But in case you missed it: On May 15, the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering project announced that a planned field trial associated with the project won’t happen. The intention had been to test hardware that could be used to inject aerosols into the stratosphere to block sunlight as a way to artificially cool the planet, a form of “solar radiation management.”

Everyone who voiced opposition to the geoengineering experiment since last September – including those who signed the HOME campaign’s open letter to the funders of SPICE asking for its cancellation – should feel heard. (The open letter, signed by more than 70 organizations from around the world, can be found here.)

SPICE’s PI cited both governance issues and potential conflict-of-interest as the principal reasons for cancelling the field trial – no argument here, though there are plenty more reasons to oppose SPICE. Namely, the entire geoengineering enterprise is dangerous, wrong-headed and counter-productive. What is certain, however, is that the cancellation of SPICE doesn’t signal the end of geoengineering or of field trials to test its feasibility. Other real-world experiments are already in the works. There will be lots of HOMEwork in the near future!

http://www.cbd.int/climate/geoengineering/review/

The Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy presents the Jack Nissenson Dialogue at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada

The Politics of Climate Change:
Climate Technofixes:  Rio +20 or Silent Spring -50

By Pat Mooney, ETC Group

Having the “proof of principle” that industry can change the climate, the folks who caused the problem are proposing new technological solutions. Unfortunately, there is no “proof of principle” that they can do it right. Pat Mooney, author and award-winning director of ETC Group will provide an overview of the politics behind some of the most critical issues facing the planet today: unsustainable agriculture, corporate concentration in the life industries and geoengineering.

Commentators:

Desirée McGraw (Co-founder, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project in Canada and Canadian delegate to the Rio Earth Summit)
William Marsden  (Author of Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change)
Patrick Bonin (Association québécoise de lutte contre la pollution atmosphérique (AQLPA))

Moderator:
Diana Bronson (Programme Manager, ETC Group)

Date: February 8, 2012
Time: 6 pm- 8 pm
Venue: Hall Building, 1455 de Maisonneuve West, Room H-767 Concordia University, Montréal, Canada

Organized in collaboration with ETC Group and the Institut des sciences de l’environnement de l’UQAM.

Bill Gates is one very confused billionaire philanthropist.

He understands global warming is a big problem — indeed, his 2012 Foundation Letter even frets about the  grave threat it poses to food security.  But he just doesn’t want to do very much now to stop it from happening (see Pro-geoengineering Bill Gates disses efficiency, “cute” solar, deployment — still doesn’t know how he got rich).

He love technofixes like geoengineering and, as we’ll see, genetically modified food.   Rather than investing in cost-effective emissions reduction strategies today or in renewable energy technologies that are rapidly moving down the cost curve, he explains that the reason invests so much in nuclear R&D is “The good news about nuclear is that there has hardly been any innovation.”  Seriously!

His Letter includes the ominous chart at the top, and he warns of the dire consequences of climate change:

Meanwhile, the threat of climate change is becoming clearer. Preliminary studies show that the rise in global temperature alone could reduce the productivity of the main crops by over 25 percent. Climate change will also increase the number of droughts and floods that can wipe out an entire season of crops. More and more people are raising familiar alarms about whether the world will be able to support itself in the future, as the population heads toward a projected 9.3 billion by 2050.

Strong stuff.

And yet, as the AP reported this week, the wealthiest of all Americans gets very prickly if you don’t wholeheartedly endorse his techno-fix adaptation-centric approach  to dealing with this oncoming disaster:

Bill Gates has a terse response to criticism that the high-tech solutions he advocates for world hunger are too expensive or bad for the environment:Countries can embrace modern seed technology and genetic modification or their citizens will starve….

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent about $2 billion in the past five years to fight poverty and hunger in Africa and Asia, and much of that money has gone toward improving agricultural productivity.Gates doesn’t apologize for his endorsement of modern agriculture or sidestep criticism of genetic modification. He told The Associated Press that he finds it ironic that most people who oppose genetic engineering in plant breeding live in rich nations that he believes are responsible for global climate change that will lead to more starvation and malnutrition for the poor.

Resistance to new technology is “again hurting the people who had nothing to do with climate change happening,” Gates said.

The real irony is that most people who diss  efficiency and renewables and aggressive greenhouse gas mitigation, like Gates, live in rich nations that are responsible for global climate change that will lead to more starvation and malnutrition for the poor.

Where is the story that says, “countries to embrace  existing technology to reduce emissions or their citizens will starve” or  resistance to aggressive low carbon technology deployment is “again hurting the people who had nothing to do with climate change happening”?

This is not a blog on genetic modification, so I’ll just quote the AP story:

Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Washington-based Center for Food Safety, said everyone wants to see things get better for hungry people, but genetically modified plants are more likely to make their developers rich than feed the poor. The seed is too expensive and has a high failure rate, he said. Better ways to increase yields would be increasing the fertility of soil by adding organic matter or combining plants growing in the same field to combat pests, he said.

The biggest problem with those alternatives, Freese said, is the same one that Gates cited in high-tech research: A lack of money for development.

I will say that while  you can make drought tolerant crops, I seriously doubt that you can make Dust-Bowl-tolerant crops — and so without mitigation, Gates’ efforts will likely  have only a marginal impact on reducing the utterly preventable catastrophe (see “Nature Publishes My Piece on Dust-Bowlification and the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security“).

I applaud Gates for warning people about the threat that climate change poses to  billions of people.  Here’s another chart his Letter has  on who will be harmed most by rising food prices:

But the fact is, as Oxfam and others have made clear, global warming is poised to make food vastly more expensive, which will be devastating to the world’s poor  know matter how much money Gates dumps into GM crops — see Oxfam Predicts Climate Change will Help Double Food Prices by 2030: “We Are Turning Abundance into Scarcity”:

From the UN Rio+20 preparatory meetings in New York, ETC Group today launches Who Will Control the Green Economy? The 60-page report connects the dots between the climate and oil crises, new technologies and corporate power. The report warns that the world’s largest companies are riding the coattails of the “Green Economy” while gearing up for their boldest coup to-date – not just by making strategic acquisitions and tapping new markets, but also by penetrating new industrial sectors. (english, spanish versions available, french soon!)

Get report and press releases HERE at ETC Group’s website.

Clive Hamilton | guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 December 2011 11.21 EST

Suspicious of the UN, resistant to regulation and leading inquiries – how has this group become the ‘go-to scientists’?

The contradictory and ambivalent recommendations of the report of the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative (SRMGI), published last week, reflect the emerging faultlines in the global debate overgeoengineering.

The global debate has been heavily dominated by a very small group of North American scientists actively engaged in geoengineering research. They are present in almost all of the expert deliberations, including SRMGI. They have been the leading advisers to parliamentary and congressional inquiries and their views will, in all likelihood, dominate the deliberations of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) as it grapples for the first time with the scientific and ethical tangle that is climate engineering. In sum, they have made themselves the “go to guys” on climate engineering.

The scientists in this group– dubbed the “geo-clique” by author Eli Kintisch – also allocate much of the funds to geoengineering research via a private trust, bring together young researchers from around the world to swap ideas under their auspices, and own patents and investments in geoengineering technologies. The latter is either a case of putting your money where your mouth is or a blatant conflict of interest.

Most importantly, they bring a distinctively American world view to geoengineering. They have the kind of faith in humanity’s ability to overcome threats and master the environment that defined the science-as-saviour culture of the United States in the post-war decades. While they are worried about the damage being done to the environment, they cannot see any intrinsic reason why, if we have the means, we would not take control of the planet as a whole.

The geo-clique are lobbying for a huge injection of public funds into geoengineering research, justified on the grounds that “the world” (read America in the era of the Tea Party) will never countenance the carbon abatement policies we so badly need.

They are suspicious of “the UN” and resist moves to regulate research and testing of geoengineering, insisting that “professional norms” are adequate, which is why, incredibly, the SRMGI could not collectively call for a moratorium on deployment. After the “recklessness” of the decision by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to move against ocean fertilisation experiments, one argued, we shouldn’t “encourage international bodies to go around declaring moratoria”.

Aware that very few members of the public have yet formed an opinion on geoengineering, or have even heard of it, the geo-clique is working at framing geoengineering positively. So they have attempted to make the acronym SRM stand not for “solar radiation management” but for “sunlight reflection methods” to avoid the sinister-sounding “radiation”.

In this effort they have been joined by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a conservative Washington non-profit, whose report last month rebranded geoengineering “climate remediation” so as to make sulphate aerosol injections into the stratosphere sound healthful. The geo-clique dominated that inquiry too.

Now that the Beltway is getting involved, the pressure is on for the United States to take control of the geoengineering agenda. While the subject was regarded as taboo only five years ago, the normalisation of geoengineering as a legitimate response to global warming is now proceeding rapidly. The next IPCC report will take a giant stride in that direction.

So everything is going to plan. Except that, on the fringes, counter views are starting to be heard. Even among scientists, I have noticed a marked difference in attitude to geoengineering in America and Europe. The Promethean dreams of the geo-clique – perhaps expressed most starkly by its sometime mentor, Pentagon “weaponeer” Lowell Wood, when he declared: “We’ve engineered every other environment we live in, why not the planet?” – are harder to defend in Europe.

In Europe, and especially Germany, geoengineering is treated with much more circumspection and nervousness. In short, the complexity and capriciousness of the Earth are accorded a much greater respect, and there is a historical reservoir of mistrust for the good intentions of humans intoxicated with technological power.

Let’s hope their nervousness does not keep them out of the debate. For as the world flounders in the mire of climate politics, one thing is certain: geoengineering is here to stay and the pressure to deploy schemes to regulate the planet as a whole will become extreme. Anyone with a modicum of foresight can see that the geopolitical stakes are immense.

• Clive Hamilton is professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra and the author of Requiem for a Species. He is a member of SRMGI.

original article at the Guardian

Posted: 12/02/2011 09:30:02 AM PST

See Guardian reporter Hanna Gersmann‘s story about it here

Also, check out ETC Group’s take on the report, below:

The deadline for comment in this initial peer review is December 9(there will be a second round in early 2012).  It would be very helpful if many NGOs, social movements and progressively minded academics, scientists and concerned citizens involved in the HOME campaign devoted a bit of time to reading this paper and forwarding their thoughts to the CBD.