Environment & Energy

Thanks for all the info .

This Sc Am article captures how I feel about it. It is not the scientists I am worried about so much as the “entrepreneurs” (ie often people with the same myopic, greedy, crass mindset that got us here in the first place):
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/geoengineering-wins-reluctant-interest-from-scientists-as-earths-climate/

If natural systems were modified with proper scientific oversight (ie not with an expert in the pocket of scientifically incurious and myopic creeps looking to make money off of “green energy”) it could be viable I suppose.

However, the role of the disinterested scientist should not get diluted down to a joke. These are complex topics that very few people have any real expertise in and so the need for trusted disinterested experts is vital.

What alarmed me about that article was the indication that industry would go ahead with some of it without much public debate.

As for reasonable standards re public engagement on such complex matters..that is another nightmare these days.

Looking at how Covid went, public skepticism about science can often be driven by nonsense . Therefore, I am not saying that we need experts who can convince Marjorie Green that space lasers and vaccines are not killing babies..

The truth is I don’t understand these issues any better than Marjorie Green does (well okay probably better than Marjorie Green but that is a low bar), but our concerns are over very different matters. Mine is more of a generic concern about deregulation from the private sector not distrust of democratic governance or mainstream scientific consensus.

I posted this elsewhere -a really cool oped by Dr Francis Collins of the NIH that is tangentially relevant to all of this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/20/opinion/covid-vaccines-truth-life-death.html

Thanks for all the reading material again .