The White House cautiously endorsed the idea of studying how to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface as a way to limit global warming in a congressionally mandated report that could help bring efforts once confined to science fiction into the realm of legitimate debate.
I am convinced that there is no way for this to possibly go wrong.
A giant space umbrella!
So much easier than regulating like 6 companies.
Even if we achieve full decarbonisation, the damage already done won’t go away. This would be a last resort, though because no matter how much research you do, it’ll never be possible to really predict what would happen.
Isn’t this how Snowpiercer started?
Sigh. Every single time on Reddit, I’d pop open the comments on a thread about geoengineering and do a quick text search for “Snowpiercer”, and there it would be. And now on the Fediverse too.
It’s a terrible idea to be making any sort of real-world policy decisions based off of Hollywood action-adventure sci fi movies, whose purposes is to sell tickets by presenting a scary danger that the hero can battle using kickflips and chokeslams or whatever rather than being remotely realistic in how they treat the scenario.
Sure, blocking the sun will surely be easier and more effective than taxing the rich assholes causing climate change.
In fact, it very well might be. I recall reading about a study done a year or two back that concluded that a fleet of high-altitude aircraft injecting calcium carbonate particulates into the stratosphere could counteract anthropogenic climate change for a cost of about $2 billion per year.
Big dropping a giant ice cube in the ocean energy
It’s nothing like that. It’s an entirely different idea from the same episode!