It’s kinda geoengineering week here at the Intersection, as I continue to prepare for Friday’s Point of Inquiry episode with Eli Kintisch to discuss his new book, Hack the Planet. So I’ve been doing my reading, and I came across this article by Kintisch’s rival Jeff Goodell, who also has a geoengineering book coming out, entitled How to Cool the Planet. (So far Goodell’s seems to be selling a bit better, but I like Kintisch’s title!) I’m certainly not surprised, but I had not yet seen the relevant data showing that when it comes to this subject, the public is basically a blank slate. Goodell provides said data in his piece:
Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change, who presented the results of a long-running study on the public perception of global warming. In his most recent survey, he had thrown in a few questions about geoengineering. When asked, “How much, if anything, have you heard about geoengineering as a possible response to climate change,” 74 percent of respondents said “nothing.” The 26 percent that had heard about geoengineering turned out to be wildly misinformed — more than half thought it referred to geothermal energy. Only 3 percent of …