{"id":24779,"date":"2021-02-10T14:30:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-10T14:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/p\/is-it-time-to-dim-the-sun#id29080"},"modified":"2021-02-10T14:30:00","modified_gmt":"2021-02-10T14:30:00","slug":"is-it-time-to-dim-the-amp-sun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/associatednews.us\/content\/is-it-time-to-dim-the-amp-sun\/","title":{"rendered":"Is it time to dim the *&$%@! sun?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“We live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.” That's the quote that Ezra Klein selects to sum up the great climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert's new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future<\/em>, and she basically concurs. Because our political systems can't solve the climate crisis; we're basically at 1.5 degrees now, in terms of global temperature rise, and 2 degrees is getting to be almost geophysically impossible as a goal. So what are the options? A technological fix? A carbon dictatorship?<\/p>\n

A couple quotes:<\/p>\n

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No species has ever had the kind of impact that we are having on the Earth, with the possible exception of the original bacteria that invented photosynthesis and oxygenated the atmosphere.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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We are in a no analog moment. We are creating a no analog climate, no analog ecosystems. They just don’t have any precedent in Earth history.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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We live on a finite planet. So there’s a famous saying, the only people who think you can have infinite growth on a finite planet are mad men and economists. And I think that contemplating degrowth and putting that on the table is really, really important. Now, in our political system, one has to imagine that would be toxic. So we have a problem here.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Worth it in its entirety for Kolbert's thoughts on carbon capture, electric vehicles, mosquito hacking, and aliens (transcript here<\/a>). <\/p>\n