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Geoengineering. The word probably conjures up. If it makes you think of anything at all,

planes taking off on short haul flights, spraying obscure chemicals into the air,

in a perhaps futile, perhaps accidentally catastrophic attempt to stop the sun from being so bright.

But does it have to? Although that's the popular and much feared image of Geoengineering,

it's not all of the term implies, using giant undersea kelp farms to lock carbon into the oceans,

or even much more innocuous things, like restoring forests to pull down carbon from the air,

what's called carbon sequestration, all this could also be understood as Geoengineering.

The writer Benjarin Bratton uses the term Geoengineering to refer to any large

gate attempt to modify the planet's composition, and that's the sense in which I'm going to be using

it here. But why is any of this necessary? Of course you've probably seen the graph.

Maybe the most important one of our lifetimes, which shows carbon dioxide steadily

ticking up in the atmosphere, despite all the words and promises on climate action.

The world meets for the first conference of the parties, or COP, in Berlin in 1995,

and the line keeps going up. In 2009, the Copenhagen COP brings a Russia optimism,

as the world's then largest polluter, the USA, seems finally ready to step up,

and then at the last crushing minute, doesn't. And the line goes up.

The 2015 Paris Agreement proves the most important to date, and the line goes up.

In 2021, the Glasgow climate pact is adopted, and the line goes up. Sometimes people on the left

respond talk of Geoengineering by insisting that we must instead focus all our energies on emission

reduction. It seems clear enough to me that we are well, well past that point. We're going to have

to do something, except just cut emissions when it seems we can't even do that. But what?

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