After Copenhagen, Is It Time for Geo-Engineering?

The debacle in Copenhagen already spawned one cottage industry—the blame game. The fiasco might have another, longer-lasting effect: Giving fresh momentum to geo-engineering.

The idea of tinkering with the earth’s climate to keep temperatures down—whether that means seeding clouds, spraying particles into the atmosphere, or building huge sunshades—already had appeal in certain circles. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus—no relation to the star-crossed climate conference—recently gave a hearty thumbs-up to the idea of making clouds whiter to reflect more sunshine, for instance.

For some folks leery of the whole idea of curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, geo-engineering offers a seemingly attractive techno-fix—and a cheaper one, too boot. You might recall a recent dustup involving geo-engineering and a pair of best-selling authors. Lou Grinzo even wonders if Chinese reticence at Copenhagen might not have something to do with the idea of becoming a big player in geo-engineering in a decade or two when the world urgently needs a quick fix.

The big question is: Will climate engineering get more appealing the less progress is actually made at cutting greenhouse-gas emissions? Copenhagen certainly lowered the bar for global action on emissions; there’s plenty of worry that even the best-case scenario envisioned by the UN won’t prevent a dangerous rise in temperatures. Chris Mooney at Mother Jones anticipated a Copenhagen failure would put the spotlight back on geo-engineering.

But the big problem with geo-engineering are the “unknown unknowns”—even if such schemes actually work to keep temperatures in check, nobody really knows what else they’ll do. MIT Technology Review has a great takeout on the pros and cons—mostly cons, actually—of climate engineering. That includes the fear that countries might resort to using geo-engineering schemes unilaterally.

Which suggests that all the buzz around geo-engineering might just have one other side effect: It could drive a lot of the countries around the world back to the negotiating table, in a bid to find some way to govern the geo-engineering genie, if not lock it back in the bottle.

In that sense, the diplomatic meltdown at Copenhagen might yet have a more productive diplomatic denouement.