Archived copies of the article:
“We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we do know that it was us that scorched the sky.”
The Matrix (1999), spoken by Morpheus
There’s a great chapter on geo-engineering in Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.
Main take aways are that it’s extremely dangerous and in a best case scenario likely to render parts of the global south unhabitable.
I think the most significant question, it’s a quote from a scientist in that chapter, is “Can the same human beings who accidentally engineered the climate crisis, be trusted to engineer a new, safer climate?”. You can draw your own conclusions, but mine is definitely a big no.
Extra point, my own opinion, is that acting like warming is the only thing causing issues for us in climate change is very short sighted. The ocean, our world’s most important ecosystem, is being massively impacted by acidification, if that doesn’t stop, we’ll face big issues, regardless of temperature increase. Plankton creates more than half the worlds oxygen, so, I don’t really know what we’re gonna do without that.
I don’t get all these “geo-engineering” magic bullets. Capitalists are taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the air and oceans. The carbon in the air leads to warming, and the carbon in the ocean leads to acidification. Both of these things are disastrous. We need to stop the capitalists. Leave the carbon in the ground, where it belongs. Simple as
Its approach is novel: Most geoengineering research today is led by scientists in the US at universities and federal agencies, and the work they are doing is more or less accessible to public scrutiny. Stardust is at the forefront of an alternative path: One in which private companies drive the development, and perhaps deployment, of technologies that experts say could have profound consequences for the planet.
First, that isn’t a novel approach. Second, being accessible to public scrutiny should be a requirement, since the consequences will affect all of us. Third, the people behind this have questionable backgrounds.
Isn’t that the plot of Snowpiercer?
