In Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 blockbuster Snowpiercer, scientists release aerosols into the sky in a last-ditch attempt to stop global warming. However, the plan catastrophically backfires, plunging Earth into a new ice age and killing most life on the planet. When I first saw the film, I remember thinking: “Thank God no one would be crazy enough to try something like that in real life”.
I was wrong. Over the past six months, several governments and international organisations — including the White House, the EU, the UK’s DARPA-inspired research agency ARIA, the Climate Overshoot Commission, and various UN bodies — have all produced reports that cautiously open the door to that very same idea: releasing aerosols into the atmosphere in order to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface. The concept is known as solar engineering, or solar radiation modification (SRM), and it’s a specific type of geoengineering aimed at offsetting climate change by reflecting sunlight (“solar radiation”) back into space.
The idea of solar engineering is not new, but for a long time it was relegated to the fringes of the scientific community — and the realms of science fiction. However, as the very existence of these reports makes clear, that is no longer the case. The concept has been attracting more and more attention in recent years, largely due to the fact that the growing panic over climate change is allowing what what I call the climate power bloc — encompassing liberal-technocratic politicians, climate scientists, environmental NGOs, “green” philanthropists, and Silicon Valley “climate capitalists” — to normalise increasingly extreme techno-dystopian ideas.
Thomas Fazi 