Environment & Energy

Essentially, if you do anything with the intent of affecting the environment, you are geoengineering. (Let’s say you want to plant great swaths of forest in the arctic for example. It seems harmless enough, it’s “natural” right? Well, the snow is highly reflective, bouncing light back into space. Trees are darker, increasing the Earth’s “albedo…”)

While we may not like the idea of tinkering with the natural environment, we’ve done it from the moment we first set foot on the planet.

For the past few centuries, we’ve been rapidly changing the composition of the atmosphere, unintentionally leading to global heating, which may kill all of us, not to mention the rest of the “natural world.” (We are, after all, part of nature ourselves.)

In Global Warming in the Pipeline, James Hansen et al, warn:

15 years ago, they were not recommending this sort of solution. Instead they were recommending rapid reductions in emissions, and using various other means to lower the atmospheric concentrations of "greenhouse gases.” Well, we failed to follow their advice, and that put us where we are now, needing to resort to more drastic measures.