Geoengineering : A Planetary Science Experiment – Blog Post 7 - September 19

This week I read the section “Regulatory Illusion” in The Energy Reader, which discussed the current “regulatory” system that Americans have today.  Although the government is supposed to function as public servants who try to improve the lives of its citizens, Horejsi argues that the government today works primarily for big business.  American citizens assume that regulators are checking that fair, safe, and scientifically tested energy generation methods are used, and unsafe, unfair, or untested ones are not used.  Yet the BP Oil Spill was a shock to most Americans and showed the danger of the oil and gas industry, as well as the lack of accountability they actually have over the problems that they cause.  Horejsi continues on to mention that President Carter’s White House Council on Environmental Quality allowed “categorical exclusions” from the National Environmental Policy Act, which oil and gas companies use relentlessly to their advantage.  Most American citizens would be against these kinds of actions, yet most Americans do not know of do not feel they have the power to change anything.  How can we change these people?  How can we change this country?

Because big businesses essentially push around and lobby the government into allowing possibly unsafe and unscientifically proven technologies to be used, it is easy to see how geoengineering could become a big industry in the United States.  Geoengineering, as brought up by the ETC Group in “Retooling the Planet,” can only be done by richer countries and companies that have the money, power, resources, and technology to enact it.  These powerful companies would many times be doing this for profit, not to help the environment or to help developing countries deal with climate change.  I could definitely see geoengineering becoming a big industry in the United States because big companies could make big money doing it, and they could use their big money to lobby Congress to make it happen.

So why are people opposed to geoengineering?  Major social, economic, and environmental damage could result.  Socially, dominant rich countries could geoengineer the planet without consulting the poorer countries, which will more than likely be affected by the geoengineering done.  Additionally, as the ETC Group points out, these rich countries will probably not be too worried about how the poorer countries fair from the geoengineering experiments, as long as their own country’s condition improves.  This is probable because rich companies today exploit poorer people all the time; what prevents them from doing so on a larger scale!  This could make poorer countries even poorer by placing an unfair burden on them, just like climate change already has.

Others may argue my last statement.  They may say that geoengineering won’t provide any negative results to harm poorer countries or people because it is a fully beneficial technology.  I would like to argue that by stating that everything has some form of unintended consequences, and experiments on the global scale would more than likely have some unpleasant ones.  For example, in the article “Engineering the Ocean,” David Biello argues that dumping iron sulfate into the Southern Ocean’s eddies would lead to increased plankton populations, which would take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and mitigate climate change.  Additionally, when the plankton die, they fall to the bottom of the ocean, which sequesters the carbon there.  Biello argues that the technology has already demonstrated that it works because Victor Smecatek ran one experiment that showed a higher plankton population when the iron was added and a much faster rate of carbon in the form of plankton reaching the seafloor (Biello 3).

Although Smecatek’s experiment generated the results he wanted in regards to plankton, it did not necessarily generate the results he wanted of lowering carbon dioxide emissions.  No carbon dioxide emissions were taken (or at least reported in this article), so how would he know if this experiment really worked?  Maybe the growth in plankton led to the growth of something else that led to more carbon dioxide being released?  In addition, one experiment does not signify that something works; science is all about repetition.  This result needs to be repeated by others in order for it to be significant and a proven technology.  Finally, the unintended consequences of this experiment were not even considered.  What if eutrophication occurs, just like it does at the bottom of the Mississippi River, which would lead to fish kills and whale kills instead of increased fish and whale populations?  What if decomposers broke down the plankton under the water, which releases carbon dioxide?  This would release a lot of carbon dioxide, which is the opposite of what sequestering would do.  What if iron plumes poison the ocean?  What are the environmental impacts of acquiring the iron needed, shipping it to the Arctic, and then dumping it?  Is it worth the fossil fuels to even do this?  What if an increase in plankton populations hurts other organisms in the food web, instead of helping them?  None of these studies were done, and most of them cannot be done without trying out this method on a large scale.

In conclusion, geoengineering is a very dangerous industry.  Although proponents of the industry point out its potential benefits, these are many times just assumptions.  The number of unintended consequences that could occur when manipulating large, complicated, interconnected ecosystems that are poorly understood is tremendous and unpredictable.  Experiments done to help prove the validity of a geoengineering technique cannot possibly analyze everything that can go wrong because there are simply too many variables to account for on that scale.  Focusing on geoengineering also gives the fossil fuel industry a crutch, allowing them to say that geoengineering will save the planet and enabling them to keep polluting.  Our time and resources should go towards mitigation, not the false hope of geoengineering.  Unfortunately though, based on how our government is currently set up, geoengineering may be funded more than I hope it would be in the United States.

Works Cited

Biello, David. "Engineering the Ocean: Once You Know What Plankton Can Do, You’ll Understand Why Fertilising the Ocean with Iron Is Not Such a Crazy Idea." AEON. N.p., 1 July 2014. Web. 19 Sept. 2014. <http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/can-tiny-plankton-help-reverse-climate-change/>.