The expected departure of the USA from the failed Paris Accord offers hope for a shift to a new climate paradigm. Cutting emissions is a failed climate strategy, too small, slow, contested, expensive and difficult to have any effect on heat. Only direct climate cooling technologies such as solar geoengineering can make any rapid difference to global warming, providing prospects for safe, orderly, cheap, acceptable and effective cooling with multiple spillover benefits. A total paradigm shift can separate climate policy from its roots in left wing ideology and renewable energy cronyism. Climate science is settled but climate policy needs radical overhaul, placing albedo restoration as the first priority and providing public funding and governance on the basis of cooling return on investment. The UK Royal Society estimated in 2009 that sunlight reflection CROI is 1000 times better value for money than emission reduction. This extraordinary order of magnitude difference was true then and is true now. The domination of climate policy by renewable energy zealots has served to suppress this basic science, in a scandalous exercise of pure hypocrisy by those who say to 'follow the science'. I believe this argument should be attractive to Chris Wright, President Trump's Energy Secretary, as a way to replace Paris with a better climate policy.
The 1.5 and 2 degree targets were just round numbers chosen by technocrats to be managed by technocrats at the peak of mid 2010s technocratic power. It was just hubris infused with scientism all the way down. In the end technocrats always fail to live up to their promises, because human beings can’t plan the future and they can’t know what works a priori. The world is just too damn complicated!
Let 1000 flowers bloom and let’s see what technical solutions work. A few grants to get ideas off the ground can be fine, but not mass subsidization of any technology that can’t be competitive on its own.
The expected departure of the USA from the failed Paris Accord offers hope for a shift to a new climate paradigm. Cutting emissions is a failed climate strategy, too small, slow, contested, expensive and difficult to have any effect on heat. Only direct climate cooling technologies such as solar geoengineering can make any rapid difference to global warming, providing prospects for safe, orderly, cheap, acceptable and effective cooling with multiple spillover benefits. A total paradigm shift can separate climate policy from its roots in left wing ideology and renewable energy cronyism. Climate science is settled but climate policy needs radical overhaul, placing albedo restoration as the first priority and providing public funding and governance on the basis of cooling return on investment. The UK Royal Society estimated in 2009 that sunlight reflection CROI is 1000 times better value for money than emission reduction. This extraordinary order of magnitude difference was true then and is true now. The domination of climate policy by renewable energy zealots has served to suppress this basic science, in a scandalous exercise of pure hypocrisy by those who say to 'follow the science'. I believe this argument should be attractive to Chris Wright, President Trump's Energy Secretary, as a way to replace Paris with a better climate policy.
The 1.5 and 2 degree targets were just round numbers chosen by technocrats to be managed by technocrats at the peak of mid 2010s technocratic power. It was just hubris infused with scientism all the way down. In the end technocrats always fail to live up to their promises, because human beings can’t plan the future and they can’t know what works a priori. The world is just too damn complicated!
Let 1000 flowers bloom and let’s see what technical solutions work. A few grants to get ideas off the ground can be fine, but not mass subsidization of any technology that can’t be competitive on its own.