| Yeah. Well, you and I have talked about this before, Chris. I've been strongly opposed to conducting an unplanned global experiment that could go wildly wrong, and most are really scared of that approach. However, the term "geoengineering" is a nuanced term that covers a lot. If you want to paint roofs white to reflect more energy from the cityscapes, that's not going to bring a danger of a runaway effect, and there are some other things that are loosely called "geoengineering" like that, which are fine. But the idea of blocking out the sun's rays -- that's insane in my opinion. Turns out plants need sunlight for photosynthesis and solar panels need sunlight for producing electricity from the sun's rays. And the consequences of changing everything we know and pretending that the consequences are going to precisely cancel out the unplanned experiment of global warming that we already have underway, you know, there are glitches in our thinking. One of them is called the "single solution bias," and there are people who just have a hunger to say, "Well, that one solution, we just need to latch on to that and do that, and damn the consequences." Well, it's nuts. | |
| But let me push back on this just a little bit. So let's say that we agree that a single solution, all-or-nothing attempt at geoengineering is crazy. But there are scenarios where the world looks at emissions and just sees, in 10 years' time, let's say, that they are just not coming down fast enough and that we are at risk of several other liftoff events where this train will just get away from us, and we will see temperature rises of three, four, five, six, seven degrees, and all of civilization is at risk. Surely, there is an approach to geoengineering that could be modeled, in a way, on the way that we approach medicine. | |
| Like, for hundreds of years, we don't really understand the human body, people would try interventions, and some of them would work, and some of them wouldn't. |