Personally, I think environmental topics can be overdone sometimes as there are limitations to what humans can do to nature. Many environmental activists started off with positive intentions, but later on, used the attention they have to campaign for themselves and their labels. Their beliefs became more exaggerated for the press, and it slowly and surely become a marketing strategy as they don’t even seem to care about the words and promises that were filtered with performance purposes.
I wanted to a new environmental technology that has gained some attention over the years. I found this technology interesting because it demonstrates how environmental experts are evaluating the Earth’s current condition and finding advanced solutions to reduce the amount of harm we are burdening onto this planet that was once pure and lovely.
Climate Engineering, or so-called geoengineering, is the deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate change.
The introduction of this new technology concept is an ongoing development in response to immediate climate change, and they are all intended to change the Earth’s climate, despite some side effects that may occur during the process.
Some common techniques include solar geoengineering, so-called solar radiation management, which reflects some sunlight (solar radiation) back to space to limit or reverse human-caused climate change. In this case, researchers might use chemicals to increase the reflectiveness of clouds or build space mirrors/shields to reflect the sun’s energy. An example would be spraying seawater thousands of meters into the air to seed the formation of stratocumulus clouds that will deflect sunlight.
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR), is another practice that many mistakenly classified with solar geoengineering, in which this technique requires taking high risk in an attempt to reduce the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Researchers might remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by building massive new forests (like extremely massive) or by adding chemicals and nutrients to the ocean. CDR has now been considered to be able to address the root cause of climate change to potentially reduce net emissions.
These mitigation ideas sound legit, but many uncertainties on efficiency and side effects start surfacing as we do not have enough research to prove the result of effect and the risk we will be taking on these massive projects that take a large amount of time and investments to eventually operate.
However, scientists have come to the conclusion that solar geoengineering and CDR cannot substitute for reducing emissions. In fact, the existence of such techniques mainly works to reduce the political and social impetus to reduce carbon emission; therefore it does not directly address or take action on the environmental issue. That’s why many environmental organizations and professionals called out geoengineering to be a moral hazard, or more specifically, risk compensation. Currently, there are many mixed results on how geoengineering is influence the reduction of CO2 emissions or not.
There are many criticisms and concerns regarding the potential risk of specific projects, as well as skepticism of how the business operates.
Another issue was brought up as many questions the motivations behind the supporters of geoengineering. Ethnically speaking, the arguments that the supporters back up are often confronting the worldview, which means the discussion of geoengineering may exclude individual and religious communities. Some religious communities could raise questions on humans to have no responsibility in controlling or fixing the climate that belongs to their Creator. Communities with belief can point out that the die effect of solar geoengineering is essentially controlling the weather.
According to climate economist Gernot Wagner the term “geoengineering” is “largely an artefact and a result of the terms frequent use in popular discourse” and “so vague and all-encompassing as to have lost much meaning“.
As for now, the public’s awareness of geoengineering is low. Despite these attempts could possibly make significant alternations in the world’s climate.
Some common concerns collected from a 2017 focus group study conducted by Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in the United States, Japan, New Zealand, and Sweden:
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What happens if the technologies backfire with unintended consequences?
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Are these solutions treating the symptoms of climate change rather than the cause?
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Shouldn’t we just change our lifestyle and consumption patterns to fight climate change, making climate engineering a last resort?
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Isn’t there a greater need to address political solutions to reduce our emissions?
The participants felt that mitigation and adaptation to climate change were strongly preferred to be what we should prioritize for now. And I have to also agree that with how large scale it needs for geoengineering to take effect, we should set this option as our very last resort. People are social media are speculating that there are secret government actions implementing massive geoengineering already, and while these claims are extreme, I cannot help but think there are people that are on the move to implement this technology someday.
Work Sources
https://www.space.com/geoengineering-how-to-control-the-weather
I think geoengineering is really interesting topic to talk about. There are many applications where people think it is ok, and one of them might be an idea like terraforming, which may eventually happen on Mars. But surely people would be more ok with that than doing that on Earth. I personally think that looking into stuff like geoengineering would be much less effective than reducing emissions.