Earthmasters: Playing God with the climate, by Clive Hamilton

Review by Robert Tulip: Amazon Link http://www.amazon.com/review/R1Y4HZY73Z8620

Geoengineering is the plan to stabilise the planetary climate by using technology to capture CO2 and reflect sunlight. Geoengineering is receiving serious consideration as a way to slow or even reverse global warming, in response to the failure of emission reduction as an adequate strategy. If technological solutions such as large scale algae production can be deployed to mine more CO2 from the air than we emit, the risk of catastrophic climate change would be prevented. While such new technology is developed, the geoengineering debate has gained momentum from scientific evidence that the global climate emergency is real and urgent. Geoengineers say the melting of the polar ice cap requires immediate prevention by reducing the amount of sunlight falling on the Arctic, the region of the world where climate change is worst.

Stepping into this complex field, a new book by Professor Clive Hamilton of Australia's Charles Sturt University seeks to describe the political and technical issues at play. Well known in Australia over the last decades as founder of The Australia Institute, Dr Hamilton comes from an unabashed left wing moral perspective. He is perhaps best known for his previous book Affluenza, imaginatively linking affluence and influenza in order to describe wealth as morally evil. A similar moral agenda informs his latest book, Earth Masters - Playing God with the Climate.

Earth Masters provides a useful short overview of geoengineering science, set within an overt polemical effort to spread alarm about the potential of science to influence the climate through any channels other than United Nations agreements on CO2 emission reduction. Painting the debate as a titanic contest between `Prometheans' in the right corner, advocating technological progress, and what he terms `Soterians' in the left corner, promoting "safety, preservation and deliverance," Hamilton casts moral opprobrium against geoengineering. He derides what he calls "the technofix" represented by Promethean climate management technology. Readers will recall that Prometheus was the Titan who Greek myth says taught the use of fire to mankind, and who as a result suffered the eternal torment of having an eagle eat his liver every day, chained by Zeus to the top of Mount Kazbek in the Caucasus. Apparently, the Promethean technofix is "deeply conformable with existing structures of power and a society based on continued consumerism. The slippery slope to the technofix promises a substitute for the slippery slope to 'revolution'" (p175). And this is bad.

This positive mention of revolution helps us to understand Hamilton's motives, which he explains as the critique of "the grand narrative of the Enlightenment" (p207) of progress through ingenuity. It therefore comes as no surprise that he devotes critical attention to the strategic vision of American national security advocates who see climate management as a viable option, or that he assumes the reader will share his conspiratorial assumption that such interests cannot make a worthwhile contribution. But then his analysis betrays some confusion, as he cites conservative Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe as providing a religious critique of the idea that we can play God with the climate (p206), which is just what Clive's book aims to do. Do we see here in practice what Clive cites (p209) as a Chinese proverb, that things revert to their opposite when taken to extremes?

One illustration of Hamilton's core goal of politicising the issue of geoengineering is his comparison between methods to reduce incoming solar radiation and the introduction of the cane toad pest into Australia. Such colourful images are designed to encourage the reader to be very suspicious of any claims that ingenuity could engineer climate stability in a way to preserve economic growth. But then perhaps such suspicion is to be expected, given that Clive had argued in Affluenza that consumer wealth is a source of psychological disorder that can only be remedied by an alternative political philosophy.

His political commitments become more apparent in his surprising expression of wistful regret at the demise of the Soviet Union (p127). In a rather unusual moral inversion that does not quite do the work he asks of it, Hamilton compares emissions reduction to the failed perestroika restructuring policy of Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR, while comparing geoengineering to the argument that the West won the Cold War.

Perhaps this strategic analysis of the Cold War shows the most valuable contribution of Earth Masters, in the window it provides into the thinking of prominent political activists regarding climate change. It seems climate policy is seen as the great opportunity for the left to repudiate the victory of the right in the Cold War. Through centralised UN regulation, a proto-world government can use climate as a stalking horse for its social engineering goals of social equality. It really is no wonder that normal people react to this `neo-communist' agenda with such mistrust. Hamilton invites us into the frame of his moral universe, where spraying particles into the stratosphere to protect the climate is like nuclear weapon testing, where practical strategies for economic growth in partnership between the public and private sectors are demonised, and where the benevolent on-the-spot guidance of the great leaders of the United Nations provides a shining path to a utopia of emissions reduction.

His case boils down to the view that potential unforseen effects mean the world should severely restrict (if not ban) all research into practical methods for global climate management, because such research threatens to derail UN leadership on emission reduction, and because "even talking about geoengineering will further delay mitigation." (p147) He says "there is no sense of urgency about the need to put in place regulatory mechanisms" (p145), presumably because he thinks the melting of the Arctic is not an urgent problem. The reader is left wondering if Clive's main agenda is climate safety or social revolution. If the latter, we can more easily understand his negative comments about the desire of conservative people to sustain existing the social system.

What I found perplexing in Earth Masters was Hamilton's failure to analyse the alternatives in any evidence-based quantitative way. Emissions now stand at about 32 gigatonnes per year and rising. Reducing emissions would mean the CO2 concentration would continue to increase. As Bjorn Lomborg argues, emission reduction can only produce a relatively short delay of a few years in the arrival of catastrophic CO2 level. Climate stability therefore requires large scale cost effective methods to remove CO2 from the air. That means geoengineering. The logic is simple, except to people who insist on seeing the debate in terms of `playing God'.

Hamilton does not engage with the evidence that emission reduction is insufficient to manage climate change. Nor does he address the suggestion that finding ways to reflect sunlight is a genuine emergency. Melting of the Arctic will cause bad feedback loops, and has already done so with Hurricane Sandy. It is prudent and precautionary to research and implement short term strategies to prevent such disasters while longer term methods to achieve climate security are developed. But Hamilton's attitude to evidence is summed up by his assertion that cost-benefit analysis is morally corrupt according to his intuitive metaphysical order (pp 117, 178, 185). His subtitle, Playing God with the climate, means that Clive accuses geoengineers of prioritising logic and evidence over his pious "feeling for the role of the Sun as a symbol of powers beyond the reach of mortals." (p179) While many will have sympathy for this reverential religious wonder at the power of the sun, its place in scientific analysis is not clear.

Just to correct one small error, Hamilton calls it a "paramount fact that few ...have yet grasped - the carbon dioxide we are putting into the atmosphere will persist for thousands of years." (p184) This `fact' is not true. Technology can mine the atmosphere as a resource to convert carbon into useful products such as fuel, food, fertilizer and fabric. Algae farms on one per cent of the world ocean surface would be more than enough to rapidly pushing the CO2 level back down to the safe value of 280 ppm. Clive's dismal funk of doomsday eco-pessimism is unjustified, blinding him to the great optimistic potential for growth, peace, stability and progress provided by industrial technology.

Science and technology have created the abundant wealth and freedom enjoyed by modern civilization. Science also shares the responsibility to enable us to manage the complex global ecological impacts of humanity. Clive Hamilton speaks to technophobes who wish for a simpler world and are attracted more by emotion than analysis.
Dr Hamilton has actually provided a gift for geoengineers, and for their conservative capitalist backers, by illustrating the thinking of left wing political opponents in a way that will enable constructive dialogue and progress. Earth Masters provides useful insight into the incoherence of arguments against geoengineering. This debate illustrates the need for geoengineering to move into serious public discussion, in full awareness of the risks and the need for quick and transparent implementation with clear and simple public explanation.

Corporate investment from energy and extractive industries should be mobilised to research and develop geoengineering technology. The planetary emergency of rising CO2 levels requires a global climate security project modelled on the USA's successful Manhattan and Apollo projects. Immediate steps to use solar radiation management to protect the Arctic from melting are required, together with longer term research and development of profitable commercial methods to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.