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Geoengineering proposals are perhaps the most extreme form of pushing power up the pyramid. Nuclear power, for example, requiring massive centralized investment along with extreme security, is notorious for pushing power to the top. New technologies have a way of pushing political power either up or down that pyramid. Most of the world’s population exists towards the bottom. In the middle are the minority fortunate enough to enjoy privilege. At the top are the political leaders and the billionaires. Does it push political power up or down the pyramid? I suggest three ways to consider any proposal you might come across. How should we evaluate the proposals we’ll be hearing about to determine which ones to support and which ones will only lead to worse disasters? We need a way to distinguish authentic pathways to a sustainable civilization from false solutions. People are talking about changing how we do agriculture capturing carbon from power plants painting roofs white fertilizing the ocean and even spraying gold dust into the atmosphere.

#Drawdown meaning hydropowe how to

There’s no shortage of proposals for how to do this.

Even if we were to bring net global carbon emissions to zero by mid-century, experts say, we’d need to suck a massive amount of carbon from the atmosphere to keep temperatures within a range of 1.5º-2.0º C this century. We’re going to be hearing a lot about grand solutions to our climate emergency in the coming years. At this rate, we’re on a path to blow through the 1.5º C temperature rise the nations of the world set as a goal at COP21, not in decades but in a few short years. February obliterated all records as the warmest seasonally-adjusted month since measurements began. The climate news gets scarier by the day. Jeremy is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicating to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth. His recent work, The Patterning Instinct: A History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, (to be published), traces the deep historical foundations of our modern worldview. His science fiction novel about genetic engineering, Requiem of the Human Soul, was published in 2009.

Jeremy Lent is an author whose writings investigate the patterns of thought that have led our civilization to its current crisis of sustainability. This article first appeared in Patterns of Meaning on the 22nd March 2016.