By David Keith | August 5, 2024
Good journalism builds stories out of facts. And good stories need characters.
The NY Times recognized the growing significance of debates about solar geoengineering and commissioned a story that humanized the topic by building it around a character, me.
David Gelles’ article is fair, but as the following examples illustrate, the imperative of storytelling may leave readers with an exaggerated impression of both my importance and the differences between my views and the views of other interviewees he quotes.
“My” solution. Gelles’ article refers to solar geoengineering as “his [my] solution”. This is doubly wrong. I was a child when the idea of injecting sulfur into the stratosphere to slow global warming was first proposed. These ideas are not mine but are the work of many people over more than half a century. Moreover, solar geoengineering is not a solution, at best it’s a band-aid; a supplement to emissions cuts but not a substitute for them.
Moral hazard. The article says, “Opponents worry it would distract from the urgent work of transitioning away from fossil fuels”, adding that opponents cite “moral hazard” as one of the main risks of solar geoengineering. This is accurate, but in crediting this concern to ‘opponents’, Gelles suggests an “all-in” vs “all-out” dichotomy, which in turn suggest that people like me who are willing to contemplate deployment are blind to the risks, while people Gelles labels as opponents are blind to the benefits. Concern about moral hazard is, in fact, widespread within the solar geoengineering research community. I fear that fossil fuel interests or fossil-rich nations will exploit solar geoengineering by exaggerating its effectiveness and minimizing its risk to weaken controls on carbon emissions. I also believe I was the first to call this concern a moral hazard almost a quarter century ago[i].
Frank Keutsch. The article says “Dr. Keutsch is less sanguine than Dr. Keith when considering [SRM’s] potential risks” and quotes Frank as saying, “I compare stratospheric solar geoengineering with opiates,” and “They only treat the symptom and not the actual cause. You can get addicted to it if you don’t actually address the cause. In addition, like any painkiller, you’re going to have side effects. And then there are withdrawal symptoms, and that’s termination shock.”
I fully agree with Frank’s comments. I love his opiate analogy and use it occasionally. Many of us use similar analogies, including myself when I compared geoengineering to chemotherapy in 2010 congressional testimony. It’s possible that Frank is more concerned than me about geoengineering’s risks, but we talk often, and my overall impression is that while we see some things differently, we share a similar overall level of concern.
David Suzuki. The article quotes David Suzuki saying, “The whole notion of spraying sulfur compounds to reflect sunlight is arrogant and simplistic”, and “The fundamental problem is that we think we’re so smart that we don’t have to pay attention to nature’s boundaries.” A reader might assume that David Suzuki opposed research on solar geoengineering—the central question at issue today—yet in a conversation I had with David Suzuki in March 2022 as part of a documentary, Suzuki’s response to a question about research on solar geoengineering was “absolutely we need more information just to show us how ignorant we are.”
Shuchi Talati, the founder of a nonprofit organization called the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, called the technology “a double-edged sword.” Adding that “…it can also exacerbate suffering if used in a bad way.” Yes. Solar geoengineering could cause immense harm through deliberate misuse. To dramatize its terrible possibilities, I computed that solar geoengineering could theoretically be used to cool the earth over a century, freezing the oceans to the equator and, a quote that Michal Spector picked up for a 2012 New Yorker article.
Gelles’ follows Shuchi’s quote with a statement implying that I disagree, saying that I “countered that the risks posed by solar geoengineering are well understood, not as severe as portrayed by critics and dwarfed by the potential benefits”. I believe this statement is correct for the physical risks of deployments under specific conditions (e.g., hemispherically balanced and offsetting less than half the CO2-driven warming). Yet I emphatically agree with Shuchi’s view that solar geoengineering could most certainly “exacerbate suffering if used in a bad way.” Caveats matter.
Summary. I am excited to see solar geoengineering getting above-the-fold coverage in the NY Times. Readers should bear in mind that story-driven reporting tends to exaggerate differences by portraying people as stylized representatives of sharply distinct points in a landscape of opinion.
No single person’s judgment should count for much. The news that should, in my view, matter to readers, is that there is rapidly growing agreement that research on this topic makes sense, as does active debate about how these technologies might be used and governed. There are, of course, strong voices against research from climate experts such as Ray Pierrehumbert, but evidence from surveys and formal consensus documents suggest that these opinions are held by a small minority[ii]. Additionally, to the extent we can gauge public opinion, there is a surprising level of support for research which is strongest in the developing world[iii].
If you want to learn more about solar geoengineering I suggest the One Atmosphere report from the UN Environment Program. For my views in my own words, have a look at my 2021 essay in the NY Times or my short book. My website has all my articles. If you want ones most relevant to general readers use this search. If you want my take on the links between nature and climate engineering, see my µ-autobiography. Or, see my Facts & values: my thoughts on talking about solar geoengineering.
Minor errors
- “Risk is negligible compared to the benefits”. If I said “negligible” then I misspoke, but I doubt I said negligible as I have been speaking about this comparison a lot and have a standard way to describe it. The comparison between the reduction in mortality from heat and the increase in mortality from air pollution is from a paper by Tony Harding. An early version is public as an RFF whitepaper; a full version is under peer review. I have been speaking about this quite a bit and I typically provide a quantitative comparison of benefits to harms and include caveats as we do in the paper. Since the deaths from air pollution would be due to deliberate introduction of sulfur, I don’t think it’s ethical to dismiss them as negligible.
- SCoPEx history. Firstly, SCoPEx was led by Frank Keutsch in the period the article refers to https://www.keutschgroup.com/scopex. I collaborated closely with Frank, but an account that leaves his name out overstates my role. Second, no test was planned over Arizona in 2018. Frank and I were developing hardware and working with balloon launch providers, but we were a long way from being able to schedule a flight. Third, the article says, “When details of that plan became public, a group of Indigenous people objected and issued a manifesto against geoengineering.” The manifesto was authored by ETC, founded in Montreal as part of an anti-geoengineering campaign. ETC did get signatures from some indigenous organizations but the article inaccurately characterizes the group that issued the manifesto.
[i] See page 276 of https://davidkeith.earth/publication/geoengineering-the-climate-history-and-prospect-2/
[ii] Dannenberg, A., Zitzelsberger, S. Climate experts’ views on geoengineering depend on their beliefs about climate change impacts. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 769–775 (2019); Dai, Z., Burns, E.T., Irvine, P.J. et al. Elicitation of US and Chinese expert judgments show consistent views on solar geoengineering. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8, 18 (2021).
[iii] Sugiyama, M., Asayama, S., & Kosugi, T. (2020). The North–South Divide on Public Perceptions of Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering?: A Survey in Six Asia-Pacific Countries. Environmental Communication, 14(5), 641–656; Low, S., Fritz, L., Baum, C.M. et al. Public perceptions on solar geoengineering from focus groups in 22 countries. Commun Earth Environ 5, 352 (2024).