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[Editor's note: We are pleased to begin a partnership with Grist, the pioneering environmental website, which will allow us to highlight some of Grist's articles on GreenBiz.com. The first article in this series comes from author Jeff Goodell, who is on tour with his new book, How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate.
For a writer, publishing a book is like letting an animal out of a cage -- you never know how it will behave in public, whether people will be charmed by it, or scared by it. Or bored.
This is doubly true with book about geoengineering -- an issue that is volatile, profound, and morally fraught. Is it a sci-fi nightmare writ large, or a sensible back-up plan in case our climate spins out of control?
I have my own ideas about all this -- and wrote about them in my new book, How to Cool the Planet. But now, as I travel around the country for the next month, I get to hear your ideas. Are you scared by geoengineering? Worried about rogue nations -- or rogue billionaires -- taking the fate of the planet into their own hands by launching a geoengineering project? Is geoengineering another way for rich, technologically-advanced nations to exert their will over the rest of the world? Does geoengineering the planet necessarily mean the end of nature as we know it?
Read the rest of this article at Grist.org.
The book - we can pretty well
The book - we can pretty well guess the result - one extreme will decide to love it (extreme greens) while the opposition will hate it. The 95% in the middle won't care one way or the other until they are told what to think by the screaming fringes.
We know and understand less about geoengineering and how it would affect the planet than doctors do about the human body - meaning İ believe that with the current state of knowledge it would be inviting disaster.
The rogue billionaire comment sounds like you are watching too much James Bond. For terrorists there are far easier routes to follow - it is only our good luck that the bad guys tend to be religious fanatics or fools.
'Is geoengineering another way for rich, technologically-advanced nations to exert their will over the rest of the world?' This is one of the more silly statements anyone can make. The poor nations will follow along behind as they always have. İf they want better they have to improve their governments, education etc and join the more developed countries. İf they choos to remain backward and corrupt so be it.