half-arsed cynicism as gateway drug to solutionism, example #632

So close, but yet so far. Alan Jacobs on geoengineering:

The argument that the exploration and testing of geoengineering technologies should be stopped is not “a worthwhile argument.” It’s a dumb argument. We cannot afford to put all our eggs in the emissions-reduction basket, for the simple reason that there is no good reason to believe that the world’s governments will impose the necessary constraints.

So we can’t trust the world’s governments to come through on emissions reduction, but we can somehow trust them to “impose the necessary constraints” to prevent unilateral and poorly-thought-through geoengineering interventions adding new perturbations to a complex system the size of a planet which we’ve already made a mess of by meddling with it unthinkingly?

C’mon, man. If you’re going to be cynical, at least fucking commit to it.

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