Call it "Climate Repair"

Because “geoengineering” makes you sound like a megalomaniac

IYKYK

The field I’m interested in is usually brought to mind with a single word. But I refuse to use it. Because, it’s awful. A toxic brand. It’s s so ugly, it seems to have been invented by its opponents to malign it.

Except I have to use it. If I don’t, nobody knows what I’m talking about.

Sometimes I think the g-word itself is the reason the taboo on climate repair remains in force. The field needs a rebrand urgently.

The g-word drips with hubris. It makes you sound like a megalomaniac. Like a Bond villain sitting in a lair somewhere with tented hands planning to take over the world. Or like Mr. Burns, plotting to block the sun over Springfield. It’s a term so bad, you lose the argument the second it’s uttered.

Only a lunatic would even consider trying to engineer the whole world.

Some weak attempts to do better have been attempted. Only some of the words proposed to replace the g-word manage to be even worse: “Solar Geoengineering” sounds like you didn’t think engineering the world was quite enough and now you want to engineer the sun, too.

Some have thought the solution is to get more technical, so we get monstruosities like “Stratospheric aerosol injection”, which conjures up a demented image of a masive syringe injecting who knows what weird drug into the atmosphere.

“Stratospheric radiation management” is somehow even worse: just as a general marketing principle, putting the word “radiation” in the name of a thing you’re trying to sell is ill-judged.

How did sensible ideas get burdened with such spectacularly terrible branding?

Well, because the people who came up with these terms weren’t thinking in communications terms at all. These are all technical terms terms, descriptors developed by engineers, for engineers, and never intended for broader circulation.

Let out into the broader world, they do damage to the ideas they describe. They really need to go.

But what exactly is wrong with them? First, they’re all process terms, not outcome terms. They put the emphasis on the how, instead of focusing on what we want to achieve.

Nobody wants to “manage solar radiation” — that’s not the goal of the technique. It’s just a means to an end. The end state you’re trying to achieve is reestablishing the earth’s pre-industrial energy balance.

Climate Repair gets at this much more cleanly: it puts the spotlight on why it’s a good idea, which is just better marketing than spotlighting the how.

Tell people you’re proposing a technique to repair the climate, and they’ll start out at a conditional yes: everybody wants to repair the climate.

Tell them you want to engineer the globe and their starting point will be “ok, so this person is obviously crazy.”

Repair has much better connotations than engineering. You repair something you deeply care about, because you care about it. You take the trouble to repair things you’re emotionally engaged with it. You are attached to it, so you want it to be better. You engineer a solution to a problem with a kind of cold detachment that leaves no room for care, for the warm engagement with a loved object that repair implies.

But repair is also more honest because. If you break a treasured mug and then lovingly glue it back together, you’re left with a mug that carries the scars of its fall.

You can never re-establish the mug to its pristinem pre-fall state. All you can do is patch it up as best you can. And that’s a fair description of what climate repair techniques propose: they can’t really re-establish the pre-warming balance. The ocean will still be in trouble from acidification. General circulation patterns will not be quite like they had been before. The planet will still be bruised — just mended.

When you consider the volume of greenhouse gases we’ve emitted, you understand a return to a pre-industrial eden is out of the cards. We can’t turn back the clock. But we can repair the one planet we have. Everybody wants that. Or should want it. Let’s get to it.