Wait, am I reading @kdrum's mind or is he reading mine? At any rate, this is pretty close to my thinking on the political path, and to the long-term scenario I fear.https://jabberwocking.com/in-2040-we-will-collectively-decide-to-flood-the-atmosphere-with-aerosols/ …
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I'd only add — and this is something I took from "The Ministry For The Future" — that it's a mistake to extrapolate our current level of political apathy too far forward. At some point, some set of calamities will sharply change the reaction in specific countries.
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Geoengineering is one possible response, including countries going it alone. But so too is largescale eco-violence, either by state or non-state actors. And I'm persuaded that there could be financial crises to come, that would also change the politics here in unpredictable ways.
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But like
@kdrum, I think all of this will happen too late to keep temperate rise under 2 degrees, so we either need technological solutions — and we should pump gobsmacking amounts of money into trying to find them — or we're going to end up facing truly horrible choices.3 replies 3 retweets 66 likesShow this thread -
This is one reason I support seriously funding geoengineering research now. These are not solutions I want to use. But if we end up without better choices, I want to know as much as possible about them, and what could go wrong.
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Replying to @ezraklein @moskov
One serious concern I have about geoengineering is that unilateral actions are easy, but have geopolitical implications. As a hypothetical case, if US west-coast cloud seeding for crops causes a drought in China, I could imagine escalation to armed conflict.
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great point, but, just observing in your example, the way that the prevailing winds are (west to east) the more likely impact is China seeding clouds in Tibet and Xinjiang and starving the Indian subcontinent of water. it may be possible to achieve positive sum results however
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That makes sense - I definitely didn't try to research the example much. And yes, positive sum solutions are possible, and I suspect there are even pareto improving solutions that don't require redistribution - but without far more cooperation than is typical, we won't get them.
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yes, and very challenging to figure out in general. the initial solution that will evolve will probably be mainly bilateral agreements.
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