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You hear more and more talk about geoengineering these days. No doubt about it, there are some fascinating ideas being thrown out, ranging from the fanciful, orbiting mirrors to reflect away sunlight, to the more practical, pumping aerosols into the atmosphere.
The problems with all of these suggestions are: (1) they are untried; (2) they will take time to deploy, time we may not have; and (3) they represent yet another variable in an already confused climate picture. Hello, law of unintended consequences.
The real problem it seems to me is that it is a way of tacitly admitting that it doesn't look like the worlds' governments are going to get it done in Copenhagen. Lurking behind that pessimism is an even gloomier assessment that it may already be too late to avoid significant changes due to global warming.
So I guess the theory is that desperate times call for desperate measures. But even if geoengineering was a smashing success, would that really get us anywhere in the long, long term?
The implied goal of geoengineering is to set up a situation where we can go on doing what we have been doing, a "business as usual" solution. In other words, we won't have to stop doing the things that we know are harmful to the planet and to our own long-term interests. Instead, we can mitigate the consequences and just keep on keeping on.
Maybe what we need to accept is that this is why we are in this mess in the first place. Instead of using our brains to change our ways, we insist on seeing ourselves as man the toolmaker who can always find some sort of tool to fix whatever problem is at hand.
Maybe it is time to reengineer our ways of thinking about things with the goal of finding a way to downsize our footprint on the planet before Mother Nature does it for us.
This essay first appeared on http://www.PlanetRestart.org
