Geoengineering The Anthropocene And The End Of Nature

This book takes a critical look at solar geoengineering as an acceptable means for addressing climate change. Baskin explores the assumptions and imaginaries which animate ‘engineering the climate’ and discusses why this climate solution is so controversial. The book explains geoengineering’s past, its revival in the mid-2000s, and its future prospects including its shadow presence in the Paris climate accord. The main focus however is on dissecting solar geoengineering today – its rationales, underpinning knowledge, relationship to power, and the stance towards nature which accompanies it. Baskin explores three competing imaginaries associated with geoengineering: an Imperial imaginary, an oppositional Un-Natural imaginary, and a conspiratorial Chemtrail imaginary. He seeks to explain why solar geoengineering has struggled to gain approval and why resistance to it persists, despite the support of several powerful actors. He provocatively suggests that reconceptualising our present as the Anthropocene might unwittingly facilitate the normalisation of geoengineering by providing a sustaining socio-technical imaginary. This book is essential reading for those interested in climate policy, political ecology, and science & technology studies.

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.

Solar geoengineering could reduce climate change, but poses risks. This volume explores how it is, could, and should be governed.

First published in Great Britain by Granta Books, 2015.

DIVThis book goes to the heart of the unfolding reality of the twenty-first century: international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have all failed, and before the end of the century Earth is projected to be warmer than it has been for 15 million years. The question “can the crisis be avoided?” has been superseded by a more frightening one, “what can be done to prevent the devastation of the living world?” And the disturbing answer, now under wide discussion both within and outside the scientific community, is to seize control of the very climate of the Earth itself./divDIV /divDIVClive Hamilton begins by exploring the range of technologies now being developed in the field of geoengineering--the intentional, enduring, large-scale manipulation of Earth’s climate system. He lays out the arguments for and against climate engineering, and reveals the extent of vested interests linking researchers, venture capitalists, and corporations. He then examines what it means for human beings to be making plans to control the planet’s atmosphere, probes the uneasiness we feel with the notion of exercising technological mastery over nature, and challenges the ways we think about ourselves and our place in the natural world./div

In this book, eleven prominent authorities on climate change consider the legal, policy, and philosophical issues presented by geoengineering. The book asks: When, if ever, are decisions to embark on potentially risky climate modification projects justified? If such decisions can be justified, in a world without a central governing authority, who should authorize such projects and by what moral and legal right?

Geoengineering is the deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system in an attempt to mitigate the adverse effects of global warming. Now that a climate emergency is upon us, claims that geoengineering is inevitable are rapidly proliferating. How did we get into this? What options make it onto the table? Which are left out? Whom does geoengineering serve? These are some of the questions that the thinkers contributing to this volume are exploring.

This short book sets out to explore the concept of nature in the context of a changing reality, in which the extent of our transformation of the environment has become evident: What is nature and to what extent has humanity transformed it? How do nature and society relate to one another? What does the idea of a sustainable society entail and how can nature be understood as a political subject? What is the Anthropocene and how does it affect nature as both an idea and a material entity? Has nature perhaps “ended?” In addressing these questions, the author delivers a concise but meaningful study of contemporary understandings of nature, one that goes beyond the limits posed by a single discipline. Adopting a truly comprehensive perspective, the work incorporates classical disciplines such as philosophy, evolutionary theory and the history of ideas; new and mixed approaches ranging from environmental sociology to neurobiology and ecological economics and the emerging area of the environmental humanities and represents a growing branch of political thought that views nature as a new political subject.