The deep roots of the geoengineering taboo

People see climate chaos as divine retribution for the sin of polluting the atmosphere

The consensus view on climate, as of 2024, goes something like this: we’re facing a civilization-ending catastrophe and the only way to avert it is to take net emissions down to zero quickly.

Why the debate should be so narrow isn’t immediately obvious. We know Net Zero this century would be ruinously expensive, politically poisonous, technologically improbable, and agonizingly slow. And we have known for decades that we could reverse global warming comparatively cheaply and quickly if we wanted to.  

A different climate debate is imaginable. Given the enormous stakes, you’d think people would be eager to explore those alternatives. 

You’d think wrong. 

International organizations refuse to talk about alternative techniques. Politicians just roll their eyes.

When people do make the case against climate intervention explicitly, the arguments they put forward are shockingly flimsy: hand-wavy concerns about unforeseen consequences, the tired old canard about “playing God”, half-baked concerns about moral hazard. 

None of these arguments hold up when you think about them deeply. 

But they don’t think about them deeply. 

Their gut is emphatic; they don’t see much reason to question it. 

Psychologists know this style of cognition well: they’ve spent decades studying it. They call it motivated reasoning. That’s when you start at the end, with a pre-established conclusion, and then look around for rationalizations to support it. 

Jonathan Haidt memorably described this as the press secretary model of reason: intuition is the boss, reason is the press flak concerned only to make the boss look good.

Arguments against climate intervention usually reek of motivated reasoning. They’re seldom more than paper-thin post-hoc justifications of moral intuitions. It does no good to argue against such rationalizations. You can’t reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.

But that just pushes the question one step back: where does this strong moral intuition come from? How come so many people feel these climate repair techniques are dangerous and wrong?

I’ve thought about this question a lot. 

In part, it’s a branding problem. “Geoengineering” is a terrible label. It drips with hubris. It makes you sound like a Bond villain, someone crazy enough to think you can engineer the whole planet. The G-word is a thought-ending cliché — that’s why I usually say “climate repair” instead.

The awfulness of the G-word is not the whole story, though. People find the idea of cooling the earth by messing with the atmosphere upsetting: they recoil not just at the term, but at what the term denotes.

But why?

Because climate change is not just a technical problem about the energy balance of the atmosphere. Instead, it’s increasingly seen in moral and even religious terms: as a consequence of the breakdown in the relationship between people and nature.

Overconsumption, overdevelopment, greed. These are the drivers of the climate crisis in the popular imagination. We’re talking about sins here. Sins that court retribution from a deified nature.

It’s easy to forget pollution is originally a religious concept: to pollute is to defile a holy thing, to sully it through contact with what is unclean. It’s telling that the same word got recycled into the environmental sphere.

The moral order is disturbed when we pollute the sacred with the profane. Climate chaos is experienced as punishment: unpleasant, yes, but necessary to reestablish the meta-cosmic order. We have tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge of affluence; expulsion from the Garden of Eden follows as a matter of course.

What climate activists seek is redemption. But redemption requires that we stop sinning first. This makes climate repair an outrage: a call for sidestepping divine retribution without renouncing our sinful ways. Calls for climate repair feel like calls to sever the moral link between sin and divine retribution.

We’re the indulgence sellers of the 21st century.

This is why the taboo against geoengineering persists. And it really is a taboo: a religious prohibition against questioning the basic moral order of the universe.

Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, in particular, will find it very hard going in this cultural context. Faced with a crisis caused by pollution, it takes a special kind of moral torpor to argue we can get out of it by dumping tons and tons of sulfuric acid into the upper atmosphere. The science of it is beside the point. Nobody is going to sit still as you explain the radiative forcing effects of stratospheric sulfur. It sounds like saying we can drink our way out of alcoholism.

Marine Cloud Brightening has, I think, an easier path simply because it relies on salt: a substance so everyday, so banal, it’s hard to see it as an agent of defilement. The obstacles are still serious, the moral intuition to be overcome is still strong.

But maybe there’s a chance. 

What matters most, I think, is realizing that the reflex against climate repair is not grounded in technical reasoning. Never has been.  Its roots go much deeper than that.

And look, I don’t know how to disarm that reflex. I wish I did. Because I’m pretty sure that Net Zero won’t work. As a matter of survival, we’re going to end up having to do something drastic to repair the climate. So we’d better win this argument. And step one is taking the measure of what we’re up against.