The UK Government’s new DARPA style research agency–Advanced Research and Innovation Agency, ARIA–today announced 21 research projects, costing the British tax-payer £57 million, aimed at developing technologies to ‘cool the climate’, so-called solar geoengineering. I have been studying and writing about these speculative technologies for many years, see for example my 2014 book ‘Can Science Fix Climate Change? The Case Against Climate Engineering‘, this co-authored analysis from 2015, ‘Climate emergencies do not justify engineering the climate‘, and this recent commentary in Nature Climate Change.
£57m is a huge amount of tax-payers money to be spent on this ragbag assortment of speculative technologies intended to manipulate the Earth’s climate. This is because these technologies will always remain unproven in the real world until they are deployed at scale, at which point it will be too late to remedy any harms. Just because such technologies ‘work’ in a model, or at a micro-scale in the lab or in the sky, does not mean they will cool climate safely in the real world, without unwanted side-effects. There is no possible way that the research funded by ARIA can demonstrate that the technologies are safe, successful or reversible. The UK Government is leading the world down ‘the slippery slope’ towards eventual dangerous large-scale deployment of solar geoengineering technologies. This announcement is good for climate scientists and environmental engineers who need more money for their labs, but it is not good for either people or planet, and nor does it offer value for money to the British tax-payer, each of whom is being called on to contribute £1.50 for this venture.
Climate change is not well framed as a ‘crisis’ or an ‘emergency’ that demands ‘moonshot’ technologies like this; it is not like an approaching asteroid, as allegorized, for example, in the movie ‘Don’t Look Up’. Climate change will not be arrested, nor its challenges managed, through one-off breakthrough technologies that this ARIA programme is trying to incubate. This is public money that would be far better invested in enhancing technologies to reduce dependence on fossil fuels or else to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in permament stores.
I am a foundation signatory to the 2021 international Solar Geoengineering Non-Use Agreement.
