Charles C. Mann: evaluation

Transcript context

…And are you a geoengineering optimist, given uncertainty it may be hard to experiment with? And also the notion that countries may not agree. We might want to do one kind of geoengineering, but Russia will have other ideas because it’s a colder country. Can that work? I think you’ve hit on, to me, the big issue. I think the social issues in almost all these cases are much harder to solve than the technical issues. Geoengineering is a science in its total infancy, and right now the leading technology is solar radiation management, as they call it, SRM, which basically means sprinkling shiny, little, tiny, shiny particles into the air and reflecting back the sunlight. But there’s lots of other kinds that are at least potentially possible. So it’s difficult for me to believe that all of them will fail to prove. I’m not sure about the institutional frameworks because there is the problem of the greenfinger, as it’s called, which is that geoengineering is sufficiently cheap because all you need is a bunch of airplanes that an eccentric, rich person . . . It may be too cheap. [laughter]…

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