Dear colleagues,
attached is a fresh new briefing paper for civil society on geoengineering that ETC Group and the Heinrich Böll Foundation prepared for the Bonn Climate Change Conference in May 2017: Climate change, smoke and mirrors
Comments and feedback are very welcome since we consider this a work in progress!
Warm regards!
Lili Fuhr
A civil society briefing on Geoengineering
Climate change, smoke and mirrors
For the past decade, a small but growing group of governments and scientists, the majority from the most powerful and most climate-polluting countries in the world, has been pushing for political consideration of geoengineering, the deliberate large-scale technological manipulation of the climate. Geoengineering is inherently high-risk and its negative effects will likely be unequally distributed. Because of this, geoengineering has often been presented as a “Plan B” to confront the climate crisis. But after the Paris Agreement, which set the ambitious goal of keeping the temperature to well below 2°C and possibly even 1.5°C, the discourse has changed. Now, geoengineering is increasingly being advanced as an “essential” means to reach this goal, through a mix of risky technologies that would take carbon out of the atmosphere to create so-called “negative emissions” or take control of the global thermostat to directly lower the climate’s temperature.
It should be no surprise that geoengineering is gaining political currency as temperatures rise. The fossil fuel industry is desperate to protect its estimated $55 trillion of installed infrastructure and its $20-28 trillion in booked assets that can only be extracted if the corporations are allowed to overshoot GHG emissions. The theoretical assumption is that geoengineering technologies might eventually let them recapture CO2 from the atmosphere and bury it in the earth or ocean, or that injecting sulfates in the stratosphere could lower the temperature, “buying us more time” to finally agree to radically reduce our fossil fuel emissions. Either way provides the fossil fuel industry with means to avoid popping the "carbon bubble" beyond outright climate denial. In other words, geoengineering proposals are becoming the fossil fuel industry’s main tool to undermine the political will to lower actual emissions now. Geoengineering proposals are also becoming the weapon of last resort for some desperate climate scientists unable to produce pathways that realign our growth-driven economic model with a climate-safe future.
But what exactly is geoengineering and what technologies are being proposed? And what are the risks and implications associated with the respective technologies when it comes to ecological integrity, environmental and climate justice and democracy?
This briefing was produced as a background for civil society active at the UNFCCC intersessional meeting in Bonn, May 2017. Feedback and comments are welcome. We consider this a work in progress and plan to publish more documents in the coming months.Contact: grupoetc@etcgroup.org, schneider@boell.de
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Lili Fuhr
Referentin Internationale Umweltpolitik /
Department Head Ecology and Sustainable Development
Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung
Schumannstraße 8
D - 10117 Berlin
T +49 (0)30 285 34 304
F +49-(0)30 285 34 5304
M +49 (0)151 40201775
E: fuhr@boell.de / www.boell.de
Referentin Internationale Umweltpolitik /
Department Head Ecology and Sustainable Development
Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung
Schumannstraße 8
D - 10117 Berlin
T +49 (0)30 285 34 304
F +49-(0)30 285 34 5304
M +49 (0)151 40201775
E: fuhr@boell.de / www.boell.de
Twitter: @lilifuhr
Recommended Reading: Inside the Green Economy - Promises and Pitfalls
Thomas Fatheuer, Lili Fuhr, Barbara Unmüßig.
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