Oct 5, 2019 03:06 AM
After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration, by Holly Jean Buck
Published by Verso Books: Climate engineering is a dystopian project. But as the human species hurtles ever faster towards its own extinction, geoengineering as a temporary fix, to buy time for carbon removal, is a seductive idea. We are right to fear that geoengineering will be used to maintain the status quo, but is there another possible future after geoengineering? Can these technologies and practices be used to bring carbon levels back down to pre-industrial levels? Are there possibilities for massive intentional intervention in the climate that are democratic, decentralised, or participatory?
These questions are provocative, because they go against a binary that has become common sense: geoengineering is assumed to be on the side of industrial agriculture, inequality and ecomodernism, in opposition to degrowth, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture and climate justice. After Geoengineering rejects this binary, to ask: what if the people seized the means of climate production? Both critical and utopian, the book examines the possible futures after geoengineering. Rejecting the idea that geoengineering is some kind of easy work-around, Holly Buck outlines the kind of social transformation that would be necessary to enact a programme of geoengineering in the first place.
A significant excerpt from the book itself: https://longreads.com/2019/10/04/its-tim...gineering/
Interview of Holly Jean Buck (INTRO): After Geoengineering offers up a best case scenario for geoengineering, an argument for why the left should engage with carbon removal technology, and a few ways we might avoid that “torturous afternoon,” by reclaiming the direction of tech from industry executives and coupling it with large scale social change. Earther spoke to Buck over the phone about her book and vision for the future. The interview ... has been edited and condensed for clarity. (MORE - interview)
Published by Verso Books: Climate engineering is a dystopian project. But as the human species hurtles ever faster towards its own extinction, geoengineering as a temporary fix, to buy time for carbon removal, is a seductive idea. We are right to fear that geoengineering will be used to maintain the status quo, but is there another possible future after geoengineering? Can these technologies and practices be used to bring carbon levels back down to pre-industrial levels? Are there possibilities for massive intentional intervention in the climate that are democratic, decentralised, or participatory?
These questions are provocative, because they go against a binary that has become common sense: geoengineering is assumed to be on the side of industrial agriculture, inequality and ecomodernism, in opposition to degrowth, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture and climate justice. After Geoengineering rejects this binary, to ask: what if the people seized the means of climate production? Both critical and utopian, the book examines the possible futures after geoengineering. Rejecting the idea that geoengineering is some kind of easy work-around, Holly Buck outlines the kind of social transformation that would be necessary to enact a programme of geoengineering in the first place.
A significant excerpt from the book itself: https://longreads.com/2019/10/04/its-tim...gineering/
Interview of Holly Jean Buck (INTRO): After Geoengineering offers up a best case scenario for geoengineering, an argument for why the left should engage with carbon removal technology, and a few ways we might avoid that “torturous afternoon,” by reclaiming the direction of tech from industry executives and coupling it with large scale social change. Earther spoke to Buck over the phone about her book and vision for the future. The interview ... has been edited and condensed for clarity. (MORE - interview)