Mexico has become one of the first countries to ban
solar engineering experiments,
after a start-up released balloons of sulphur dioxide
particles meant to cool the Earth by reflecting
sunlight back into space.
“The company’s behaviour plays into long-held fears
that a ‘rogue’ actor with no particular knowledge of
atmospheric science or the implications of the
technology could unilaterally choose to geoengineer the
climate, without any kind of consensus around whether
it’s okay to do so—or what the appropriate global
average temperature should be,” reports MIT Technology
Review.
The balloons (not to be confused with another small
flotilla of balloons that has since been making
headlines) were released in Baja California last April
by Make Sunsets, a United States start-up that says it
makes “reflective, high-altitude, biodegradable clouds
that cool the planet.” The balloons are intended to
release their payload by bursting when they reach the
upper atmosphere.
Make Sunsets says its method is “really effective,”
with one gram of cloud cover offsetting the warming
that one ton of carbon dioxide emissions creates for a
year. The company sells US$10 “cooling credits” that
each buy the release of one gram of cloud. In January,
around four months after launching, CEO Luke Iseman
said the fledgling company had raised $750,000 in
venture capital and other funds, Mexico News Daily
reports.
But in response to news of the balloon launch from its
territory, Mexico’s government said it would “prohibit
and, where appropriate, stop experimentation practices
with solar geoengineering,” citing a moratorium against
geoengineering deployment for countries party to the
2010 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.
“The opposition to these climatic manipulations is
based on the fact that there are currently no
international agreements that address or supervise
solar geoengineering activities, which represent an
economically advantageous way out for a minority and
risky for the supposed remediation of climate change,”
Mexico’s environmental ministry SEMARNAT and the
National Council of Science and Technology said in a
joint release. Make Sunsets carried out the experiment
“without prior notice and without the consent of the
Government of Mexico and the surrounding communities,”
the statement added.
Iseman, a California entrepreneur with no background in
climate science and a self-professed geoengineering
novice, argues that the accelerating pace of climate
change makes immediate action necessary and that the
balloon release was not illegal, TIME Magazine writes.
“It was surprising that people feel like we’re trying
to sneak around some law when that is not the intent,”
Iseman said. “There doesn’t appear to be some permit
that I should have filed for and did not.”
Defined as a “deliberate, large-scale intervention in
the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate
change,” several countries are pursuing geoengineering
as a strategy to remove carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere. But another geoengineering strategy, one
that aims to artificially cool the planet through
methods like ocean fertilization or deflecting solar
rays, is more controversial.
“The two strategies are very different, and the term
‘geoengineering’ is sometimes wielded to misleadingly
conflate them,” explains Vox. But the two branches are
also similar in important ways. Both might be necessary
parts of a climate solution if countries fail to
embrace more practical, equitable climate solutions.
And both can affect the whole world, “but don’t require
worldwide buy-in to pull off.”
International law has so far failed to grapple with
solar geoengineering, but many scientists are opposed
to it. Make Sunsets’ experiment may have been too small
to do any damage, but solar geoengineering on a larger
scale could have dangerous side effects like increasing
rainfall in some areas while reducing it in others,
James Haywood, a professor of atmospheric science at
Exeter University, told Climate Home News. Other
research indicates that solar geoengineering could
redistribute malaria risk in developing countries,
increasing transmission in some cases and decreasing it
in others, and drastically reduce crop yields.
Environment groups also tend to oppose the practice,
saying it would allow fossil fuel companies to maintain
business as usual instead of making transformational
changes that reduce emissions. Make Sunsets “plays into
the hands of the fossil fuel industry” by “offering a
supposedly cheap and easy fix to the climate crisis,”
Lily Fuhr, deputy program director at the Center for
International Environmental Law, said in a statement.
The risks have produced an intense ethical debate and
prompted Sweden’s space agency to cancel the
Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment
(SCoPEx), a solar geoengineering experiment promoted by
Canadian researcher David Keith, after Indigenous
communities objected—again.
“This is at least the third time that SCoPEx has been
halted on Indigenous territory. First in New Mexico,
then Arizona, and now Sweden,” ETC Group Research
Director Jim Thomas said at the time. “Each time,
geoengineers promise to ‘consult’ better, deliberately
missing the point that consultation does not equal
consent. When communities and Indigenous people say no
to planet-altering schemes being launched from their
territories, it is disrespectful to mishear that as
‘needing more consultation’. No means no.”
Since some countries will suffer the adverse effects of
solar geoengineering projects more than others, and
some may be more in control of geoengineering outcomes,
“the geopolitical implications of such uneven effects
and risks—or even just the perceived risks of
unevenness and unintended consequences —could put up a
huge barrier to this technology being used consensually
and peacefully,” Olaf Corry, professor of global
security challenges at Leeds University, told the
Financial Times.
|
|