Who Is In Charge of the Planet’s Temperature?

Consider two headlines.

First, from the New York Times, on Thursday: “This Scientist Has a Risky Plan to Cool Earth. There’s Growing Interest.”

And then, from Mother Jones on Friday: “The Fraught Election to Determine Who Will Call the Shots on Deep-Sea Mining.”

In the first case, we have a sort of profile of David Keith, the long-time public face of solar geoengineering, the controversial idea to inject small particles into the stratosphere to help cool the Earth, along with a more general discussion of that concept’s current status. And in the second, a story on a pending vote for leadership of an obscure international body that will help determine if and when companies and countries might begin another controversial process, to dig up minerals from the deep seabed that are critical to electric vehicles and other energy transition tech.

And in both cases, inherently, a question: who is in charge of all this shit anyway?

The root issue, of course, is that humans have warmed up the planet to its breaking point, almost assuredly sending the world hurtling past the 1.5-degree Celsius target set forth in the 2015 Paris Agreement and, at latest check-in, likely baked in somewhere between 2.5 and 3.0 degrees of warming — which, take the catastrophe outside your window right now and multiply by, well, a lot. The solutions to this ongoing disaster are in some ways well known — solar and wind power and batteries, and lots of all of it, and for god’s sake stop burning fossil fuels — and in some cases less so, as with solar geoengineering. But the “who” of it all — who decides what we do, what we spend money on, which controversial approaches can be attempted, and which should be shunned into a technological dustbin of history — nobody really has answers to those questions.

In geoengineering’s case, there is a tone shift currently underway. I have followed and written about this topic, including interviewing Keith several times, reviewing his book, and more, for more than a decade. I have long felt that geoengineering’s deployment is inevitable, for many of the reasons that Keith enumerates in that Times piece: the benefit of cooling the globe by some large amount will prove too tempting when the real dying (and money-losing) starts. For years, though, even the researchers in the field seemed reluctant to say anything more than researching the topic was important. Now, Keith says if there was a yes/no vote tomorrow, he’s on board with deployment.

“[T]here’s really a lot of evidence that the risks are quantitatively small compared to the benefits, and the uncertainties just aren’t that big,” he told the Times.

But why should anybody listen to him? Sure, he might know more specifically about geoengineering than maybe anyone on the planet, but deployment of the technology inevitably means tradeoffs: it might reduce the sum total of human suffering in the world, but it probably creates suffering for some that otherwise would not have experienced it. I once called it the world’s biggest Trolley Problem. Who gets to flip the switch, especially when plenty of voices — scientists, activists, world leaders, and more — continue to loudly decry the entire concept, even including the computer modeling research that has been the full extent of activity so far?

The same question might be asked of seabed mining. Scientists have warned that the areas under scrutiny, in particular a region in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, are among the last largely undisturbed ecosystems on the planet. Deep though they may be, they are teeming with life, and sending robots down there to gobble up the rocks containing cobalt, iron, nickel, and other minerals could kill plenty of it, as well as kick up sand and dust plumes that might not settle back down for years.

Of course, the world really does need those minerals if we want a smooth energy transition, and as one expert told me a few years ago, when it comes to mining, “Nothing is puppy dogs and ice cream, right? Everything has upsides and downsides.” If not the seabed, that means surface extraction — Democratic Republic of the Congo, Peru, and many other often poorer countries faced with enormous extractive industries ripping holes in their physical flesh.

The vote happening on Friday is for leadership of the International Seabed Authority, an agency established under a U.N. convention and based in Jamaica. The ISA will be the group to issue mining permits; so far, all they have granted is about 30 exploration contracts to more than a dozen countries, with no release to actually do the extraction. The results of the election could well determine if that state of affairs continues, as the incumbent leader has close ties to The Metals Company, a Canadian concern considered the farthest along toward deep-sea extraction.

So again: Who gets to decide? The incumbent British lawyer who has been accused of misappropriating funds and whose national sponsor, the island nation of Kiribati, has admitted to trying to bribe his opponent out of the race? The Brazilian oceanographer who refused that bribe and hopes for a “meaningful transformation” at the ISA? Collections of dozens of countries now calling for a moratorium on mining until the ecosystem and the impacts of mining can be better understood?

[Update: Brazil’s Leticia Carvalho did in fact win the election on Friday, and will be the ISA’s new Secretary General.]

None of these questions have even close to a reasonable answer. The U.N. climate process that gave us the Paris Agreement took decades to get to that point, and it was only last year that the world collectively agreed on a watered-down goal to “transition away” from fossil fuels. The idea that we’ll just engage new multilateral processes for all of this — what to mine and where, whether geoengineering should be deployed, any number of other tough solutions-centered decisions — is likely off the table.

That’s the problem with a global catastrophe: it is coming for all of us, but only a few will end up with their hands on the wheel.