Geoengineering: Doing business with the climate crisis, putting humanity in danger

2024-03-02 09:59:13

The climate geoengineering It has more and more detractors, luckily. Climate engineering are a series of techniques to deliberately alter planetary ecosystems through large-scale manipulation of the climate systems.

It is about, as I have explained on other occasions, combat climate change, but WITHOUT FACEING ITS CAUSES. It What we can call “solutionism”.

One of the crazy strategies is solar geoengineering, also called Solar Radiation Management (SRM). They are a set of technological proposals to prevent part of the sunlight from reaching the Earth, in order to reduce global temperature.

The best known of the proposed techniques is Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, which consists of injecting sulfur dioxide (a refrigerant that also erodes the ozone layer) and disseminate it into the stratosphere.

Well, the geoengineering lobby has performed these days at the last meeting of the United Nations Environment Assembly, in Kenya.

According to activists of ETC GroupSwitzerland’s resolution on Modification of Solar Radiation could seem like a simple neutral call to constitute a group of experts on MRS.

However, this group has been a Trojan horse for the advancement of the solar geoengineeringby creating a platform for geoengineering promoters to become the main reference in global debates on SRM.

An underlying but central issue in the controversy over the resolution proposed by Switzerland is what information and what type of solar geoengineering research should be taken into account. Countries such as the United States, Canada and Saudi Arabia pushed for the compilation of information not only on the risks, but also on the benefits of solar radiation management.

The same countries insisted that this information should come from certain sources, agencies and programs that they wanted to establish in the text, mostly directed by geoengineering advocates”.

Neth Damagedirector for Asia of the ETC Group.

In contrast, the African Group of negotiators, supported by Colombia and other countries of the Global South, raised the urgency of establishing a mechanism that guarantee the non-use of solar geoengineering.

Furthermore, they noted the need to request and collect knowledge on SRM from world governments and make it accessible to all countries.

This would help create a repository of information that could address the lack of transparency of those carrying out research and experiments, and the lack of access to multidisciplinary information on solar geoengineering.

Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States are investing in new solar geoengineering research through public institutions and enabling or supporting private initiatives.

Although these countries propose supporting investigations into the risks of technologyhave also expressed their intention to study the benefits potential and how to develop it. “These are steps toward a large-scale deployment of solar geoengineering.”

Silvia RibeiroDirector for Latin America of the ETC Group.

If you look, they are the richest countries and therefore the most polluting and the ones that contribute the most to the current climate crisis.

By contrast, the African Group, Mexico, Fiji, Pakistan and several countries in the Global South often backed by the European Unionpropose reaffirming the precautionary approach, affirming the moratorium on Convention on geoengineering already existing and establish a basis for not allowing open field experiments.

Mexico, specifically, proposed integrating the condemnation of solar geoengineering experiments into the resolution.

Like the one in 2023, which violated sovereignty and indigenous territories and rights: sulfur dioxide was released from weather balloonsas an experiment to “prevent” the sun’s heat from reaching the earth.

Several countries that are large emitters of greenhouse gases (GHG) and therefore causes climate change, also pushed for the resolution to be based on an extremely narrow framework, which only would compare the risks of solar geoengineering with the risks of climate change.

On February 29, 2024, after several rounds of discussions, the enormous difference between these two perspectives on geoengineering became clear. Finally, the refusal of the United States and other countries to include the precautionary principle and while promoting research in solar geoengineering, made it impossible to reach any agreement, and forced cancel the entire proposal.

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