On the Thief in the Night: A Movement Primer on Solar Geoengineering
Report: Climate Vanguard, 09 July 2024
Executive Summary
At 1.2°C heating above pre-industrial levels, the catastrophic impacts of climate breakdown are plain to see. In 2021, wildfires wiped out an entire town in Canada. In 2022, a third of Pakistan was submerged by unprecedented monsoons. And in 2023, a fifth consecutive failed rainy season in Somalia left millions in acute food insecurity. But this is just the beginning. The world is set to cross 1.5°C by 2032, 2°C by 2052, and 2.9°C by 2100.
Climate collapse has done little to sway the ruling classes’ feverish accumulation drive. In 2022, investors pumped $499 billion into upstream oil and gas development (the largest year-on-year increase in history), despite the IEA warning in 2021 that new oil and gas is incompatible with the 1.5°C guardrail. Over the next 16 years, the world’s largest fossil fuel companies are planning to invest $1.5 trillion in new oil and gas. The hotter it gets, the more capital invests in the inferno.
To remedy the existential contradiction between capital accumulation and a habitable planet, ruling classes have a growing interest in solar geoengineering – an umbrella term referring to technologies aimed at limiting global heating by reflecting sunlight back to space, limiting the amount of heat that reaches the Earth’s surface.
These hypothetical technologies vary in their approach, including deploying large space mirrors and increasing the reflectivity of clouds by spraying them with salt water droplets. Among the range of solar geoengineering technologies, stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) stands out as the most prominent, and as such, is the focus of this report. However, many of the warnings made in this paper are equally applicable to other solar geoengineering technologies.
Although SAI deployment would have grave socio-ecological consequences for our collective future, movement organisers do not have a clear understanding of these risks, nor do they have a critical awareness of its growing sway amongst the ruling classes.
This report serves as a movement primer on SAI, breaking down what it is, why it matters, and how we can resist it.