Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Dead Wrong About Outlawing Climate Geoengineering

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) and leading MAGA mountebank earlier this month urgently demanded that “we must end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering.” She added, “This is not normal. I want clean air, clean skies, clean rain water, clean ground water, and sun shine just like God created it!! No person, company, entity, or government should ever be allowed to modify our weather by any means possible!!”

Subsequently, the congresswoman has now introduced a bill in Congress making it a felony for anyone to attempt “weather modification” anywhere in the United States. The text of her “Clear Skies Act” prohibits “any injection, release, emission, or dispersal of a chemical, a chemical compound, or a substance, or conveyance of an apparatus, into the atmosphere for the express purpose of…producing an artificial change in the composition, behavior, or dynamics of the atmosphere; or…affecting the temperature, weather, climate, or intensity of sunlight.” Examples of prohibited activities include “geoengineering” “cloud seeding” “solar radiation modification and management” and “a release of an aerosol into the atmosphere to influence temperature, precipitation, or the intensity of sunlight.”

Greene has a long history of promoting debunked theories about chemtrails and cloud-seeded floods (not to mention innuendos about Jewish space lasers causing forest fires), and her proposed prohibition on atmospheric geoengineering can now be added to her list of specious provocations.

As a matter of fact, there is currently an ongoing “injection, release, or dispersal” of a a chemical compound or a substance that is already geoengineering the “temperature, precipitation, or the intensity of sunlight.” These are globe-warming greenhouse gases that are accumulating in the atmosphere as the result of increased carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, methane and various synthetic gases. As a consequence, last year was the hottest in the instrumental record. Speaking of weather modification, man-made climate change contributes to the increase in the frequency and duration of heatwaves and extreme precipitation globally and in the United States.

Now some researchers want to experiment with reverse-geoengineering the atmosphere with the aim of slowing man-made climate change by reducing the globe’s average temperatures. One of the more promising proposals is stratospheric aerosol injection. This involves releasing tons of tiny particles high in the stratosphere where they would reflect a small percentage of incoming sunlight back into space as a way to reduce global average temperatures. We know that this likely would work to reduce global average temperatures due to a natural experiment. In 1991, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines injected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, cooling the planet by 0.5 degrees Celsius over the following year. One middle-of-the-road estimate is that a SAI program would cost about $18 billion annually per degree Celsius of warming avoided.

Another geoengineering proposal aimed at counteracting some of the consequences of man-made climate change is marine cloud brightening (MCB). In this case, a fleet of ships would ply the oceans spraying salt water into the atmosphere, which would aid creation of very reflective low-level clouds. Interestingly, the 2020 prohibition on cargo ships burning high sulfur fuel oil reduced the number of bright cloud tracks formed by ships, and research suggests that this has contributed to a recent acceleration in global warming. Cost estimates to implement MCB programs to cool the planet range from $5 to $40 billion per year.

Historically, political opposition to climate geoengineering has mainly come from the progressive left. So it is somewhat amusing that Greene now appears to be endorsing and promoting the views of some of her progressive colleagues.

Contrary to Greene’s fears, permitting research on a backup emergency plan to cool should be an urgent priority. We are bequeathing to our descendants a world in which the climate is changing in what may be very deleterious ways. Surely banning research that would supply people later in this century with information about the risks and benefits various geoengineering tools would be wrong. As two geoengineering research proponents asked, “Is it justified for us to deprive future generations of tools that may lessen the pain we have inflicted? They may or may not use these tools, but surely those decisions are theirs to make.”

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