Bill McKibben and Geoengineering

In his warmly received new book Eaarth, Bill McKibben (environmental activist and founder of 350.org) argues that we have already entered the era of significant climate change and must adapt our ways to restore some semblance of balance. For most of us these claims are uncontroversial and indisputable. But McKibben offers a spectacularly inadequate analysis of geoengineering, consisting solely of the following three sentences:

"If you're in the developed world, [maintaining economic growth] might mean embracing "geoengineering" schemes: filling the atmosphere with sulfur to block sunlight (on purpose smog), or filling the seas with iron filings to stimulate the growth of plankton that would soak up carbon. But the early tests have found only "negligible" results, and the costs are huge, measured in the tens of trillions of dollars. Not only that, but we'd be experimenting on the same scale that we've experimented with carbon, and look how well that turned out." (p. 100)

This is shocking in its inaccuracies, distortions, and outright laziness. For such a prominent environmentalist to dismiss geoengineering on this basis borders on the irresponsible. The mainstream green movement deserves much better than this.