“I would annex the planets if I could.” — Cecil Rhodes

 

Imagine being in a freezer. Or an oven. And the hand on the thermostat belongs to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Or the United Nations. That’s “solar geoengineering.” And it’s the global political elite’s next climate change strategy.

Outlawing oil isn’t enough for global warming doomsayers. Some would poison the skies with chemotherapy to cure earth of its capitalist cancer. Solar geoengineering means jet fleets injecting sulfuric acid into the stratosphere every day. The first 10 years we won’t even know if it’s working.

Should We Put Earth on a Thermostat?

Last Thursday, “Engineering Solar Radiation Is a Crazy Idea” was debated at Hunter College in New York City. Intelligence Squared invited four advocates of zero fossil fuel use. One consensus that soon developed: white males must not control this planetary sunscreen. Yet three of the four debaters, plus the moderator, were themselves white men.

“At this point, there’s a pretty small group of people who are working on this,” noted Harvard’s David Keith. “Mostly Western white males.” TIME magazine named Keith one of its “Heroes of the Environment.” He founded a firm that’s developing technology to capture carbon dioxide from ambient air. But he wants solar geoengineering explored.

Clive Anderson is founder of a progressive think tank in Australia and author of a book on climate engineering. He countered: “With solar geoengineering, it’s highly likely that the climactic preferences of rich, white people will prevail.” Whites are “the same people who are likely responsible for bringing on the climate crisis.”

He later remarked that solar geoengineering would even “whiten the sky”!

Elites Will Control It, Of Course

You can’t help but picture Leo McKern as the crusty Fleet Street reporter in The Day the Earth Caught Fire. That was an all-too-pleased-with-itself British dystopian flick from 1961. McKern fumed, “The stupid, crazy, irresponsible bastards! They’ve finally done it!” He meant nuclear explosions at the poles knocking the world off its axis and hurtling it into the sun.

The actual danger here, of course, is that the technology will come into the control of the global governmental elite. The same people who have endlessly told us the state can provide high-quality, timely health care. And that multi-national governmental bodies can broker world peace between free powers and fanatical tyrannies armed with nuclear weapons.

Still, it’s heartening that a confirmed man of the left like Anderson can at least recognize insanity. Arguing in favor of the motion, he asked who should be trusted with

the power to turn the earth’s temperature up a bit, down a bit. Should the Kremlin make the decision? Should the politburo of the Chinese communist hierarchy make the decision?  Should Donald Trump make the decision? Could we expect to see a Tweet one morning, ‘Hey, this heat wave here down at Mar-a-Lago is getting out of control, so I’ve instructed the U.S. climate regulatory authority to turn it down.’”

No More Monsoons?

Anderson noted climate models suggesting geoengineering could disrupt the regular summer Indian monsoon. Say goodbye to agricultural yields and low food prices. “From the point of view of the peasant farmer in Pakistan, the rains have failed, people are starting to go hungry. You know that someone somewhere in the world is messing with the climate system,” Anderson said. “And a political stirrer comes along and tells you America, the great Satan, is messing with your climate. You’ve got a massive political problem.”

Not surprisingly, the progressive Anderson also warned of military uses. He pointed out that

the landmark 2014 report on solar geoengineering by the U.S. National Research Council was partly funded by the CIA.  The CIA wanted to know if America’s adversaries could use solar geoengineering to damage the interests of the United States.

He also noted that “one of the earliest and strongest advocates of sulfate aerosol spraying was Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.”

Keith, arguing against, himself admitted solar geoengineering’s little-understood hazards. He simultaneously argued we should keep an open mind. “It has a whole set of poorly known environmental side effects,” he conceded.  “You’re adding aerosols to the atmosphere. Aerosols are a health hazard.  You can damage the ozone layer. Even if you reduce warming, you can reduce precipitations in some places that could harm people.”

We’d Still Have to Give Up Fossil Fuels

He also warned that it won’t ever work until we have a zero-CO2 economy. If you “keep emitting carbon dioxide, and turn up the amount of solar geoengineering again and again, you’d walk yourself further and further away from the current climate with more and more danger.”

Is “white males whitening the sky” not a rich enough irony? Anderson noted that at least some of the sulfur sprayed into the sky would come from burning coal. “That same sulfur which we don’t allow into the lower atmosphere because it causes sulfur pollution and is bad for health and so on? It’s then put on planes and put into the upper atmosphere.” That, plus the likelihood it “would undue all of the work that we’ve been doing reducing CFCs to try to reduce the whole in the ozone layer, really tells us that when you start messing with the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, you’re really in very dangerous territory,” Anderson argued.

But the left often convinces the public to give government more power by suggesting the power is ultimately inconsequential. That stratagem was used by UCLA’s Ted Parson. He’s an environmental law professor who has consulted for both the U.S. government and the UN’s Environment Program. He argued against the motion. He was the third of the three white guys in the debate. “If this is ever used,” Parson quipped, “my guess is it will look like a dreary public works project.”

“A dreary public works project?” Anderson retorted. “Transforming the atmosphere of planet Earth?  I don’t think so.”

Global Government Power

The audience, with no shortage of 20-somethings, was polled both before and after the debate. Before, only 37 percent believed spraying sulfuric acid into the stratosphere every day for a decade wasn’t crazy. But after hearing all the warnings, 75 percent of them thought blocking out the sun wasn’t crazy. That’s an increase of 38 percentage points.

President Jimmy Carter told us where to set our thermostat. Now look where the public – at least in liberal meccas like New York – are. They’d let politicians and global government bureaucracies regulate the planet’s atmosphere with poisons.

Watch the debate in full yourself:
 

 
For another view of geoengineering and climate change, see this Stream column by John Zmirak.