A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

44 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingGood grief!It doesn’t end there. US and Canadian research institutions have alsorecently seeded various areas of the Pacific Ocean with iron particlesto try to stimulate CO 2 -absorbing plankton blooms. 47 With financialsupport from the US Department of Energy, human genome pioneerCraig Venter is now committed to creating a new life form – a syntheticconstruct based on simple micro-organisms – to clean up carbondioxide or other greenhouse gases. 48Scientists convened by the White House under George W. Bush havemeanwhile proposed fleets of ocean-going turbines to throw up saltspray into clouds to improve their reflectivity. 49 And the US NationalScience Foundation is discussing the possibility of creating a biologicalfilm over the ocean’s surface to divert hurricanes. 50 In January2006, a ‘weather-modification’ bill (S517) was ‘fast-tracked’ by theUS Senate and House of Representatives. The Bill was expected tobecome law before the 2006 hurricane season. 51US scientists have also long contemplated spraying the stratosphere withfine metallic particles to reflect sunlight, perhaps using the engines ofcommercial jets for the job. 52 Taking unilateral action to dim the sky inthis way, explained the late Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogenbomb, is a simpler, cheaper alternative to ‘international consensus on…large-scale reductions in fossil fuel-based energy production’. 53These schemes sound crazy! Who knows what might happen if they werecarried out? Shouldn’t scientists and technologists be encouraged to use theiringenuity in ways that would help end dependence on fossil fuels instead?Perhaps they should, but they would need more institutional, financialand cultural support to do so. Today, as Teller implied, the focusis on avoiding ‘large-scale reductions’ in fossil fuel use.Supporting more use of fossil fuels certainly seems to be a big priorityat, for example, the US Department of Energy and its old nationalnuclear weapons laboratories, which have teamed up with oil companiessuch as Chevron, Texaco, Shell, and BP to study geologicalsequestration of carbon dioxide. It’s also a priority at top universities,due to floods of government and corporate funding directed at thesame objective. In 2000, for instance, BP and Ford contributed usd20 million to Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative, the largestcorporate contribution in the university’s history. Headed by professorsfrom two departments – mechanical and aerospace engineering,and ecology and evolutionary biology – the scheme tried to find waysto collect carbon dioxide at central processing sources, then store itdeep underground. One ostensible objective was to help India and