Not to undercut Ryan’s point, which seems to me to be correct — geoengineering probably is much harder than its boosters currently think, and anyone who ignores the experts calling for first taking a crack at emission reduction is a dope — but I think his point’s getting a bit lost in all the me-too-ery. Here’s Kevin Drum:
But geoengineering isn’t something that a single country can pull off. It’s a global problem, after all. That means treaties and conferences and endless debate over costs and benefits and what the target temperatures ought to be and who’s responsible for side effects. There just aren’t any easy answers here.
I’m pretty sure this is wrong: geoengineering is something that a single country could pull off. That’s sort of the whole point. The Atlantic got a bunch of experts to say exactly that earlier this year — actually, they say it’s something that Richard Branson could manage if he were so inclined.
And, contrary to what’s being asserted, I think history makes it clear that undertaking massive scientific and engineering projects that put foreigners at risk is something that’s actually pretty easy to get away with. I mean, consider that time we gassed tens of thousands of Indians to death. Or that time we were worried about the Manhattan Project igniting the atmosphere (PDF) but went ahead with it anyway. Or US agribusiness’s release of GM food products into the wild. Or all the space junk we’ve flown up over and crashed down past foreign countries. And that’s to say nothing of the environmental devastation that the first world has wrought upon any number of countries with resources we fancy.
Again, this isn’t to minimize the argument that geoengineering is unlikely to be the simple cure-all that some imagine. I’m certainly no expert on the subject, but that seems right to me.
But if we decided we wanted to do it, it’s pretty hard for me to imagine anyone stopping us. That’s the appeal of these solutions: they sidestep the collective action problem that CO2 reduction represents. You could (and should) attach to geoengineering proposals the same collaborative hurdles that emission reduction requires. But you don’t really have to. I’m sure you’d see some flushed faces around Turtle Bay if we started pumping sulfur dioxide out of military jets circling the globe, but no number of submarine meetings of the Maldives cabinet could seriously dissuade a superpower from undertaking some mad science in the face of what it earnestly believes to be an existential threat. Hell, it might even be possible to dump SO2 into the atmosphere in a sufficiently diffuse way that other countries couldn’t easily prove we’d done it. You know, like how the government is using chemtrails to build an electromagnetic superweapon.