Time's Up - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 44

could help deplete the ozone layer. What about a shield placed in outer
space to lower the amount of sunlight hiting the earth? It would need
to be around 4.5 million square kilometers in size—and thus cost a huge
amount of money to build and maintain (perhaps as much as 6 percent
of the world's GNP, every year). Maybe puting white plastic sheeting
over various deserts and reflecting the sunlight back into space would
help. But doing so would prevent the circulation of dust, which has a vital
role in providing iron and phosphorous to other regions and in supply-
ing nutrients to plankton. What about placing that white reflective plastic
over a vast area of the ocean? The objections to that idea are fairly obvi-
ous: vast quantities of plastic would cut of sunlight to organisms in the
sea, would easily be transported by wind and storm, and could affect
coastal ecosystems if the plastic were blown ashore. 81 hese and other
suggestions speak more about our current desperation than about any
genuine atempt to address our dilemma.
Other suggestions seem quite sane. The leading climate scientist
Wallace Broecker has concluded that there is no realistic chance we'll be
able to replace fossil fuels with renewable sources in time. Accordingly, he
proposes that we fix the climate by withdrawing carbon dioxide directly
from the open air and injecting it deep into the earth. As I mentioned
in chapter two, Carbon Engineering is puting similar ideas to work and
is hoping to market its technology soon. But here again, there won't be
enough of a commercial incentive to do so on a sufficient scale until there
is a carbon tax (or untax)—until there is political action to make fossil
fuels more expensive. 82 Sound familiar? We need political action before
we get the new technology—and in this case, the technology is in a very
preliminary stage.
Other observers, seeing our dilemma, do not imagine we can find
a technological fix. They turn in a different direction, encouraging
us to adapt to the massive transformations that are coming our way.
Bill McKibben, for example, took a big step when he entitled his topic
Eaarth : in his view, we're no longer living on the planet Earth, for thanks
to climate change, we find ourselves on another planet, one we're not
used to at all. Earlier writers, like Al Gore or Monbiot, who discussed our
dilemma in 2006 and 2007, still had reason to be optimistic. McKibben,
writing in 2010, abandons the atempt to tell us how to avoid a dire fate.