Kim Stanley Robinson on Science Fiction and Reclaiming Science for the Left – Jacobin magazine

KSR

In my book, these decisions are made by a nation-state that has suffered an enormous climate disaster. The state wants the temperatures cooler instantly, no matter the side effects, and no matter what the rest of the world thinks.

I can imagine that happening obviously, I did imagine it but I think that could happen in the real world, because we are closing in on temperatures that will cook people who arent protected by electricity. And that will be a game changer in the nation-states where it happens.

The word geoengineering is too broad, and the knee-jerk reaction on the Left is disturbing to me because its too simplistic; it wants heroes and villains. Its a very 1995-style response. Now that were verging on unlivable temperatures and a mass extinction event in an all-hands-on-deck situation, we might want to cool the planet for five years or so by throwing dust up into the atmosphere, which is solar radiation management.

There are obvious problems with that, but its no longer a get-out-of-jail-free card for capitalism going on the way it is. Nobody who has proposed it is discussing it that way. And if you think of them as snidely twirling their mustaches, the corporations might say that this will allow them to burn all the rest of our fossil carbon. No, it wont. First of all, its a very minor gesture in the earth system to imitate a Pinatubo minor enough that we could actually do it as human beings, which shows how small it is.

The engineering in geoengineering implies that we know enough to do it, which is hubristic and wrong. Some people are calling it climate restoration, to try to get to the ends rather than the means involved. Others think that name is a bit of a lie, because were never going to be able to restore the climate that existed in 1800. Im not so sure about that. I offer climate restoration as a way to rethink this issue.

But the issue is too big for geoengineering to deliberately interfere in the earth system in order to try to mitigate climate change. Is that what it means? Maybe climate change will come down if you pour a whole bunch of iron filings into the ocean; then it has a plankton bloom. Then the plankton die and go to the bottom, so that the carbon is on the bottom of the ocean. Nobody likes that plan because the ocean is already stressed out. And who knows what might really happen in terms of knock-on effects?

We dont know what the secondary effects would be, and they could be worse than the cure, which is true enough to give one pause. But solar radiation management has come to peoples attention because it actually could be done. It should probably be limestone dust, like calcium carbonate, rather than sulfur dioxide, which is what volcanoes put up in the atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide eats away at the ozone layer, but limestone dust is inert, and its there in the atmosphere anyway.

If you put up more, it falls to the ground; its problematic if it falls and melts more ice in the Arctic. But in any case, it falls to the ground. Five years later, youre back to square one. You dont have to do it permanently forever in order to keep the temperature from increasing. In fact, you would plan to do it just once in a hundred years, to avoid getting caught in that trap, and see what the effects are over five years.

Its not by any means the most dangerous thing that were contemplating. And its probably not as dangerous as the generation of nuclear power plants that we built. Nuclear power is another horrific no-go zone for the American left, a capitalist power danger for the future, et cetera. But what if the nuclear power is being generated by thorium rather than uranium, and the by-products are less dangerous for future generations?

In other words, everything has to be on the table. There is no leftist truism that I trust, except that justice and sustainability are the overriding considerations of civilization, and ought to be our lodestone, our guiding star, for everything that we consider. Were in a mass extinction event thats just beginning, and we have to dodge it. Everything else needs to be considered, not ruled out.

The resistance to the idea of geoengineering shows the category error of confusing science and capitalism. Its the assumption that this process would only be done by capitalists trying to retain their power, but what if it were being done by scientists to keep millions of people from dying in the tropics? Then it becomes an argument about means over ends. And weve already pumped more than a hundred parts per million of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Every corner of the planet has been geoengineered, accidentally and stupidly as a by-product, or ignorantly. We didnt know that these side effects were going to happen, and then when we knew, we either changed, or we didnt. Thats when you become innocent or a criminal.

Im comforted to see a paper in Nature that describes pumping water out from underneath the glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland to slow the melting process. Thats geoengineering. What could you complain about there? Nothing, because that water pump from the bottom of the glaciers is a trivial amount of water, and then it just freezes on the top. There are no bad side effects that can be predicted with solar radiation management.

It is said that there might be effects on the monsoon in South Asia; if true, that would be bad. The monsoon is variable, but its very important. The glaciers are also important; they come out of the Himalayas and provide a water supply to South Asia, and the glaciers are going fast. A climate modeling exercise that postulates damage to the monsoon is maybe not as powerful in an argument as the actual melting of the glaciers that form the water supply for a billion people.

Everything has to be put back on the table the arguments from 95 about moral hazard and capitalist power need to be set aside for the current moment of desperate emergency.

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Kim Stanley Robinson on Science Fiction and Reclaiming Science for the Left - Jacobin magazine