Speaker
Description
The past decade has seen growing interest in climate engineering as less of a dubious last resort than a reasonable supplement to emissions reduction. This interest finds wide expression—in high-level reports, massive capital investments, best-selling novels, and scholarship that urges context upon engineering promises (cf. “transboundary effects,” “moral hazard). It seems the question is no longer “whether” but “how” climate engineering should happen. What becomes of scientific inquiry when its task is not putative description but righteous intervention at the whole earth-scale? Why, how, and for whom is climate engineering becoming a normal thing to want to do? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explains climate engineering as planetary salvage—whereby the presumed destructiveness of planetary forces acts as the warrant for their reinvention. Key to this style of reasoning, it argues, is conjecture about ostensibly decisive “gaps” (e.g., between research and deployment, measurement and accountability, nature- and technology-based solutions).
