Geologists prefer to call the past two centuries as ‘the anthropocene period, a time when humans have reshaped about half of the Earth’s surface. We have dictated what plants grow and where. We’ve pocked and deformed the Earth’s crust with mines and wells, and we’ve commandeered a huge fraction of its freshwater supply for our own purposes.’

Humans can go even beyond that and ‘deform the Earth intentionally, as a way to engineer the planet either back into its pre-industrial state, or into some improved third state.’ This move is called “geo-engineering” whose components are already being frighteningly considered today to combat the ills of climate change. Imagine a Blade Runner future, aimed to undo the excesses of man’s dependence on carbon.

Geo-engineering, seen by scientists as a last-ditch option to prevent the catastrophic rise in Earth’s temperature, is both powerful and ‘so easily implemented’ in terms of technology. It is also relatively cheap. All it takes is one superwealthy individual ‘to change the climate all on its own.’ The downside is that a ‘Greenfinger’ could arise. This is a rich madman, obsessed with the environment. ‘There are now 38 people in the world with $10 billion or more in private assets, according to the latest Forbes list; theoretically, one of these people could reverse climate change all alone.’

‘$100 billion could reverse anthropogenic climate change entirely, and some experts suspect that a hundredth of that sum could suffice. To stop global warming the old-fashioned way, by cutting carbon emissions, would cost on the order of $1 trillion yearly.’

While a prolonged love affair with carbon dioxide will end disastrously, geo-engineering might just be ‘the biggest and most terrifying insurance policy humanity might buy—one that pays out so meagerly, and in such foul currency, that we’d better ensure we never need it.’

The caveat is for us to ‘keep investigating geo-engineering solutions.’ The choice is ours, really. Do we want a future full of Prius or to have a zeppelin as the alternative? Do we see a future with millions of wind turbines and policing consumption or aerosols pumping and injecting sulfur in the sky much like man-made volcanoes, forests of carbon-eating trees engineered to suck carbon more hungrily, painting the clouds white, installing space shades, and blooming massive areas in the oceans with carbon dioxide-ingesting plankton?

Geo-engineering is scary because it can be done.

Via The Atlantic