Page 263 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

I don’t know why anybody should feel obligated to reduce carbon dioxide if
there are better ways to do it. When you start making deep cuts, you’re talk-
ing about spending some real money and changing the entire economy. I don’t
understand why we’re so casual about tinkering with the whole way people
live on the Earth, but not tinkering a little further with the way we influence
the environment. 55

Yale economist William Nordhaus, also a contributor to the National Acad-
emy study, used geoengineering scenarios in his dynamic integrated climate
economy (DICE) model to calculate the balance between economic growth (or
decline) and climate change. Defining geoengineering as “a hypothetical tech-
nology that provides costless mitigation of climate change” (emphasis added),
he came to the controversial conclusion that “geoengineering produces major
benefits, whereas emissions stabilization and climate stabilization are projected
to be worse than inaction.” At one point, he referred to the scale of his global
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economic projections as “mind-numbing,” but he could well have applied this
description to his overall conclusions regarding the potential for a geoengineer-
ing solution. Stephen Schneider later wrote: “As a member of that panel, I can
report that the very idea of including a chapter on geoengineering led to seri-
ous internal and external debates. Many participants (including myself ) were
worried that even the thought that we could offset some aspects of inadvertent
climate modification by deliberate modification schemes could be used as an
excuse to continue polluting.” In fact, it was precisely in this way—as an alter-
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native to reducing emissions—that geoengineering discussions found their way
into the twenty-first century.
Such sentiments echoed the dismal opinions of economists at the time on
pollution solutions. In 1991, for example, World Bank economist Lawrence
Summers (who later resigned as president of Harvard University following a
no-confidence vote of the faculty and now directs the White House’s National
Economic Council) wrote, in what he assumed would remain a private, and what
he later deemed a sarcastic, memo: “Shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging
MoRE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed coun-
tries]. . . . I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in
the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to the fact that . . .
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under populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted.” The outrage
generated when this memo became public in 1992, just before the first Earth
Summit in Rio de Janeiro, motivated José Lutzenberger, Brazil’s secretary of the
environment, to respond to Summers:

246 | tHe Climate enGineerS