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Wednesday, October 20, 2010

"Geo-Engineering" Could Be Almost Anything?

Tony Fisk comments over at Worldchanging: "Anything done to alleviate global warming could be classified as 'geo-engineering.'"

If that's true then what exactly is excluded from the category, and what clarified through the introduction of the term?

Aggregate impacts of environmental regulation, widespread lifeway changes, subsidization of sustainable energy provision and infrastructure can have impacts comparable to those attributed to speculative "geo-engineering" proposals, making it still more difficult to understand just what should be included and excluded from the category. This makes it still more difficult in turn to see how the category facilitates the weighing of risks, costs, benefits of particular proposals described as "geo-engineering" or not according to proponents for whatever reasons. Meanwhile, few mega-scale corporate-military "geo-engineering" proposals could be expected to achieve their desired outcomes in the absence of effective regulation and oversight.

And so the preemptive declaration of the failure of conventional environmental politics and regulatory processes that accompanies so many "geo-engineering" arguments seems more to defeat than support them. But if such politics and processes can indeed still be effective enough to facilitate "geo-engineering" proposals then it is difficult to see why we would turn to "geo-engineering" to save us as a last resort or what have you in the first place.

Unless "geo-engineering" is just a neologism repackaging conventional proposals for the promotional purposes of futurologists as distinct from serious science policy questions? In which case, as Mr. Burns might say... "Excellent."

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