Heinberg quoted in Washington Post article on geoengineering
February 7, 2015
Post Carbon Fellow Richard Heinberg was quoted in this article about climate change and geoengineering.
From the article
READ FULL ARTICLEMany environmentalists and scientists abhor the idea. Among their objections: It doesn’t address the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which causes ocean acidification and kills coral reefs. It’s a short-term fix for a long-term problem, since carbon dioxide lingers for centuries and aerosol particles fall to the surface in just a couple of years. And critics say that even discussing this kind of geoengineering could sap momentum from efforts to cut carbon emissions…
“Geoengineering is pretty much a blind alley,” says Richard Heinberg, a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute in Santa Rosa, Calif. “We’re probably not going to be able to solve climate change with techno-fixes. We’re actually going to have to change our behavior and our expectations and our economy. Nobody likes to hear that.”…
Daly and Farley, in their text Ecological Economics, liken geoengineering to “cosmic protectionism” and suggest that free marketers ought to reject the concept out of hand. Basically, geoengineering seeks to erect a trade barrier in order to make an economically protected place for for one kind of industry–the fossil fuel industry–against its competitors in the renewable energy industry. If fossil fuel interests can start blocking out the sun, they’ll have quite an economic advantage. The economically wise thing to do would be to internalize the cost of carbon emissions to the activities that produce them, and then let the market sort out what’s best. “Artifically reducing our most basic and abundant source of low entropy in order to burn up our terrestrial source more rapidly is contrary to the interests both of our species and of life in general.” They mention Frederic Bastiat’s nineteeth century satire, “Petition of the Candlemakers Against the Sun,” and point out that it’s odd to see an idea that was absurd in 1845 being taken so seriously today.