Activists including Greta Thunberg have shut down a key research project into geoengineering — a potentially game-changing technology — arguing that it could provide an excuse not to cut fossil fuels. We can’t afford to let climate science become politicised, says Bjorn Lomborg
Climate studies are increasingly becoming politicised. Harvard University recently shut down a key geoengineering research project because of intense lobbying, despite the college’s aspiration to become “a global beacon on climate change.”
Geoengineering is one way humanity could deal with the real problem of climate change. The standard approach — which most of the rich world is focused on — is to try to cut carbon emissions and divert investment to solar and wind energy.
However, this approach is incredibly hard and expensive, because fossil fuels still effectively power most of the world. Despite decades of political support for fossil fuel reductions, emissions are still increasing and were at their highest ever last year.
In contrast, geoengineering tries to directly reduce the planet’s temperature. One approach is to emit sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which would cool the planet. There is ample evidence this works: erupting volcanoes typically pump particles into the stratosphere, with each particle reflecting a little sunlight back into space. In 1991, the Mount Pinatubo eruption cooled Earth by about 0.6 degrees Celsius for 18 months.
Harvard’s researchers weren’t attempting anything so grand. They simply wanted to launch a single, high-altitude balloon that would release a tiny amount of particulates high above Earth. Their experiment would have gathered data showing how particles dispersed, and how much sunlight they reflected.
Because the world has so far mostly failed to tackle climate change through cutting fossil fuel reliance, it seems prudent to also investigate other policies that could address parts of the problem. Even the United Nations admits “there has been no real change in the global emissions pathway in the last decade,” despite the 2015 Paris Agreement. We’re just not in a position where we can afford to ignore any pathway to solving climate change.
Unfortunately, as Harvard’s newspaper The Crimson found, pressure from climate activists made this impossible for the scientists. High-profile campaigner Greta Thunberg criticized the first planned tests in northern Sweden, then the indigenous Saami Council — whose land the tests would be above —suggested firing a single balloon into the sky bore “risks of catastrophic consequences”. Politicians jumped aboard the bandwagon, including Sweden’s former foreign minister who declared geoengineering was “crazy” while young activists pushed academic funders to cut off such research.
In addition to the activists, the project’s lead researcher points the finger at a “vocal minority” of scientists who agree with campaigners that geoengineering could provide an excuse to not cut fossil fuels by highlighting another possible solution to climate change. Among such scientists, climate professor Michael Mann claims that geoengineering is a pernicious and false solution offered up by polluters to keep profiting from fossil fuels. The Saami Council exactly opposed the Harvard experiment because the research “could compromise the world’s necessary efforts to achieve zero-carbon societies”.
That isn’t science, it’s dogma. The idea that there is only one correct policy — cutting carbon emissions to zero in a short timeframe — is absurd, and especially so when this sole policy is failing globally. The truth is that geoengineering could be an incredibly useful innovation, even if it harbors risks.
Geoengineering is the only feasible way that humanity has ever identified to cut temperatures quickly. If we were to see the West Antarctic ice sheet starting to slip into the ocean — which would be a global disaster — no standard fossil fuel policy could make any significant change. Even if all nations impossibly were to cut their emissions to zero in a matter of months, temperatures would continue to increase, only slower. It would take decades for temperatures to diverge, and even then, they wouldn’t be coming down but would only stop going up.
In contrast, geoengineering could in principle end the global temperature rise in a matter of days — and even reverse it, at a low cost.
Moreover, geoengineering offers a startlingly low price tag in the tens of billions of dollars over the 21st century, compared to standard policy costing tens of thousands of times more.
Of course, the world shouldn’t start pumping particulates into the atmosphere anytime soon. But we need to know if this technology works and we also need to know about any potential, negative impacts from its use. Partly because it is likely that countries and even the world will want to consider using this approach later. But also partly because the cost of geoengineering is so cheap that there is a risk that a single nation, a rogue billionaire, or even a highly energized nongovernmental organization could deploy the technology alone. We need to make sure the world knows the ramifications. That requires research.
All of these considerations are why both the scientific journal Nature and the Obama Administration endorsed research into geoengineering — and even the Biden Administration has offered measured support.
Just like with any other research, humanity needs to know what works and what problems might arise in the future. The politicization of climate research out of fear it might lead to politically unfavored outcomes is bad for the world.
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His new book is Best Things First, which The Economist named one of the best books of 2023.