Who Is Geoengineering?

Who Is?

iHeartRadio + NowThis

News, Politics

4.1 • 803 Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2021

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

Unless you’re lucky enough to live on another planet, you’ve probably heard about the climate crisis. It’s a problem we must address if we want humanity--and the rest of the Earth’s animal and plant population--to continue to survive and thrive. But in order for that surviving and thriving to happen, we must immediately and definitively cut emissions and begin the transition away from fossil fuels. How’s that going? As you’ve probably heard, not so well, and as a result, more radical approaches are increasingly in the mix. Geoengineering is one of these, and while it won’t solve the climate crisis, it may enable us to remove some of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted and even artificially lower global temperatures while we detox from fossil fuels. The catch? We don’t really know what would happen if we did it, and we may not be able to undo it. On this episode of “Who Is?,” it’s a look at one of the big choices we may have to make in the not so distant future.

Elizabeth Kolbert, who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Her most recent book, “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future,” was published in February of 2021
Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G). Pasztor was previously United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Change in New York under Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

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Transcript

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0:00.0	CO2 is not like most pollutants. When you put it up into the atmosphere, it hangs around for a long time and it continues to have a warming effect for a very long time.
0:09.9	So it's very difficult when people talk about fixing climate change or solving climate change.
0:14.5	That's really on some level not possible unless you're willing to take these pretty radical steps and try to counteract
0:24.6	climate change with another level of human intervention. If we just stopped emitting CO2,
0:28.6	if we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, which would be an excellent idea, but it's not going to happen,
0:33.6	we would not have solved climate change. We simply would not be making climate change
0:38.3	worse. If you actually want to reverse it so that, you know, instead of getting warmer,
0:44.3	temperatures would either stabilize or become cooler, then you have to look at these much more
0:49.5	serious forms of intervention, either trying to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere or by and or, I mean,
0:56.8	they would be potentially complementary by rejiggering the stratosphere.
1:02.5	I don't know about you, but I like Earth. Most of my favorite things are on Earth. I would love
1:09.6	it if life could continue on Earth, human life especially.
1:13.9	But that's not how things are going. The climate crisis is no longer something that's happening
1:19.4	in the future. It's happening right now. You get it. You're living it. So what are we going to do
1:26.2	about it? Well, what if we got radical?
1:29.7	It was technological progress that got us into this mess, so maybe it's technological progress
1:35.5	that can bail us out of it.
1:37.5	On the other hand, there's a thing called unintended consequences.
1:42.3	And our backup plan is Mars? I guess we should probably talk about this
1:47.0	before we do it, right? So this week on Who Is? It's geoengineering. I'm Sean Morrow, and this is Who Is.
2:03.2	The podcast from Now This, where we examine power through the stories of people who have it.
2:08.4	Today, a story about one of the most important but scary powers that exists,
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