Technology Review article, including geoengineering
Alan Robock
Geoengineering’s public moment
Yang would also earmark $800 million for research into geoengineering—the idea of cooling the planet by using various technologies to reflect away more of the sun’s heat. His plan mentions “launching giant foldable mirrors into space” as a possible emergency response.
(See “What is geoengineering—and why should you care?”)
Whether we can safely research geoengineering, let alone conduct it, is still hotly debated within academia. And it’s not remotely a mainstream idea in the US yet.
But Yang said on stage that space mirrors (by the way, not the approach most academic researchers are focused on) should be part of the climate debate. While stressing that geoengineering shouldn’t be the “main approach,” he added that “in a crisis, all solutions need to be on the table.”
Surprisingly, the topic came up again later in the evening. Alan Robock, a Rutgers professor who has published a list of risks of geoengineering, asked Booker what he thought of the idea. Booker, to his credit, simply said he didn’t know enough about it to take a firm position.
-- Alan Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor Associate Editor, Reviews of Geophysics Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-848-932-5751 Rutgers University E-mail: rob...@envsci.rutgers.edu 14 College Farm Road http://people.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 USA ☮ http://twitter.com/AlanRobock