Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

the Army Corps of Engineers has proposed building a series of artificial islands in New York Harbor. These would be connected by six miles of huge retractable gates. An early cost estimate for the project ran to more than $100 billion.

these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than what might be called techno-fatalism. They weren’t improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances.

Geoengineering may be “entirely crazy and quite disconcerting,” but if it could slow the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or take some of “the pain and suffering away,” or help prevent no-longer-fully-natural ecosystems from collapsing, doesn’t it have to be considered? Andy Parker is the project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, which works to expand the “global conversation” around geoengineering. His preferred drug analogy for the technology is chemotherapy. No one in his right mind would undergo chemotherapy were better options available. “We live in a world,” he has said, “where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.”

Thanks, too, to Ned Kleiner, my favorite climate scientist,

Any errors that remain are entirely my own.

determined it would change the appearance of the sky: Ben Kravitz, Douglas G. MacMartin, and Ken Caldeira, “Geoengineering: Whiter Skies?” Geophysical Research Letters, 39 (2012), doi.org/​10.1029/​2012GL051652. the latest version has more than two dozen entries: Alan Robock, “Benefits and Risks of Stratospheric Solar Radiation Management for Climate Intervention (Geoengineering),” The Bridge (Spring 2020), 59–67.