3358. Richard Heingberg on the Planet of the Humans

By Richard Heinberg, Resilience, April 27, 2020

A few days ago, Emily Atkin posted a reaction to Michael Moore’s latest film, Planet of the Humans (directed and narrated by Jeff Gibbs), in which she began by admitting that she hadn’t seen the film yet. When writers take that approach, you know there’s already blood in the water. (She has since watched the film and written an actual review. Full disclosure: I’m in the film, included as one of the “good guys.” But I don’t intend to let that fact distort my comments in this review.)

The film is controversial because it makes two big claims: first, that renewable energy is a sham; second, that big environmental organizations—by promoting solar and wind power—have sold their souls to billionaire investors.

I feel fairly confident commenting on the first of these claims, regarding renewable energy, having spent a year working with David Fridley of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to assess the prospects for a complete transition to solar and wind power.

We found that the transition to renewables is going far too slowly to make much of a difference during the crucial next couple of decades, and would be gobsmackingly expensive if we were to try replacing all fossil fuel use with solar and wind. We also found, as the film underscores again and again, that the intermittency of sunshine and wind is a real problem—one that can only be solved with energy storage (batteries, pumped hydro, or compressed air, all of which are costly in money and energy terms); or with source redundancy (building way more generation capacity than you’re likely to need at any one time, and connecting far-flung generators on a super-grid); or demand management (which entails adapting our behavior to using energy only when it’s available). All three strategies involve trade-offs. In the energy world, there is no free lunch. Further, the ways we use energy today are mostly adapted to the unique characteristics of fossil fuels, so a full transition to renewables will require the replacement of an extraordinary amount of infrastructure in our food system, manufacturing, building heating, the construction industry, and on and on. Altogether, the only realistic way to make the transition in industrial countries like the US is to begin reducing overall energy usage substantially, eventually running the economy on a quarter, a fifth, or maybe even a tenth of current energy.

Is it true that mainstream enviros have oversold renewables? Yes. They have portrayed the transition away from fossil fuels as mostly a political problem; the implication in many of their communications is that, if we somehow come up with the money and the political will, we can replace oil with solar and continue living much as we do today, though with a clear climate conscience. That’s an illusion that deserves shattering.

But the film does make some silly mistakes. Gibbs claims that a solar panel will generate less energy than it took to build the panel. That’s a misleading claim. Many teams of researchers have addressed the question of energy return on energy invested for solar power, and even the most pessimistic results (with which I mostly agree) say that the technology can yield a marginal energy gain. Much of that gain goes away if we have to “pay” for the energy investment entailed in providing batteries or redundant capacity. Wind power generally has a better energy payback than solar, but the location of turbines matters a great deal and ideal sites are limited in number. Assessing solar and wind power calls for complicated energy accounting, but the film reduces that complexity to a blanket, binary dismissal.

The film is low on nuance, but our global climate and energy dilemma is all shades of gray. Gibbs seems to say that renewables are a complete waste of time. I would say, they are best seen as a marginal transitional strategy for industrial societies. Given climate change and the fact that fossil fuels are depleting, finite resources, it appears that if we want to maintain any sort of electrical energy infrastructure in the future, it will have to be powered by renewables—hydro, wind, or solar. As many studies have confirmed, the nuclear power industry has little realistic prospect of revival. The future will be renewable; there simply isn’t any other option. What is very much in question, however, is the kind of society renewable energy can support.

The fact is that we’ve already bet our entire future on electricity and electronics. Communications and information processing and storage have all been digitized. That means that if the grid goes down, we’ve lost civilization altogether. I don’t think we can maintain global grids at current scale without fossil fuels, but I can envision the possibility of a process of triage whereby, as population and resource consumption shrink, the digital world does as well, until it’s small enough to be powered by renewable electricity that can be generated with minimal and acceptable environmental damage.

I agree with Gibbs, however, that renewables are realistically incapable of maintaining our current levels of energy usage, especially in rich countries like the US. Transitioning to electric cars may be a useful small-scale and short-term strategy for reducing oil consumption (I drive one myself), but limits to lithium and other raw materials used in building e-cars mean we really need to think about how to get rid of personal cars altogether.

Mainstream enviros will hate this movie because it exposes some of their real failings. By focusing on techno-fixes, they have sidelined nearly all discussion of overpopulation and overconsumption. Maybe that’s understandable as a marketing strategy, but it’s a mistake to let marketing consultants sort truth from fiction for us.

During recent decades, the big environmental orgs wearied of telling their followers to reduce, reuse, and recycle. They came to see that global problems like climate change require systemic solutions that, in turn, require massive investment and governmental planning and oversight.

But the reality is, we need both high-level systemic change and widespread individual behavior change. That’s one of the lessons of the coronavirus pandemic: “flattening the curve” demands both central planning and leadership, and individual sacrifice.

Planet of the Humans paints environmental organizations and leaders with a broad and accusatory brush. One target is Jeremy Grantham, a billionaire investment analyst who created the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment in 1997. Grantham was already a mega-rich investor before he “got religion” on environmental issues. I’ve had several face-to-face meetings with him (full disclosure: the Grantham Foundation has provided modest funding to Post Carbon Institute, where I work) and it’s clear that he cares deeply about overpopulation and overconsumption, and he understands that economic growth is killing the planet. He’s scared for his children and grandchildren, and he genuinely wants to use whatever wealth and influence he has to change the world. To imply, as the film does, that he merely sees green tech as an investment strategy is a poorly aimed cheap shot. Bill McKibben, who is skewered even more savagely, also deserves better; he has replied to the film here.

Finally, the film leaves viewers with no sense of hope for the future. I understand why Gibbs made that choice. Too often, “hopium” is simply a drug we use to numb ourselves to the horrific reality of our situation and its causes—in which we are all complicit.

Yet, however awful the circumstance, we need a sense of human agency. In the face of the pandemic, many of us are reduced to sitting at home sewing facemasks; it seems like a paltry response to a spreading sickness that’s taking tens of thousands of lives, but it’s better than sitting on our hands and saying “Woe is me.” The same goes for climate change: figuring out how to eat lower on the food chain, or how to get by without a car, or how to reduce home energy usage by half, or growing a garden might seem like trivial responses to such an overwhelming crisis, but they get us moving together in the right direction.

For all the reasons I’ve mentioned, Planet of the Humans is not the last word on our human predicament. Still, it starts a conversation we need to have, and it’s a film that deserves to be seen.

3227. How a "Green Real Deal" Can Help Beat Trump in 2020

By Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, April 9, 2019

Students demanding action of climate change in March. Photo: Tom Brenner, Getty Images.

Here’s some news you may have missed. Southeastern Africa got hit in March with a cyclone that United Nations officials say was one of the worst weather disasters to ever strike the Southern Hemisphere. “Ever” is a long time. 

The storm swept through Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe, killing hundreds. My friend Greg Carr, who runs the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, told me that the lions, elephants and zebras sensed the storm coming and moved to higher ground to avoid the flooding. Among the people and birds that survived, many of the former lost their homes and the latter their nests and eggs.

While this historic weather disaster was unfolding, President Trump was urging Republicans not to kill the Democrats’ Green New Deal proposal — not because Trump wants to work with it, but because he wants to run against it in 2020.

Trump wants to take the Green New Deal, co-sponsored by Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Bronx, and mock its aspiration to urgently decarbonize our electric grid, transportation sector, industries and buildings, while pairing all that with programs to ensure that every American can get a job and have access to health care and “safe, affordable, adequate housing,” as well as other social goods.

AOC’s rejoinder: “For everyone who wants to make a joke about that, you may laugh, but your grandkids will not.”

She is right. And given the choice between a “Green New Deal” that envisions scaling justice for all and Trump’s “Black New Deal,” which protects profitable pollution for the 1 percent, my heart is with the greens. But my head says you can’t transform our energy system and our social/economic one at scale all at once. We have to prioritize energy/climate. Because for the environment, later will be too late. Later is officially over.

And if Democrats approach this right — with a barrage of political ads paired with a focused green strategy, like the “Green Real Deal” proposed by Ernie Moniz, Barack Obama’s energy secretary, and Andy Karsner, George W. Bush’s assistant energy secretary for renewable energy — they can win on this issue in 2020 and make Trump the laughingstock.

I’d pound Trump with these points, but they will be effective only if married to a “Green Real Deal.” For Moniz and Karsner, that would involve every state or city adopting its own version of a plan California approved last year called S.B. 100.

S.B. 100, which was spearheaded by State Senator Kevin de León, an unsung hero of the green movement, mandated that power companies steadily increase carbon-free electricity on their grid until it reaches 100 percent by 2045.

As David Roberts wrote for Vox, de León kept “the bill simple and direct enough to command broad support. … Somehow, everyone saw themselves in S.B. 100. Labor and business, nukes and renewables, markets and mandates, cats and dogs — somehow the bill hit the sweet spot. It contained enough substance to matter, but not so many bells and whistles that everyone found something to hate.”

The law sets a steadily rising standard for California power generation companies: 50 percent renewables by 2026, 60 percent renewables by 2030 and 100 percent carbon-free — so as to include energy sources that aren’t actually renewable, but don’t emit carbon dioxide— — by 2045. So wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, large hydro, nuclear power and natural gas paired with carbon capture and storage (C.C.S.) can all play, plus whatever new clean power gets invented. And the steadily rising California standard guarantees they’ll all have a growing market to sell into.

A Green Real Deal would be a nationwide effort to inspire and enable Democrats and sensible Republicans to come up with state and local versions of S.B. 100 and thereby stimulate America’s earth race — not space race — to get to national net-zero emissions by 2045, or earlier.

It could garner a lot of G.O.P. support in wind states, businesses could make money off it, and it would put Trump totally on the defensive.

As Moniz and Karsner wrote in an essay on CNBC.com: “Climate deniers, as well as those with demonstrably impractical, short-term, feel-good solutions, are moving us sideways when forward motion is essential.”A Green Real Deal, they argue in The Santa Barbara Independent, would set “ambitious, but achievable, stretch goals that can be flexibly met and spur innovation and prosperity.”

Trump is vulnerable to a bipartisan, industry-friendly plan like this. Last year, The Atlantic reported that “a coalition of 34 student groups from around the country — including 23 chapters of the College Republican — announced the formation of Students for Carbon Dividends, a bipartisan group calling for national legislation to fight climate change. … It marks the first time that a coalition of College Republican groups has publicly backed a climate-change policy.”

Glenn Prickett, founder of Rock Creek Strategies, which advises organizations and companies on how to incorporate the value of nature into economic development, remarked to me: “I have been sensing something in the air that I have not felt since the late 1980s — when global warming first became prominent and Time magazine made Planet Earth the Person of the Year — and that is that people really want the government to take this issue seriously. I have to give AOC credit for helping get it back on the agenda.”

Prickett added: “I spent 25 years talking about what would happen if we don’t address this issue. Now I have to correct myself and say what is happening.” The impacts are real and they are here, “but what is new is that while the politics remain polarized, business leadership is getting behind this issue and we now have the technologies to create scale solutions.”

I repeat: Later will be too late. So let me end where I began — with Greg Carr in Mozambique’s Gorongosa Park, one million acres of wilderness, which has been protecting both wildlife and the 200,000 people living around it.

First of all, Carr noted by phone, “nearly half of Gorongosa Park is now a lake,” thanks to Cyclone Idai, but its trees and soils “acted like a giant sponge and absorbed tons of water,” so flooding of communities downstream was not as bad as it could have been. Parks mitigate climate extremes. “Hurricanes are going to be more of a problem, and more nature is the solution. I am talking to the government about creating another 250,000 acres of wetland conservancy to the south of us to soak up more water, because this will not be our last cyclone.”

It was also Carr’s 260 park rangers who delivered 100,000 pounds of food, rescue teams and new seeds for replanting flooded crops to all the villagers living around them. (To help, go to gorongosa.org/cyclone_relief_fund.) Carr wants to see national parks in Africa transformed from just tourist sites to economic development engines, absorbers of climate change and first responders to disaster.

Low-lying coastal cities in America should be thinking the same. Nine out of 10 homes in Beira — Mozambique’s fourth-largest city, on its coast — were devastated by Idai. Gorongosa is upstream from Beira and absorbed enough water to prevent that port city from being wiped off the face of the earth, Carr said.

A Green Real Deal — if framed and focused properly — could wipe that smirk right off that smirk right off Trump’s face.

that smirk right off Trump’s face.Trump’s face.

3171. Senate Energy Democrats Energy Democrats Hire Former Industry Lobbyist to Lead Staff

By Steve Horn, The Real News, January 24, 2019

The U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources has hired a former fracking lobbyist to lead its minority staff.

As first reported by the publication Greenwire, Sarah Venuto Perez formerly served as lead federal lobbyist for America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA), as well as the natural gas electricity companies Centerpoint Energy and Entergy. ANGA, until merging into the American Petroleum Institute in 2015, was the lead federal lobbying organization promoting hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for natural gas in shale basins across the U.S.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is under the Democratic minority leadership of U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), a coal and natural gas state legislator who has long served as a vocal supporter of the fossil fuel industry. Most recently, Venuto Perez had worked as chief legal counsel and senior policy adviser for Manchin.

A contradiction is unfolding among Democrats: Venuto Perez’s hire comes as Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, spearheaded by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have pushed the concept of a Green New Deal and creation of a Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.

Ocasio-Cortez recently told Bloomberg that the House will soon begin the official process of drafting a resolution to have an official written record of what “climate and clean energy policies they would support to combat climate change,” reported Bloomberg.

She said the resolution is still being drafted. “But we’re looking to essentially just define the scope of the Green New Deal” with the resolution.”

Track Record

Prior to her roughly seven years working as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., Venuto Perez worked as Assistant Council for the Office for General Counsel for the Hillary Clinton for President campaign during Clinton’s first run for the presidency, according to her LinkedIn profile. Venuto Perez also gave a $2,900 donation to Clinton during her follow-up 2016 run for President while working as a lobbyist for ANGA, according to U.S. Federal Elections Commission data.

While working for ANGA, Venuto Perez also accepted $75 biweekly payroll deductions during the 2016 campaign cycle which went to the lobbying organization’s political action committee (PAC). ANGA donated $66,688 to candidates during that cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org, with Hillary Clinton receiving the most money out of any federal candidate from the organization.

Federal campaign finance disclosure form for ANGA’s PAC in 2015; Image Credit: U.S. Federal Elections Commission

Venuto Perez—formerly Venuto—is married to another fossil fuel industry lobbyist named Nelson Perez, who works as lead federal lobbyist for the London-based electricity generation company National Grid. Throughout her career as a lobbyist, Venuto Perez has frequently lobbied against clean air rules, clean water protections and climate regulations.

For example, while working for ANGA, federal lobbying disclosure forms show that she advocated against methane emissions regulations (methane is a greenhouse gas more potent as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas than carbon during its 20 years in the atmosphere). At ANGA, she also lobbied for bills which would expedite the permitting process to ship liquefied natural gas to the export market, fast-tracking which may push aside considerations under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

At ANGA, she also worked on NEPA reform itself, legislation and a regulatory landscape which undergirds it that has long stood in the way of industry desires to expedite the permitting process for its proposed projects. The Trump Administration and congressional Republicans have made a push in recent months, as well, to stave off NEPA.

During her lobbyist tenure, Venuto Perez further advocated on behalf of the SCRUB (Searching for and Cutting Regulations that are Unnecessarily Burdensome) Act. That bill would nix one federal regulation for every federal regulation created, legislation pushed hard both in the U.S. and Canada by the climate change denial network funded by David and Charles Koch.

While at Centerpoint, Venuto Perez lobbied, too, for the Free Industry Act, which would have made greenhouse gases not subject to the Clean Air Act. Also at Centerpoint, she pushed for the Ensuring Affordable Energy Act, which would have prohibited funding for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to implement greenhouse gas regulations. Further, she lobbied for S.15, a 2011 bill to halt regulation of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. until China, India, and Russia implement similar reductions.

Related Stories

01.

Senate Energy Democrats Hire Former Industry Lobbyist to Lead Staff

02.

Former Coal Lobbyist Confirmed As New EPA Head

03.

City Council Calls for ‘No More Cash for Burning Trash’

04.

The Battle Over West Virginia’s Coal Country

05.

Baltimore Mayor Signs Charter Amendment Banning Water Privatization

And those are just some of the dozens of bills she supported while working for Centerpoint.

Third quarter federal lobbying disclosure form for Centerpoint Energy; Image Credit: Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives

Manchin Under Fire

Even before Manchin hired Venuto Perez, his appointment came under fire by climate activists.

Manchin speaks at July 19, 2017 Third Way breakfast in Washington, D.C.; Photo Credit: Third Way Think Tank | Flickr

“Anyone but Manchin,” Lukas Ross, senior policy analyst at the climate advocacy group Friends of the Earth, told Politico at the time. “I’d rather pick someone from the phone book.”

In recent months, Manchin has helped to spearhead an effort to create a multinational petrochemical hub in West Virginia. Boosted by over $83 billion in capital from China, the hub would intake gas obtained from fracking in the Marcellus and Utica Shale basins and morph the Ohio River valley region into a petrochemical refining corridor rivaling that situated along the Gulf of Mexico in Texas and Louisiana on the Houston Ship Channel.

Manchin made his mark as one of few Democrats to oppose to President Obama’s Climate Action Plan’s aims to regulate coal-fired power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions. On the day Obama announced the plan, Manchin denounced it as a “war on coal” in a press release published by his office.

“The regulations the President wants to force on coal are not feasible. And if it’s not feasible, it’s not reasonable,” said Manchin at the time. “It’s clear now that the President has declared a war on coal.”

Manchin also came out against a cap-and-trade plan put forth early on in the Obama Administration. In a well-known 2010 Manchin campaign ad, the Senator literally shot the cap-and-trade legislative proposal with a rifle.

The fifth most senior member of the Committee, Manchin assumed the helm because the other four more senior members received appointments to head up other committees. Those include U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) (Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee), U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (Budget Committee) and U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) (Finance Committee) and U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) (Agriculture Committee).

Politico noted in November that Democratic Party-aligned advocates were noticeably quiet about the appointment of Manchin, compared to its noisier activism around pushing the concept of the Green New Deal to the fore.

“We’re not shy about bringing the full spectrum of Democratic actions, including protests, to Capitol Hill, but right now our priority is building power and building a vision on climate change,” Julian NoiseCat, U.S. policy analyst for 350.org, told Politico. “We see that primarily in the House at this current moment in time.”

Any Green New Deal passed by the House, where Democrats sit in the majority, would also need to pass through both the U.S. Senate and receive President Donald Trump’s signature of approval to become law. Given much of the Green New Deal deals with energy issues, some parts of that package will likely have to go through the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources as well.

“The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee should play a key role in order for a Green New Deal legislative package to get to the President,” Tyson Slocum, Director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, told The Real News Network. “Of course, Senate Majority Leader McConnell threw such precedent out the window to rush through Trump’s corporate tax cut without such Committee involvement, but regardless the Energy and Natural Resources Committee should play a prominent role.”

Undermining Climate Commitments

Manchin’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story. Neither did any of the other Democrats contacted for this story, including the offices of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Sanders sits as a fellow member of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Fellow Committee Democrats U.S. Sen. Cantwell, U.S. Sen. Stabenow and U.S. Sen. Wyden also did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Robert Galbraith, Senior Research Analyst for the Public Accountability Initiative — a non-profit group which tracks the influence elite networks have on public policy debates and outcomes — decried the hire

“Hiring a revolving door fossil fuel lobbyist to direct their staff on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee completely undermines Democratic party leaders’ stated commitment to addressing climate change,” Galbraith told The Real News Network. “Political leaders cannot credibly claim to take climate change seriously while taking money from fossil fuel companies and executives and putting fossil fuel lobbyists in positions to influence climate policy,”

3017. U.N. Chief Warns of a Dangerous Tipping Point on Climate Change

By Somini Sengupta, The New York Times, August 11, 2018

Warning of the risks of “runaway” global warming, the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, on Monday called on global leaders to rein in climate change faster.

“If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change,” Mr. Guterres said at United Nations headquarters in New York.

“Climate change is the defining issue of our time, and we are at a defining moment,” he said. “Scientists have been telling us for decades. Over and over again. Far too many leaders have refused to listen.”

His remarks came with countries around the world far short of meeting the goals they set for themselves under the 2015 Paris accord to reduce the emissions that have warmed the planet over the last century. The next round of climate negotiations is scheduled for this year in Poland.

One of the big tests at those talks, which start Dec. 3 in Katowice, will be whether countries, especially industrialized countries that produce a large share of global emissions, will set higher targets for reducing their emissions.

“The time has come for our leaders to show they care about the people whose fate they hold in their hands,” Mr. Guterres said, without taking questions from reporters. “We need to rapidly shift away from our dependence on fossil fuels.”

Mr. Guterres’s speech came days before a high-level climate meeting in San Francisco, spearheaded by Gov. Jerry Brown of California, meant to demonstrate what businesses and local leaders have done to tackle climate change.

The United Nations chief seems to be taking a page from Mr. Brown’s playbook. He, too, is looking beyond national leaders to make a difference. He has invited heads of industry and city government leaders to his September 2019 climate change forum in an apparent effort to increase pressure on national governments.

The Paris Agreement aims to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels in order to avoid what scientists call the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

But few countries are even close to meeting the targets they set under the Paris pact. And an assessment by the United Nations found that country targets so far would achieve only one-third of the global target.

Mr. Guterres sought to make the case that a shift away from fossil fuels like oil and coal would create jobs and bolster economies. Rebutting critics who argue that such a shift would be costly, he called that idea “hogwash.”

He cited the steps private companies are taking to wean themselves away from polluting fossil fuels — including a hat tip to the insurance company Allianz, which has promised to stop insuring coal-fired power plants — though he said such actions are plainly insufficient.

“These are all important strides,” Mr. Guterres said. “But they are not enough. The transition to a cleaner, greener future needs to speed up.”

He warned that governments were not meeting their Paris Agreement commitments and goaded world leaders to step up.

“What we still lack, even after the Paris Agreement, is leadership and the ambition to do what is needed,” he said.

Mr. Guterres did not mention any countries or any heads of state by name. But looming large over his remarks was the leader of world’s most powerful country: President Trump, who has dismissed climate science, rolled back environmental regulations and vowed to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord.

2473.The Anthropocene Mindset: Geoenginerring the Climate

By Christine Frank, Socialist Action, October 13, 2016

As a last-ditch effort to curb runaway global warming, while avoiding a definitive halt to fossil-fuel combustion, scientists, governments, entrepreneurs, and even right-wing think tanks are advocating various highly dangerous technologies to block solar radiation or draw down atmospheric carbon to cool the planet. Touted as Plan B, these risky methods come under the label of either Solar Radiation Management (SRM) or Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).

SRM techniques under consideration include placing space-based solar deflectors in orbit, spewing sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, and seeding clouds to increase their brightness. CDR techniques include Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) of CO2 from power-plant flue gases, the iron fertilization of the oceans to stimulate phytoplankton blooms, and burning acres of trees for biochar burial in soils.

For any of these ruinously expensive, energy-intensive techno-fixes to work, they must be applied on a planetary-wide, mega-scale, at great risk to Earth’s natural systems and human societies. Their implementation could result in an array of disastrous unintended consequences due to reckless human interference.

A case in point would be the initial Grand Experiment of employing fossil fuels to power the Industrial Revolution, which got us into this mess in the first place. Over the two-and-a-half centuries of hydrocarbon burning and steadily rising carbon dioxide emissions, the growing evidence that greenhouse gases were warming the planet was either ignored, denied, or deliberately suppressed by those who profited from the coal, gas, and oil industries.

With that in mind, any child worried about his or her future could easily grasp the folly of using Mother Earth as a laboratory for geoengineering experiments, yet scientists as well as some so-called environmentalists, who both should know better, are ready to push the panic button in order to “buy time.”

To buy time for whom, we may ask? It is clear that quick-fixing the climate will allow the capitalist class to conduct business as usual by never having to give up fossil fuels. That is why Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson declared back in 2007 that adapting to extreme weather and rising sea levels is an “engineering problem” that has “engineering solutions.”

That’s right, Rex, with the help of Yankee ingenuity and American know-how, we can engineer our way out of ecological collapse so you and your ilk will be free to pillage, plunder, and pollute for profit until the natural world descends into chaos. There may be a Plan B, but there is no Planet B! A growing number of climate crisis activists are realizing that and demanding a ban on geoengineering experiments, funding, and implementation.

We now know from paleoclimatic evidence that dramatic changes on a planetary scale are difficult to reverse and can lead to irreparable harm, even mass extinctions. Earth’s climate system is a complexity of natural variables and feedback loops. All of the planet’s matrices—atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, and lithosphere—interact in non-linear and subtle ways to create a self-regulatory whole. Therefore, a change in the solar flux could cause an imbalance in the global heat budget and alter atmospheric circulation, precipitation patterns, and ocean currents to the detriment of life in the affected regions. Needless to say, the economic costs of launching an array of sun shields or mirrors into orbit would be astronomical.

The release of sulfate aerosols mixed with polluting jet aircraft exhaust into the stratosphere would also have detrimental side effects. Historically, tropical volcanic eruptions that release sulfur particles can cause warmer winters over land masses in the Northern Hemisphere, whereas, eruptions at high latitudes weaken the Asian and African monsoons, causing droughts. Adding aerosols to the stratosphere could exacerbate ozone depletion by providing more surfaces on which harmful chemical reactions take place. Also, blocking sunlight would mean less for renewable solar power. Acid rain that kills forests and aquatic life could be another ill effect.

A flotilla of ships spraying seawater into the air in order to increase Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN) and brighten marine stratocumulus clouds may not be the “Silver Lining” that is promised. It could backfire with a counterproductive reduction in cloud cover because of all the industrial pollutants present over the ocean adding to the mix.

For years, carbon capture and sequestration have been used to foster the myth of Clean Coal. With a handful of exceptions, most coal-fired power plants have not deployed CCS because of the enormous expense and energy required to create the solvents to absorb the CO2 from the smokestacks and to pressurize and pipe the supercritical gas underground into a secure geologic formation. Critics have pointed out the dangers of the highly pressurized carbon dioxide migrating through the rock fissures and belching out at the surface where it would smother anything breathing at ground level.

Supposedly, the CarbFix project in Iceland has succeeded in mineralizing carbon pollution from a geothermal power station by pumping it into subterranean volcanic basalt formations. The in situ process took only two years rather than millions, greatly improving on geologic time scales. The major drawbacks to applying this technique on a world scale are the availability of basalt formations, the energy required to transport the carbon dioxide from its source, and the amount of water—25 tons per each ton of CO2—necessary to pipe it into permanent geologic storage. It would require a massive infrastructure.

Then there are always the problems of pipeline ruptures and wellhead blowouts plus the hazards of deep-sea drilling. The more complex the mechanical means, the more things that can go wrong.

Dumping a slurry of iron sulfate into the ocean to increase marine phytoplankton populations has had limited results in drawing down carbon. What has happened in actual trials is that iron fertilization encourages a feeding frenzy among the zooplankton grazers, resulting in very little carbon actually being sequestered as dead plankton or fecal matter—marine snow—in the deep ocean.

Also, there is the danger of undermining the integrity of the food web. Neurotoxic algal blooms can poison fish, shellfish, and marine mammals, and nutrient overloading can deplete oxygen and create dead zones in the world’s seas. Also, methanophilic bacteria could take advantage of the situation and release massive amounts of dimethylsulfide (DMS) into the atmosphere, blocking the sunlight needed for photosynthesis.

Because no government is forcing the Big Polluters to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, panicked scientists and politicians say that conventional means of mitigating global warming are not working. Therefore, we need to resort to more drastic measures, and they are receiving encouragement from wealthy entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Mark Lynas, who are eager to patent every wild, hair-brained scheme coming down the pike. The result is the privatization of global warming mitigation strategies to satisfy their greed. It raises the question of who ultimately controls the thermostat and whether they have the right to imperil the lives of everyone else.

Another reason why we are not winning the struggle to save the climate is the cowardice of the weak, reformist environmental groups, who are afraid to challenge the Carbon Barons head on, so they compromise by promoting electric cars instead of clean mass transit.

Fearing the wrath of Big Auto, the Union of Concerned Scientists has harped endlessly on improved fuel-efficiency standards because it too cannot give up its worship of the internal combustion engine. For years, the Sierra Club falsely advocated natural gas as a “bridge or transitional fuel” until it was revealed that its leadership had been taking millions in donations from the industry. Even climatologist James Hansen believes in “green nukes” by advocating thorium reactors.

The delusional sci-fi fantasy that human beings can control powerful natural forces is based on the mechanistic view that the Universe is a giant clockwork that can tolerate endless tinkering without consequence. Only the democratic control of science for the benefit of society will allow us to work with Mother Nature instead of against her.

We already have renewable wind and solar technologies at our disposal, which will enable us to leave the fossil fuels in the ground. Instead, of torching trees for biochar, we should be saving the world’s forests from the logger’s chainsaw. To increase the carbon-storage capacity of Earth’s badly depleted, lifeless soils, organic matter must be recycled to regenerate their health and fertility instead of flushed into the ocean. Organic food production, not genetic monsters and toxic chemicals, will feed the world.

To implement these sustainable measures, we must first get rid of the economic system and the class that puts profits before human and ecological needs.