WASHINGTON — The idea of artificially cooling the planet to
blunt climate change — in effect, blocking sunlight before it can warm the
atmosphere — got a boost on Thursday when an influential scientific body urged
the United States government to spend at least $100 million to research the
technology.
اضافة اعلان
That technology, often called solar geoengineering, entails
reflecting more of the sun’s energy back into space through techniques that
include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere. In a new report, the National
Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said that governments urgently
need to know whether solar geoengineering could work and what the side effects
might be.
“Solar geoengineering is not a substitute for
decarbonizing,” said Chris Field, director of the Woods Institute for the
Environment at Stanford University and head of the committee that produced the
report, referring to the need to emit less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere. Still, he said, technology to reflect sunlight
“deserves substantial funding, and it should be researched as rapidly and effectively
as possible.”
The report acknowledged the risks that have made
geoengineering one of the most contentious issues in climate policy. Those
risks include upsetting regional weather patterns in potentially devastating
ways, for example by changing the behavior of the monsoon in South Asia;
relaxing public pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and even creating
an “unacceptable risk of catastrophically rapid warming” if governments started
reflecting sunlight for a period of time, and then later stopped.
But the authors argue that greenhouse gas emissions are not
falling quickly enough to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, which means
the world must begin to examine other options. Evidence for or against solar
geoengineering, they found, “could have profound value” in guiding decisions
about whether to deploy it.
That includes evidence about what the authors called the
social risks: For example, if research showed that the side effects would be
concentrated in poorer nations, Field said, it could be grounds not to pursue
the technology, even if it benefited the world as a whole.
The report also argued that by publicly funding
geoengineering research, the United States could ensure that the work is
transparent and accountable to the public, with clear rules about when and how
to test the technology.
Some critics said those safeguards weren’t enough.
The steps urged in the report to protect the interests of
poorer countries — for example, accounting for farmers in South Asia whose
lives could be upended by changes in rain patterns — could fall away once the
research begins, according to Prakash Kashwan, a professor of political science
at the University of Connecticut.
“Once these kinds of projects get into the political
process, the scientists who are adding all of these qualities, and all of these
cautionary notes, aren’t in control,” Kashwan said.
Jennie Stephens, director of the School of Public Policy and
Urban Affairs at Northeastern University, said that geoengineering research
takes money and attention from the core problem, which is cutting emissions and
helping vulnerable communities cope with the climate disruptions that are
already happening.
“We need to double down on bigger transformative changes,”
Stephens said. “That’s where the investment needs to be.”
Solar geoengineering has bipartisan support in Congress,
which in late 2019 gave the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration $4
million to research the technology.
“America needs to be on the cutting edge of climate research,”
Representative John Curtis, a Republican from Utah, said in a statement. “More knowledge is
always better.”
The calculation could be more difficult for President Joe
Biden, who has tried to gain the support of the party’s progressive wing, some
of whom are skeptical about geoengineering. Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent Democrat from Vermont, has
called it a “false solution,” grouping it with nuclear power or capturing
carbon dioxide and burying it underground.
A White House spokesman, Vedant Patel, referred a request
for comment on the report to the three federal science agencies that funded the
report.
Tylar Greene, a spokeswoman for NASA, which helped fund the
report, said in a statement that “we look forward to reviewing the report,
examining recommendations, and exploring how NASA and its research community
can support this effort.”
Ko Barrett, deputy assistant administrator at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which also helped fund the
report, said in a statement that the agency looked forward to “carefully
reviewing” it. The Department of Energy, another funder, didn’t respond to a
request for comment.
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