Environment & Energy

Last edited Wed Sep 25, 2024, 06:02 AM - Edit history (1)

Recently the Biden admin is cautiously opening the door to it and it is fine if it is done with real scientific knowledge and appreciation of the potential issues (ie not as a Musk would go about it):
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/01/white-house-cautiously-opens-door-to-study-blocking-suns-rays-to-slow-global-warming-ee-00104513

I just hope that if/when they try such measures it is people like Hansen or the Fauci/Francis Collins type of scientist rather than the Richard Lindzen type of contrarian or worse someone outright in the pocket of industrial interests.
I generally think scientists like doctors are a decent lot. But it would have to be scientists without serious conflicts of interest commercially who do factor in the ecological sciences rather than demoting those in favor of the views economists.

Economists are not scientists in that sense. And the failure of economics as a field to even factor in the planet in any serious way does not get talked about anywhere near enough.

For all the whinging about liberal scientists, it is hardly addressed enough that economics is a very right shifted field not to mention not a hard science but an inexact human science (by which I mean far more susceptible to human vagaries than anything more objective).

A type of worldview (common I suspect in the tech world/cs) essentially sneers at ecological sciences or evolutionary biology (social Darwinism and eugenics are not evol bio in my book) in any sane sense, but gives exaggerated importance to economics and that is not good.