Climate change represents an unprecedented physical and technological challenge. But perhaps the biggest hurdle yet to be overcome is political in nature. Overcoming a planet’s worth of cross-cutting and conflicting interests remains a daunting problem — and one that has been made even more complicated with the ascension of a U.S. administration that dismisses most science on the issue.
We humans have proven our ability to affect an entire planet’s temperature, albeit unintentionally. Does this mean we have the ability to control that temperature? That’s the crucial question behind geoengineering — and it’s one that we will likely have to grapple with given our inability, so far, to curb carbon dioxide emissions by other means.
The climate challenge is, at its core, an energy challenge. Fossil fuels are the lifeblood of the modern world, and virtually everything we do, make, buy, drive, wear, and consume is touched by or dependent on the infrastructure use to harvest, distribute and burn coal, natural gas, or oil. Creating a new infrastructure to undergird the 21st century and beyond is a gargantuan undertaking, the scale of which is easy to underestimate.
