PLEA Network

22 March 2018, Reveal,  What on Earth? Why climate change skeptics are backing geoengineering. Next month, a Silicon Valley engineer plans to head out on a snowmobile from Barrow, on the northern tip of Alaska, to sprinkle reflective sand on a frozen lake to try to stop it from melting. It’s part of a journey that began in 2006, after Leslie Field watched the climate change documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and felt like she’d been “hit by a big fat truck.” Now, she hopes to gather global support to cover more than 19,000 square miles of sea ice – an area about the size of Costa Rica – with a thin coating of tiny floating silica spheres, which she claims will help reduce the world’s rising temperatures. The cost estimate? $1 billion a year. “I keep thinking, ‘If not me, who?’ ” Field, a former researcher at Chevron Corp. and HP Labs, said as she led a reporter through a wholesale flower shop that shares access with her office. In the emerging field of geoengineering, which envisions large-scale efforts to fight climate change by directly manipulating the natural environment, Field’s privately funded Ice911 project is a small player.  Under the Trump administration, these eclectic, messianic and mostly untested projects have been gaining unprecedented momentum. For decades, scientists have warned that unchecked climate change will lead to catastrophes and have urged policymakers to curb greenhouse gases at their source. But politicians have dragged their heels, and under President Donald Trump, progress has slowed. The Trump administration has challenged the scientific consensus on climate, moved to repeal curbson power plant emissions, proposed sweeping cutbacks to renewable energy research and pledged to withdraw from global climate talks. Amid these developments, some close allies of Trump have taken a seemingly paradoxical stance: While denying climate change is a human-caused problem and rejecting proposals to cut greenhouse gases, they’re promoting what many experts worry is the risky default solution of geoengineering. Read More here