What is the future of OIF and geoengineering?
Will OIF become increasingly important or fade away?
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“I think geoengineering itself is going to move beyond narrow focus on climate issues to a much more fundamental focus on how do we want to structure earth system processes and benefit in general. The more we learn about these systems, the more we have big engineering ideas: we are going to be talking about food production, energy creation, biodiversity preservation, fisheries… What do we want this world to look like?
Because if we are going to be living in a synthetic world where nothing is natural, there is going to be people who will push forward and say, 'we can control these systems' and there is going to be a lot of environmentalist backlash of a particular strain of environmentalists where they say, 'hey, the way we reduce ocean acidification is by reducing our emissions, not by chemically altering the ocean in order to fix the problem we’ve caused.” “But I think there is a symptom of a much broader interesting political debate that will form a lot of our decisions about food and energy production and land and marine management in the next century. We are starting to have enough understanding to have the power enough to actually do something about these things on big scales and it raises a lot of questions as to what are the values behind something being natural, anthropogenic or man vs wild, managed vs unmanaged.” We still think of environmentalists as a monolithic, singular movement; that there are greens out there. However, environmentalism is not one thing. There are environmentalists who are pro-geoengineering, others who are against, pro-aquaculture and anti-aquaculture and pro-natural wild and think we should do whatever we can with our technology and science to fix the world and that technological political schism is going to be at the forefront of where we are.” |
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“There is no question in my mind that [geoengineering and OIF] should be added to a global perspective. One cannot conceive of a sensible way of doing this which doesn't involve a large number of nations, with the UN managing this. [...] We need to be doing this in an open concerted coordinated manner. If it is done in a large scale it will affect the whole of the human population and all of the biosphere on the planet in the same way that the extreme use of fossil fuel is affecting the planet.”
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“OIF is becoming less prominent in the geoengineering debate because of the disappointing results of the experiments carried out. So, at this stage, it seems to me more likely that OIF will fade in its importance and the space will be filled by sulfate aerosol spraying, liming the oceans, air capture etc.”
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