Page 264 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane. . . . Your thoughts [provide]
a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social
ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional “economists” con-
cerning the nature of the world we live in. . . . If the World Bank keeps you as vice
president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said . . . the
best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear. 59

“Insane,” “reductionist,” “ruthless,” “arrogant”—such modifiers suit most geoen-
gineering proposals quite well. Nordhaus wrote in 2007 that geoengineering
is, at present, “the only economically competitive technology to offset glo-
bal warming.” 60

a naval rifle System

Frosch called his proposal to bombard the stratosphere using an array of 350
naval guns “designer volcanic dust put up with Jules Verne methods” (figure
61
8.2). He envisioned each $1 million, 16-inch gun being able to fire 1 ton of
sulfate or aluminum oxide into the stratosphere about every ten minutes. Each
barrel would need replacement after 1,000 to 1,500 shots. Thus a single cannon
would have a useful life of less than two weeks, and a total of 300,000 cannon
would be needed for a forty-year program! The naval guns had been designed
in 1939 and were first put into service in 1943, so they would have to be updated.
The cost of ammunition for 400 million shots was estimated at $4 trillion, the
barrels would be $300 billion, the firing stations $200 billion, and the person-
nel costs $100 billion—for a total of $5 trillion over forty years. This system
could deliver dust to the stratosphere for about $14 a pound, and each pound
62
was expected to mitigate 45 tons of carbon emissions. Balloon delivery systems
were estimated to cost $36 a pound and sounding rockets, $45.
Frosch was aware that damaging side effects could result, such as strato-
spheric ozone destruction, widespread drought, or unacceptable atmospheric
haze, but he did not emphasize that. Instead, he reassured his readers that “the
rifle system appears to be inexpensive, to be relatively easily managed, and to
require few launch sites” (460). He concluded that “the rifles could be deployed
at sea or in military reservations where the noise of the shots and the fallback
of expended shells could be managed” (817–819). What Frosch forgot to take
into account was the lower tropospheric air pollution generated by the bom-
bardments. If, for example, each 650-pound explosive charge contained pure

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