Geoengineering. Gernot Wagner

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      The Gamble

      Gernot Wagner

      polity

Copyright page

      Copyright © Gernot Wagner 2021

      The right of Gernot Wagner to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      First published in 2021 by Polity Press

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      All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4305-2 (hardback)

      ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4306-9 (paperback)

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Wagner, Gernot, author.

      Title: Geoengineering : the gamble / Gernot Wagner.

      Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A bestselling climate economist asks ‘is geoengineering worth the gamble to tackle climate change?’”-- Provided by publisher.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2021011283 (print) | LCCN 2021011284 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509543052 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509543069 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509543076 (epub)

      Subjects: LCSH: Environmental geotechnology. | Climate change mitigation. | Carbon dioxide mitigation. | Pollution--Economic aspects. | Environmental policy.

      Classification: LCC TD171.9 .W34 2021 (print) | LCC TD171.9 (ebook) | DDC 628--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011283

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011284

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      by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

      Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

      The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

      Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

      For more on the author, visit: gwagner.com

      For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

About the author

      Gernot Wagner teaches climate economics at NYU, co-authored Climate Shock, and writes Bloomberg’s Risky Climate column. He was the founding executive director of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program and served as lead senior economist at Environmental Defense Fund. His writings appear frequently in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, TIME, among many others. Follow his work at gwagner.com

Introduction Start here – But don’t start with geoengineering

      The first time I heard about solar geoengineering, I considered the idea nuts. It is. Two decades later – after having worked on the topic at Environmental Defense Fund, helping launch Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, and doing quite a bit of research and writing on the topic myself – I still think it is a rather healthy attitude to have toward the topic. The entire enterprise seems like a gamble, and a planetary one at that.

      Of course, anyone who’s been paying attention to what’s happening with the rapidly changing climate will recognize that the world is currently playing a different kind of gamble with the planet, and arguably an even larger one.

      Geoengineering – in particular, solar geoengineering, attempting to cool the planet by sending a small fraction of sunlight back into space, or by increasing the amount of solar radiation that escapes back into space – is no solution to climate change. That much is clear. It does not address the root cause of too much carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere, nor the continuing inflow of CO₂ emissions. Geoengineering is a technofix, and