Earthmasters by Clive Hamilton

Mike Childs

21 May 2013

There are some dastardly power-mad people who want to take control of our weather, says Clive Hamilton in his excellent book Earthmasters. The Australian Professor of Public Ethics then names these wannabe 'Earthmasters' and offers an expert review of their weapon of choice: climate geoengineering technologies.

There are two categories of geoengineering. One is less risky and less potent - and therefore of less interesting to these people motivated as they are by technical control of the Earth. This is negative emissions, or sucking carbon out of the air. The other is very risky and potent - solar radiation management, or managing the sun - and therefore attractive to their 'Earthmaster' ambitions

Sucking carbon out of the air

Sucking carbon out of the air is a massive and costly activity says Hamilton.

Hamilton calculates that sucking carbon out of the air equivalent to a standard 1000-megawatt coal-fired power station would take 30 kilometres of air-sucking machinery and six chemical plants covering six kilometres of land, neatly demonstrating the stupidity of our continuing fossil fuel use. After outlining some other carbon-sucking options he concludes: "the essential difficulty with all carbon dioxide removal approaches is that they want to push a reluctant genie back into the bottle".

Sadly we'll need to get the genie back into the bottle because in our view very rapid cuts in carbon emissions alone won't keep greenhouse gas concentrations below danger level.

Managing the sun

But Hamilton concentrates his fire on those who actively promote much riskier, but much cheaper, technologies to regulate the amount of energy we get from the sun. The main ideas for achieving this are modifying clouds and mimicking the cooling effect of volcanoes through injecting aerosols into the stratosphere.

Hamilton delivers a devastating critique of the technologies and the agendas of those promoting their use. Bill Gates, Bjorn Lomborg and a number of influential and well-funded think-tanks, such as the Exxon-Mobil-funded Heartland Institute, attract his fire. Ironically, many of these think-tanks deny the existence of man-made climate change but are eager to manipulate the weather. Others are eager to manipulate the weather in order to avoid action to cut carbon emissions. Just how bad can you get?

Ethical anxieties

Hamilton also explores the ethical dilemmas involved in the difficult territory of geoengineering.

He has sympathy with the many well-motivated scientists alarmed by the lack of progress on cutting carbon pollution who are now regard investigating geoengineering options as a lesser evil than unchecked climate change. Yet he points out that even talking about and researching options may in itself lead to reduced action to cut emissions.

He suggests the lure of the technofix is powerful to some mindsets. Mindsets which fail to understand the fragility of natural systems and the inherent risks of experimenting on our only home.

He concludes by saying that "if the meek are ever to inherit the Earth then they had better be quick".

What next?

Earthmasters is an important and accessible read. I'd recommend it to anyone concerned with climate change and the politics of climate change.

What's clear is that humankind - or probably more accurately mankind - has created one hell of a mess by ignoring warnings about greenhouse gases and climate change for decades. We must cut carbon emissions, and fast, in addition to sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. And we must also reject the agendas of these would-be masters of the Earth.