WASHINGTON – The idea of artificially cooling the planet to dull climate change – and actually block sunlight before it can warm the atmosphere – was reinforced Thursday when an influential scientific institution asked the U.S. government to fund at least $ 100 million Spending dollars on climate change research on technology.
This technology, often referred to as solar geoengineering, involves reflecting more of the solar energy back into space through techniques that include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere. In a new report, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine said governments urgently need to know if solar geoengineering could work and what side effects it could experience.
“Solar geoengineering is not a substitute for decarbonization,” said Chris Field, director of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University and chair of the committee that produced the report, highlighting the need to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases Environment to emit atmosphere. Nonetheless, he said, sunlight reflecting technology “deserves substantial resources and should be explored as quickly and effectively as possible.”
The report recognized the risks that have made geoengineering one of the most controversial issues in climate policy. These risks include disrupting regional weather patterns in potentially devastating ways, such as changing the behavior of the monsoons in South Asia. Easing public pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and even creating an “unacceptable risk of catastrophic rapid warming” with governments reflecting sunlight for a period and stopping later.
However, the authors argue that greenhouse gas emissions are not falling fast enough to avoid dangerous global warming, which means the world must start looking into other options. They found that evidence for or against solar geoengineering “could have profound value” in making decisions about whether to use it.
This includes evidence of what the authors identified as social risks: if, for example, research showed that side effects were concentrated in poorer countries, it could be a reason not to pursue the technology any further, even if it benefited the world than Whole.
The report also argued that by publicly funding geoengineering research, the United States could ensure that the work is transparent and accountable to the public, with clear rules about when and how to test the technology.
Some critics said these protections were not enough.
The steps called for in the report to protect the interests of poorer countries – for example, considering farmers in South Asia whose lives could be changed by changing rain patterns – could after the research begins, according to Prakash Kashwan, professor of political science at the University of Connecticut.
“Once these types of projects are brought into the policy process, the scientists who add all these qualifiers and all these warnings are no longer in control,” said Dr. Kashwan.
Jennie Stephens, director of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University, said geoengineering research raised money and attention to the core problem of reducing emissions and helping vulnerable communities cope with the climate disruptions that are already emerging gives.
“We need to double up on major transformative changes,” said Dr. Stephens. “That is where the investment has to be.”
Solar geoengineering receives non-partisan support from Congress, which brought in $ 4 million for research into the technology by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in late 2019.
Let us help you understand climate change
“America needs to be on the cutting edge of climate science,” Republican John Curtis, Republican of Utah, said in a statement. “More knowledge is always better.”
The calculation could be more difficult for President Biden, who has tried to win the support of the party’s progressive wing, some of whom are skeptical of geoengineering. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has called it the “wrong solution” by using nuclear power to group it or capturing carbon dioxide and burying it underground.
A White House spokesman, Vedant Patel, asked for comment on the report and said via email that President Biden “was clear about tackling the climate crisis”. He added, “Innovative solutions that can help should be explored and explored.”
Tylar Greene, a NASA spokeswoman who helped fund the report, said in a statement: “We look forward to reviewing the report, reviewing recommendations, and examining how NASA and its research community can support these efforts. “
Ko Barrett, assistant assistant administrator at NOAA who also helped fund the report, said in a statement that the agency looks forward to “carefully reviewing” it. The Department of Energy, another donor, did not respond to a request for comment.
National Academies approval could make some lawmakers more comfortable endorsing the technology, according to Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Law at Columbia Law School and editor of a book on solar geoengineering.
And instead of making people care less about curbing greenhouse gas emissions, a big new federal research program into geoengineering could have the opposite effect: getting the public to take climate change seriously by showing it to be more extreme soon and more dangerous options might be necessary.
“It could be so scary that people are even more motivated to cut emissions,” said Gerrard.
Comments are closed.