"A noble desire to save the world from climate change will attract less noble intentions. That’s just the way of the world. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Already we’re seeing it with Canadian oil sands billionaire Murray Edwards investing in geoengineering technologies. I spend quite a bit of time talking about BILL GATES in the book. ...Gates is now in philanthropic mode, and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does praiseworthy work, but it’s not Bill Gates’ motives I’m worried about; it’s his worldview. That Silicon Valley, ‘we’ve-got-an-app-for-that’ kind of understanding. Joe Romm (Editor of Climate Progress) has been very critical of Gates for his dissing of renewable energy technology. Gates described solar energy as cute. So Gates is drawn to big, new, shiny technological responses that clever people dream up...It’s one thing to think about computers and software that way, but it’s a completely different matter to think about the earth as a whole as in need of a snazzy new app that will solve the problem. I think that’s an extremely dangerous way to understand it for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps the most important of which is that the climate change problem is not a technological one. It’s a social and political one. The more people focus on techno-fixes, the more they distract us from the real problems, which are the social and political difficulties of responding to climate change.... conservative think tanks like The American Enterprise Institute, The Cato Institute and even The Heartland Institute, which have for years worked hard to deny climate science and block all measures to reduce carbon emissions, have come out in favor of geoengineering. What it shows us is that the debate over climate change and the role of the deniers is not about the science. They want to make it about the science because that gives it an air of legitimacy, but it’s really about fundamental cultural and political values. So if geoengineering is the solution then they’re happy to concede that there’s a problem because geoengineering is a big, technological, macho, system-justifying response to climate change. And that’s the kind of response that fits with their political orientation.... Something very profound has happened. Human history, which we think of as only being a few thousand years old and is the history of human actions, has converged with geologic history, which we always thought of as operating in a very distinct domain having nothing to do with us. But now we find that our history affects the history of the earth. If there is no more human history distinct from earth history, then what does that mean?"
Posted on: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 19:17:45 +0000
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