{"id":40309,"date":"2018-11-09T07:55:16","date_gmt":"2018-11-09T12:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40309"},"modified":"2018-11-09T07:55:16","modified_gmt":"2018-11-09T12:55:16","slug":"the-colonial-logic-of-geoengineerings-last-resort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40309","title":{"rendered":"The Colonial Logic of Geoengineering\u2019s \u201cLast Resort\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"headline\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/11\/09\/the-colonial-logic-of-geoengineerings-last-resort\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">The Colonial Logic of Geoengineering\u2019s \u201cLast Resort\u201d<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"post_content\">\n<p>As panic starts to set in about what little time we have to avert catastrophic climate change, elites have begun in earnest to drum up support for geoengineering fixes \u2013 including the fix of injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere.<\/p>\n<p>The basic idea behind this relatively cheap, \u201ccost effective\u201d technique is that we could replicate the cooling effect of volcanic disruptions. Like the sulfur emitted by volcanos, the aerosols would reflect sunlight back into space, and thus briefly spare us from the disastrous effects of rising temperatures caused by our fossil fuel emissions. This \u201clast resort,\u201d advocates say, could ultimately \u201csave the planet\u201d and thus \u201csave humanity\u201d while we figure out how to effectively and cheaply remove carbon from the atmosphere.<\/p>\n<p>One could take great comfort in this aspiration to \u201csave humanity.\u201d After all, it seems we will not, in the time required, rise to the occasion of shutting down petrocapitalists.<\/p>\n<p>However, advocates\u2019 unspoken presumption that all humans would (of course!) want to pursue this \u201clast resort\u201d indicates that a more cynical aspiration is at work, for it is precisely the kind of presumption one makes when one is steeped in the colonial logic that produced our climate crisis.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, we should pay attention to how freely the champions of sulfur injections (and other equally radical geoengineering fixes) speak the language of the Universal Subject, that creature of colonialism whose benevolent claims about what was best for \u201chumanity\u201d \u2013 often framed in the discourse of economic as well as scientific objectivity and rationality \u2013 masked His exercise of brute power over nonwestern people and over Earth herself.<\/p>\n<p>He is speaking to us again now, promising to save \u201cus all\u201d while intending primarily to safeguard western civilization, because western civilization is what He really means when He speaks about \u201chumanity.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Colonial Logic of Geoengineering\u2019s \u201cLast Resort\u201d As panic starts to set in about what little time we have to avert catastrophic climate change, elites have begun in earnest to drum up support for geoengineering fixes \u2013 including the fix of injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere. The basic idea behind this relatively cheap, \u201ccost [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[22868,141,5493,14317,1741,22869,13567],"class_list":["post-40309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-alycee-lane","tag-climate-change","tag-counterpunch","tag-fossil-fuel-emissions","tag-geoengineering","tag-sulfur","tag-volcanoes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40310,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40309\/revisions\/40310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}