Political Pragmatism and Geoengineering

Realpolitik is a German word dating back to the time of Otto van Bismarck referring to the conduct of statecraft on the basis of necessity, practicality and pragmatism rather than ethics or morality. The sole goal of realpolitik is to solve problems-----whatever the answer or the process that must be undertaken to solve a problem, then that is what should be done, no matter how Machiavellian it might be.

Admiral David Titley recently gave a talk arguing the US government should be sponsoring studies of geoengineering for reasons that amount to a pragmatic, realpolitik view of geoengineering and the climate change issue.

Admiral Titley thinks the political pressure to "do something" about global climate change may grow significantly in the future, and the government would be wise to study geoengineering options now so as to avoid doing the "wrong" kind of geoengineering in the future in response to political pressure.

 “When something bad happens the pressure to do something will be enormous. It will be enormous on the administration, whosever administration. And if we don’t have the research to say, ‘Okay .... here are the risks, this will truly make things worse’—if you don’t know that, you may do it because you need to do something, and that would be a really dangerous place to be.”

Admiral Titley also worries that other countries or perhaps a private corporation or a terrorist group might try to geoengineer the climate.

 “If a country or a non-country acts to intervene in the climate, the president’s going to turn around to his science advisor and his national security staff and say, ‘Should I ignore this? Should I slap them on the wrist? Or should I tell them unless you cease and desist within 48 hours the full weight of the United States is going to be on them? What is the risk to our citizens and our country?’ And if we don’t know because we haven’t done the research, that puts our intelligence community, the president’s science advisor, the mission agencies ... in a very tough situation.” 

Finally, Admiral Titley speculates about a rapidly developing climate crisis  so severe that would irreparably damage the world's economy or its ecosystem.  In such a case it would be wise to have a viable geoenginering program ready to roll out on and implement on a moments notice.

 “The other component is climate emergency.....God help that we don’t get there, but we don’t know. 

 Indeed.  God help us if global warming becomes so severe that we have a global climate emergency.  And if God won't help us, then geoengineering may be the only other option.