In Graeme Wood’s article, “Re-Engineering the Earth” on the Atlantic, they discuss the possibilities of solving the climate crisis from a Geo-engineering prospective. The main argument for this, is that it it much more cost effective. Wood claims that “$100 billion could reverse anthropogenic climate change entirely, and some experts suspect that a hundredth of that sum would suffice.” Wood follows that up with “To stop global warming the old-fashioned way, by cutting carbon emissions, would cost on the order of $1 trillion yearly.”

Wood follows this claim by discussing many of the Geo-engineering ideas proposed to solve this problem. Some of them are quite out there, like shooting 840 trillion Frisbee-sized ceramic disks in-between us and the sun. While some are much more reasonable, like building ships that propel sea water in the air to create whiter and fluffier clouds, they still all raise a concern with me.

At some point in the future if we rely on Geo-engineering, we will have to make a very costly decision on what the best method to do so is. Funding any one of the projects discussed would take a very large sum of money and we would only be able to test them on small scales before deciding on one. This small amount of evidence would be what we rely on to solve a global issue and any number of factors could go wrong when scaling up the project.

To me, this is why it seems much smarter to take a route that we have proven works, and instead of geo-engineering a sort of “third state” of the world, we should do our best to revert it back to its first state. Sure the decision could be much more costly, but it is also a much more guaranteed way of solving the climate crisis and has much less possible ramifications on us as a species if something does go wrong when solving it with a geo-engineering solution.