Only centrist GND allows geoengineering

(Kevin Surprise (@KevinSurprise) is a Visiting Lecturer in Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College. https://mronline.org/2020/07/30/solar-geoengineering-is-incompatible-with-a-radical-green-new-deal/)

No kind of justice The left’s position on geoengineering is varied. Some advocate for it (and Holly Jean Buck convincingly argues that carbon removal can be part of radical climate transitions), while the predominant position sees solar geoengineering as a “false solution.” This critique, though important, too easily lumps all geoengineering technologies under one umbrella, missing unique political and economic facets of solar geoengineering. Solar geoengineering would not merely maintain the status quo, but increase the power of concentrated capital and leading capitalist states by extending their reach to the stratosphere, only to mask and at best temporarily impede capitalism’s destruction of the planet. Climate capitalism is likely impossible without the time afforded by solar geoengineering, and “moderate” versions could easily be incorporated into a corporate-centrist GND. But this is no kind of climate justice. With the backing of billionaires, the explicitly pro-capitalist agenda of researchers, and the ever-present prospect of militarization, solar geoengineering is antithetical to ecosocialism, climate justice, and a radical GND—movements pushing for massive redistribution, nationalization(s), new relations of production, racial, gender, and frontline justice, and beyond. A revolutionary climate movement must fundamentally reject a world engineered to fit the needs of endless capital accumulation.