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Hacking the planet so a few rich people can get richer
“Geo-engineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year.” Newt Gingrich 2008
“Solar geoengineering solves everything! It’s great! We don’t need to bother to cut emissions.” President Trump 2017
“The main findings are that any implementation of stratospheric geoengineering could end catastrophically for many species. Although if geoengineering were ever done, it would not make sense to abruptly end it, there are credible scenarios where this might happen. Should society ever take that risk?” Alan Robock, Rutgers University
It is obvious that climate change will be the biggest challenge of this century and it is the gravest threat to humanity since we wandered out of Africa about 100,000 years ago. The existing burden of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the current rate of emissions requires us to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The goals of the Paris Agreement cannot be met without such large scale long term withdrawals. Because we have wasted decades fighting the fossil fuel industry and the anti-science political opposition of mostly Republican legislators, our situation is becoming urgent and geoengineering is appearing likely. There are manifold extreme risks associated with this approach to mitigation of climate change…
