WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Today’s show is about understanding the need for a new social and political vision in the face of climate catastrophe, ecological collapse, and species extinction. New technologies must spring out of new ways to organize living if we’re not to repeat the same mistakes of humans devoted to the attempt at dominating and subduing all of nature.
Imagination is key, but not the sociotechnical imaginary that wants to aerosolize the stratosphere as a way to delay the cascading effects of climate change. That sci-fi dystopia is brought to you by capitalists and fossil fuel industry think tanks.
The window for action on climate change is closing rapidly. As anxieties about global temperatures soar, demands for urgent action grow louder. What can be done? Can this process be reversed? Once temperatures rise, is there any going back?
In her new book, After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration, today’s guest Holly Jean Buck charts a possible course to a livable future. Climate restoration will require not just innovative technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but social and economic transformation. The steps we must take are enormous, and they must be taken soon.
Buck examines industrial-scale seaweed farms, the grinding of rocks to sequester carbon at the bottom of the sea, direct air capture, marine cloud brightening, and even old school low tech fixes like soil carbon sequestration, and reforestation. The truth, to date, is that even if some methods show promise, they are still only imaginary when it comes to the scale of need.
What is most worrying to Buck is the way the current capitalist fossil fuel barons are putting their considerable wealth and influence behind technologies that might fit the technical definition of carbon neutral or even carbon negative (and so serve their propaganda), but with the sole purpose of continuing to pollute for profit in the same old way for as long as possible. Who or what gives them the right to decide on the fate of life on the planet?
Our music today comes from Polish jazz pianist and composer Krzysztof Komeda and we open with title track to his 1966 masterpiece Astigmatic. To be astigmatic is to suffer blurred vision.
GUEST
Holly Buck researches the social dimensions of geoengineering as a faculty fellow with the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment in Washington, DC, as a member of the Steering Committee for the international Climate Engineering Conference in Berlin, and as a doctoral researcher at Cornell University, from which she holds a PhD in development sociology.
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MUSIC by Krzysztof Komeda
“Astigmatic”
“Cul-de-Sac”
“Get Out of Town”
“Don Kichot”
“Por Katastrofie”
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
