Pollution is Sin; Geoengineering is Heresy

It's not science that's stopping us from repairing the climate.

If we really saw global warming as an existential risk, we would reverse it.

I don’t mean that in the usual, grinding, multi-decade, tens-of-trillions-of-dollars way. I mean we could set the global mean temperature back to 1750 levels this decade. 

We know how to do it. We have the technology. It would cost next to nothing. 

The planes would have to fly around twice as high as commercial airliners, but we’ve had planes that can do that since the 1950s. The aerosols they’d deploy are plentiful, safe and cheap. The plan has been tested: we ran a planetary-scale field trial in 1991, we know for a fact it will work. The cost would be trivial: less than less than a tenth of what the U.S. Federal Government spends on tenant-based rental assistance.

If the people calling global warming an existential threat had the courage of their convictions, they’d be lining up behind this plan.

And yet, Stratospheric Aerosol Injection is firmly off the climate agenda.

Nobody at the UN Climate Change conference in Azerbaijan is talking about it. No major donor is considering it, no government is working on it. It’s all a bit of a specialist interest: fodder for speculative fiction or substacks nobody reads.

That, when you think about it, may be the single strangest thing about climate catastrophism. 

We’re told this thing will kill us. That we must make enormous, society-shaking, democracy-endangering sacrifices to stop it. But if you then say “wow, that seems hard, here’s this other, radically cheaper and much quicker alternative,” you’ll be told we must not even talk about that: it’s too dangerous. 

Too dangerous compared to what? 

Too dangerous compared to the thing that will definitely kill us? 

Something obviously doesn’t add up here.

The ongoing taboo against climate repair is a bright flashing sign that there’s something profoundly odd about catastrophist climate orthodoxy.

If you saw a person thrashing around a pond screaming that they were drowning while refusing to acknowledge the lifesaver floating within easy reach, you’d quite naturally conclude that they were either stark-raving mad or putting on a bit of an act. 

Yet plenty of climate advocates are perfectly rational, expensively-educated, high-status members of the most sophisticated, successful societies in the world. Whatever they may be, they’re not mad. 

Naturally, conservatives tend to see climate catastrophism as a bit of act: thin cover for an anti-capitalist agenda that has nothing to do with climate, really. There’s clearly something to that — a good chunk of the climate left and the degrowth movement are fairly explicit about it. But putting it like this misunderstands their commitment, and mischaracterizes the movement. 

Climate activists aren’t mad, and they’re also not play acting. They hold their beliefs passionately and, as they see it, earnestly. It’s just that they plainly don’t believe them in quite the same sense that a person being chased by a bear believes that they should run.

In Climate Change Isn’t Everything, Mike Hulme describes their system of beliefs as an ideology, which he calls “climatism.” Hulme does well to identify its totalizing tendencies — the way climate change is invoked to explain more and more, and the way it organizes its followers moral outlook on the world. There’s also something to that also, but not enough.

Catastrophism’s appeal rests on its moral clarity. Though it purports to rest on science, its essence is not scientific. It’s moral. Its tenets are simple: Nature is good. The desecration of nature is evil. Climate change isn’t mainly a question of thermodynamics, it’s a question of good and evil. Climate chaos is just desserts. The planet is punishing us for the evil we are doing to it. To stop the effect, you must stop the cause.

This is the reason the mainstream climate movement won’t even acknowledge climate repair as a possibility. Proposing that we undo the damage we’ve done to the atmosphere by adding more weird substances to it scans as a kind of non-sense: like trying to fuck your way to chastity.

Breaking the link between crime and punishment offends us morally. Breaking the link between sin and divine retribution offends us on a religious level.

Because climate catastrophism is, when you get down to it:, a religious view of the world.

Inevitably, given its provenance, it mimics the structures of Christian belief, with pollution playing the part of Original Sin.

We are born with it: at our birth, we inherit responsibility a long history of pollution. And we pollute just by existing. We can’t help but pollute, in just the same way even a good Christian can’t help but sin. Everything about the way our lives are set up is polluting. We carry this grave moral fault with us at all times, and try as we might to expiate it, we just can’t.

Christianity at least came equipped with some hope of redemption: we may not deserve absolution for original sin, but God can freely offer it to us. The concept of grace is just absent from climatist dogma. So is that of foregiveness. Our only recourse is to stop sinning, only we can’t stop sinning. So we suffer.

We live, on earth, in the hell of climate chaos we collectively deserve for our sin of pollution. Our punishment is metacosmically just: trying to sidestep it through some two-bit magic trick like stratospheric aerosol injection just compounds our sin.

Climate orthodoxy cannot make room for climate repair because climate repair disturbs the moral order of its imagined universe. It breaks the link between human sin and divine retribution. This, I think, is why climate activists by and large refuse to even discuss it: the notion of undoing the damage from one kind of pollution with another kind of pollution is somehow worse than wrong: it’s heretical. 

The best reason to fight climate catastrophism, in my book, is that it’s become an obstacle to our most promising responses to climate change.