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13 CCLR 94 (2019)
Is the Decisive Issue in Geoengineering Debates Really One of Representation of Nature? Gaia against (or with) Prometheus?

handle is hein.journals/cclr2019 and id is 109 raw text is: 94 | CCLR 212019 Is the Decisive Issue in Geoengineering Debates Really One of Representation of Nature? Gaia Against (or With?) Prometheus? Sibastien Dutreuil* Geoengineering has long been considered a science fiction solution designed by climate wiz- ards - physicists - who inherited Cold War-era tinkering in the shadows with their demiur- gic designs. Presented in this way, these Promethean solutions are likely to be rejected by a large majority of the public. The most common reaction to these techniques is thus rejection, based on the feeling that they are based on a pathological conception of nature, the Earth and the relationship that humans must maintain with it. But important, albeit recent, devel- opments seem to change how these techniques are presented, and could thus change the de- gree and mode of adherence to them, without changing anything about what these tech- niques are and the dangers they represent. This paper analyses two discourses in favour of the deployment of geoengineering techniques: the Promethean discourse and the Gaian or Earth system discourse. Both hinge on radically opposed conceptions of nature and of the Earth which leads me to question the idea, however classically accepted, that what is at stake in the geoengineering debate is first and foremost a question of the representation of na- ture. It is common to distinguish two types of geoengi- neering techniques, those aimed at modifying the Earth's albedo on a large scale - the so called 'Solar Radiation Management' or SRM techniques - via, for example, the injection of sulphur particles into the stratosphere, and those aimed at capturing at- mospheric carbon, the so called Carbon Dioxide Re- moval (CDR) techniques, such as afforestation or bio-energy production associated with CO2 storage resulting from biomass combustion.' Rather than DOI: 10.21552/cclr/2019/2/4 Aix-Marseille University, French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Centre Gilles Gaston Granger, Aix-en- Provence, France. For Correspondence: <sebastien .dutreuil@univ-amu.fr> [ would like to warmly thank Laurent Bopp, Regis Briday, Amy Dahan, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Helene Guillemot, Marion Lemoine and Timothy Lenton for their review of this text and for the fascinating and useful discussions we had on it. 1 In certain circumstances and at the cost of precise argumentative work, it would be possible to argue that what applies to SRMs applies to certain CDR techniques deployed in certain ways. We can make some suggestions, even if a much more detailed work would have to be done. First, the scale of deployment required for the effectiveness of negative emission technologies could blur an opposition between albedo-modifying and chem- istry-modifying techniques, it would probably be more appropriate to distinguish between tech- niques with an immediate global effect and those with a local scope, the two distinctions not system- atically overlapping.2 Throughout the text, I most often use geoengineering to implicitly refer to im- mediately global changes, but no doubt one of the aims of the text is to re-examine the categories of geoengineering. the classic distinction between large-scale modification of the Earth's albedo (SRM) and the development of local forest gardens within state boundaries (CDR). Secondly and above all, within the discourse space, the discourses legitimizing SRM on the one hand, those supporting CDRs on the other, may be part of the same dynamic, since both stress the urgency to act and the impossibility of stabilizing the climate in a reasonable state in the absence of the use of these technologies - the two discourses therefore pose the same risk of a moral hazard. Moreover, the two discourses are by no means incompatible, and can converge. Some propose to multiply and diversify the arsenal of techniques to limit the risks inherent in each one, to modulate the local- regional effects that a particular technique could have, or to mobilize them at different times. 2 Regis Briday, 'Le discours de la Promesse Chez les Promoteurs de L'ing6nierie Climatique' (2019) Socio 12 133 - 157 .