Geoengineering is inevitable AND regulated geoengineering is good---stops extinction from eco-catastrophe.

The world is losing its battle against climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions rose to last year, as countries lagged in meeting their already inadequate pledges under the Paris Agreement. Based on the current trajectory, the warming Earth will blow well past the 2-degrees Celsius ceiling widely agreed to be the maximum acceptable increase in average global temperatures before catastrophic impacts set in. In the face of this looming threat, climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts are necessary but insufficient. Humanity must also consider a third option it has long resisted: geoengineering, or the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment. Geoengineering takes various forms, but most fall into one of two categories: carbon-dioxide removal and solar radiation modification. The first one, also known as negative emissions, entails the permanent removal of CO2 from the atmosphere and its subsequent storage, either in plants, underground or beneath the ocean floor. Solar radiation modification denotes the deployment of technologies to alter the amount of radiation entering or leaving Earth’s atmosphere. Unlike carbon removal, solar radiation modification does not remove greenhouse gases. Rather, it reduces the heat that they trap. Both types of geoengineering encompass diverse approaches, of varying complexity and maturity. Carbon-dioxide removal strategies, for example, include planting forests at massive scale, capturing carbon from the atmosphere—or from the burning of biomass—and permanently storing it, fertilizing ocean ecosystems to accelerate phytoplankton growth, and dispersing carbon-binding minerals on land or in the oceans. Solar radiation modification technologies, meanwhile, range from injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, to seeding or thinning clouds and brightening Earth’s surfaces in order to alter the amount of incoming and outgoing radiation. Many approaches remain experimental, and none—with the partial exception of afforestation, or planting trees on non-forested land—have been attempted at scale. Environmentalists hesitate to endorse geoengineering techniques for fear of creating a moral hazard. They worry that governments, corporations and citizens will use the likely false promise of a technological quick fix down the road to avoid taking dramatic but costly steps today to reduce emissions. In addition, the idea of interfering with Earth’s climate system raises a host of practical, distributional and ethical conundrums. To begin with, geoengineering risks unintended consequences. Dare we experiment with the only planet we have? Large-scale geoengineering projects also seem bound to create winners and losers around the world. Who gets to determine where the chips fall? Finally, the very notion of manipulating the climate can induce a cosmological queasiness, especially among the faithful. In taking this path, do we make ourselves gods? These are all profound and troubling questions. Nevertheless, geoengineering is a Rubicon that humanity seems destined to cross. By spewing massive quantities of CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—in fact, an unintentional form of geoengineering—humanity is running the largest uncontrolled scientific experiment in Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history. Unless dramatic action is taken soon, the end of the century will likely bring a wide range of environmental calamities: the rapid melting of polar ice caps, inundation of coastal regions and low-lying islands, more frequent and extreme natural disasters, widespread desertification and deforestation, the creation of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, accelerated extinction of plant and animal species, and the death of entire marine ecosystems, including coral reefs and fisheries, through warming and acidification.