I ultimately agree with you but I think you miss the best argument for the other side. I think it goes like this:
Humans are particularly bad at coordinating to reduce harms that are distant in time or are small risks of large harms. In other words out of sight out of mind. We are much better at solving problems which we experience at least some current harm from but prefer to push off harms into the future or a low probability event.
The argument for this point is buttressed by the very fact that we aren’t doing anything about warming right now.
Geoengineering takes the continuous harms of from increasing temperatures and renders them discontinuous and increases the risk of sudden major negative effects.
The argument here is that Geoengineering let’s us eliminate all negative effects as long as it is effective but if the Geoengineering mechanism ever fails we experience all the built up warming at once. Maybe we get hit by a bit solar flare and can’t launch our sunshade or shoot our sulfur into the stratosphere.
I’m not sure if immediacy of the problem really would lead to a better response: maybe it would lead to a shift from prevention to adaptation, from innovation to degrowth, and from international cooperation to ecofascism. Immediacy could clarify who will be the minority of winners from global warming, whereas distance makes it easier to say that we are all in this together.
At the very least, geoengineering does make the future more complicated, in that on top of the traditional combination of atmospheric uncertainties and emission uncertainties, we have to add uncertainty about how the geoengineering regime will proceed. And most humans don’t do a great job of responding to uncertain problems like this.
But I don’t think we understand these psychological and political dynamics very well. This all reminds me of public health researchers, pre-COVID, theorizing about the consequences of restricting international travel during a pandemic.
I ultimately agree with you but I think you miss the best argument for the other side. I think it goes like this:
Humans are particularly bad at coordinating to reduce harms that are distant in time or are small risks of large harms. In other words out of sight out of mind. We are much better at solving problems which we experience at least some current harm from but prefer to push off harms into the future or a low probability event.
The argument for this point is buttressed by the very fact that we aren’t doing anything about warming right now.
Geoengineering takes the continuous harms of from increasing temperatures and renders them discontinuous and increases the risk of sudden major negative effects.
The argument here is that Geoengineering let’s us eliminate all negative effects as long as it is effective but if the Geoengineering mechanism ever fails we experience all the built up warming at once. Maybe we get hit by a bit solar flare and can’t launch our sunshade or shoot our sulfur into the stratosphere.
I’m not sure if immediacy of the problem really would lead to a better response: maybe it would lead to a shift from prevention to adaptation, from innovation to degrowth, and from international cooperation to ecofascism. Immediacy could clarify who will be the minority of winners from global warming, whereas distance makes it easier to say that we are all in this together.
At the very least, geoengineering does make the future more complicated, in that on top of the traditional combination of atmospheric uncertainties and emission uncertainties, we have to add uncertainty about how the geoengineering regime will proceed. And most humans don’t do a great job of responding to uncertain problems like this.
But I don’t think we understand these psychological and political dynamics very well. This all reminds me of public health researchers, pre-COVID, theorizing about the consequences of restricting international travel during a pandemic.
I’ll think a bit more on this.