Alex from Worldchanging sez, "I have a new piece up about how the right is spinning geoengineering to undermine climate action. No matter what our stance on geoengineering itself – pro, con, undecided — we should all agree that the last thing we need are climate denialists manipulating the debate."
Their new justifications for delay are simple. Taking advantage of the economic crisis, they call climate action a job killer. If the Right's anger and vehemence against the very idea of green jobs has shocked and confused you, well, understand that it's important that climate change be framed as a threat to the economy, and never an opportunity: the growing importance of clean tech industries and jobs to the American economy must be downplayed in order for this strategy to work (never mind that wind power already employs more Americans than coal mining). Look for this argument to increase in volume as Copenhagen draws near…
But if we can be made to believe that megascale geoengineering can stop climate change, then delay begins to look not like the dangerous folly it actually is, but a sensible prudence. The prospect of geoegineering is the only thing that can make that delay seem at all morally acceptable.
In other words, combining dire warnings about climate action's economic costs with exaggerated claims about geoengineering's potential is the new climate denialism.
Geoengineering and the New Climate Denialism
(Thanks, Alex!)
