High-Tech Climate Fixes Come With Some Tricky Moral Choices / Some observers say high-tech climate fixes are a moral imperative. Others say they are a moral hazard #GlobalCarbonFeeAndDividendPetition

4 comments

1. The human grieving process is painfully slow! We’ve just got to let go of the way things are and accept that everything must change, the sooner the better.

   We’re all at different stages of grieving; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, or acceptance. I feel like we’re decades from universal acceptance and any real change. A scary number of people are stuck on denial… still. At least this article falls into the bargaining category – half way there!

2. Looking at the fraudulent financialised fiasco of offsets, and I can only imagine that geoengineering given the slightest opportunity would be deployed in a similar way by fossil fuel users: to create an illusion of a social licence for business as usual “*just for a little while longer, to give us time to transform because it’s super hard*”.

   See also carbon capture & storage, brown hydrogen and gas as a “transition fuel”.

   We might eventually need to do forms of geoengineering, but for now, like offsets, it’s the worst most insidious form of greenwashing.

3. The biggest problems will be unintended consequences. So far the recent tech waves have mostly hurt the environment. Huge data farms for cloud and AI are not good as they create massive demand for energy. Proof of work crypto also is very harmful to the environment.

   Technology is good for many things… but as to the climate and environment it tends to be harmful (though obviously there are exceptions to this such as green energy tech etc.).

4. These are smoke screens from our fossil fuel friends to convince us to let them continue destroying the planet because miracles technologies will come and clean up our mess for us. It’s total BS, nothing will ever come close to scale, and some are downright insanely dangerous.