Holly Jean Buck

We are just now beginning to reckon with climate change itself. The cognitive dissonance created by the coffin in the hipster food market, or the crowd in the park appearing like fanatics while reciting lines from scientific assessment reports, illustrates what it’s like to be living at the moment of the shift. Here we are again, at the same point where we began this book: the shift, desperation point, where a critical mass of people realizes just how bad climate change will be, and how late we are to address it.
The desperation point could be used as a moment of exploitation, as in the logic of the “shock doctrine” that Naomi Klein traces in her work; it could take form as a crisis that consolidates power elsewhere. But it could also be a moment of reckoning, of taking account. “Accountability” first meant taking account, counting—it’s linked with reckoning, etymologically. Writer and organizer Clare O’Connor writes about how at first, “accountability” had overtones of reckoning with God.1 But during the eighteenth century, the term took on more positivist tones around sharing and evaluating; giving an account of something. Even today, though, “accountability” still conveys a moral sense.
Many critical thinkers perceive geoengineering as something that avoids accountability—a workaround for reckoning with not only the thermodynamics of climate change, but also their deeper implications and causes. As Kyle Whyte explains, colonial domination continues to be the problem that generates climate risks, to a large but not exclusive extent. Yet, Whyte observes, “geoengineering discourses isolate geoengineering as a topic and only add in colonialism, capitalist exploitation, imperialism and other forms of domination later as governance challenges or stakeholders’ values or views that must be understood and weighed.”2 When it comes to geoengineering, scholars have thought about compensation for loss and damage; about transparency in research and decision making. But it’s this narrative of giving an account, and moral sense of accountability for climate change itself, that are still missing, censored out, regarded as someone else’s job.
Can there be a way of approaching geoengineering that considers the root causes of ecological degradation, and that weaves in accountability, reckoning, and reparation?

Some of the techniques I’ve discussed in this book could be appropriated for the ends of reparation ecology, or for making the Anthropocene shorter—if we fully acknowledge the current situation, beyond just climate. Call it carbon removal, drawdown, regeneration, replenishment—it could shorten this dark time. If solar geoengineering is used—though I hope we can retire both the term and the idea—it, too, should be put in the service of this larger aim. Far from being a quick or easy “fix,” climate restoration is an idea that is not just technologically optimistic, but also radically socially optimistic, for it implies that we could chart our way through this mess and reconstitute a climate that is safe for people to grow regenerative food and live healthy lives. The kind of lives many progressives imagine—where we are gardening, living in reasonably sized and energy-efficient homes, riding our bicycles, feeling healthy, and healing our relationships with each other and with other forms of life—are more likely to be possible at the end of the century, for our descendants, if we pursue multiple methods of carbon removal.
We need more thought experiments into radical adaptation, as well as new ideas for carbon removal—whether that means engineering glaciers, putting biochar into roadways, robotically farming kelp, turning carbon into rock beneath the earth, or other approaches yet to be discovered. We need creativity, both technologically and socially; to think beyond the boxes of capitalist economics, on one hand, and binary formulations, on the other. What other bold ideas might be out there? What forms of social organization will help them blossom? People will accuse new ideas involving technology of planting false hopes. But the hope doesn’t inhere in the technology—it inheres in the people who would craft it: the workers, designers, collaborators, educators, engineers, cultural producers, farmers, and others. In the long term, they are the place to source hope—not in technology. Climate is a long game. The work of shaping these practices and technologies, and what comes after geoengineering, will also be long.

People often ask me, “What do you really think about solar geoengineering?” I think it should be avoided, and at the very minimum be treated with great care. It’s not yet a “thing”; it’s still a notion, and we understand so little about it. There is a lot more research to be done. I think this research should be done, because the risks of climate change are so great. But I’m concerned that this research will be taken from the hands of the scientists who conduct it, and used or implemented by incompetent politicians or malicious regimes.
I also think that carbon removal technology should be pursued vigorously—and that without it, the push for solar geoengineering may be stronger. But I think carbon removal requires strong public advocacy and demand if it is to succeed at scale. This public support implies a tremendous shift in perception, and in values. It’s not simply an engineering or infrastructure issue. Many of the new climate action groups, including Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movement, and the Climate Mobilization, among others, have expressed support for carbon drawdown. For instance, the Sunrise Movement currently calls for “funding massive investment in the drawdown of greenhouse gases” as part of its Green New Deal platform. Drawdown was part of Extinction Rebellion’s demands, too, if sporadically. It is my hope that activist groups who grasp the climate situation can advocate for drawdown and help carbon removal become a reality, shaping it in ways that benefit rather than hurt communities around the world.