folly

Middle of the Observer, a few weeks back, round at a friends parents house. Splash page on the top technofixes to stop climate change. Basically, terraforming our own planet. Stuff like chucking sulphur into the atmosphere, mirrors in space and iron filings into the ocean. Carbon sucking fake trees. Oceanic heat pumps. That kind of shit.

Now, some of this stuff may even, in a very narrow, engineering sense, work. It is possible that we could suck enough carbon out of the cycle or heat out of the process to avoid catastrophic climate change. I doubt it, though, as the energy required to actually make this stuff happen is colossal - I mean, space mirrors? But that’s not the real problem with these Bond Villain plans, it’s the side effects. Trashing the oceans with geological scale algal blooms or spraying the whole planet with acid rain will have massive consequences, especially as we’ve already degraded most of the earths habitats to the point of near collapse.

Worse, it proves we just aren’t learning. We’re willing to contemplate highly risky, completely experimental and ecologically catastrophic plans that we don’t even know will work, rather than turning a few plugs off, not flying to Paris for the weekend and getting to like the taste of warm beer again, etc. Our greed and comfort come first. Like some toxic toddler, spoiled beyond recovery, stamping our feet and screaming in the supermarket untlil our parents buy us more chocolate so we can bolt it down and throw it up. We want it all, we want it now, and then we want more. Because we’re worth it, because we want to, because we can. And fuck the hindmost, the future and the reckoning.

Well, tough. The trip ends here and it ends soon. Either way. Enjoy, you’ve earned it.