Lead author of a new
paper, S. Matthew Liao, has something to
say.
Even as he says the starting point of this paper is the anthropogenic cause of climate change,
well, ok, of global warming, his realization that man should be able to
"mitigate", with his intellect and will, with a bit of voluntary
"re-engineering", and not by Big Government autocratic push for "change" (read: consensus), is what we have seen and said long before (maybe not so much about the re-engineering thing though).
Nevertheless, any modifications to the body as to the extent of human re-engineering may have serious ethical repercussions that need looking into more deeply. It would seem that they know that they are treading on shaky if not very sensitive ground.
Taking a look at this from the perspective of deep ecology---is
there something to be said for the idea that because climate change is
human caused, that humans ought to be the ones that change to mitigate
it---that somehow we ought to bear the cost to fix this?
Liao:
That was actually one of the ideas that motivated us to write this
paper, the idea that we caused anthropogenic climate change, and so
perhaps we ought to bear some of the costs required to address it. But
having said that, we also want to make this attractive to people---we
don't want this to be a zero sum game where it's just a cost that we
have to bear. Many of the solutions we propose might actually be quite
desirable to people, particularly the meat patch. I recently gave a talk
about this paper at Yale and there was a man in the audience who worked
for a pharmaceuticals company; he seemed to think there might be a huge
market for modifications like this.
Read the rest of the interview
here or from the source
here.
More from the interview:
Judging from your paper, you seem skeptical about current
efforts to mitigate climate change, including market based solutions
like carbon pricing or even more radical solutions like geoengineering.
Why is that?
Liao: It's not
that I don't think that some of those solutions could succeed under the
right conditions; it's more that I think that they might turn out to be
inadequate, or in some cases too risky. Take market solutions---so far
it seems like it's pretty difficult to orchestrate workable
international agreements to affect international emissions trading. The
Kyoto Protocol, for instance, has not produced demonstrable reductions
in global emissions, and in any event demand for petrol and for
electricity seems to be pretty inelastic. And so it's questionable
whether carbon taxation alone can deliver the kind of reduction that we
need to really take on climate change.
With
respect to geoengineering, the worry is that it's just too risky---many
of the technologies involved have never been attempted on such a large
scale, and so you have to worry that by implementing these techniques we
could endanger ourselves or future generations. For example it's been
suggested that we could alter the reflectivity of the atmosphere using
sulfate aerosol so as to turn away a portion of the sun's heat, but it
could be that doing so would destroy the ozone layer, which would
obviously be problematic. Others have argued that we ought to fertilize
the ocean with iron, because doing so might encourage a massive bloom of
carbon-sucking plankton. But doing so could potentially render the
ocean inhospitable to fish, which would obviously also be quite
problematic.
