How did we miss the sweet spot?

• Guest post
• 15 years ago
• Categories: climate change

This fascinating article (with many links) describes some of the radical technologies America is considering to address the urgent problem of global warming.

… global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air …

One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.

Ohh this is going to end well don’t you think? How did we get here? First the problem of global warming was too distant, too unproven, to be worth doing anything about. Now all of a sudden it is too late, too urgent, for sensible measures like reducing carbon emissions to work effectively. Now we need to start clutching at quick fix solutions. How did we miss the sweet spot? How long exactly was the window between too early and too late?

I think the author (Andrew Gilkson) pretty much sums it up:

That global climate change has reached an impasse whereby the “powers-to-be” are entertaining climate geoengineering mitigation, instead of the urgent deep reduction of carbon emissions required by science, represents the ultimate moral bankruptcy of institutions and a failure of democracy.