Engineering the Climate: The Career of an Unlikely Innovation

• In Event: How Has Climate Change Reshaped Scientific Expertise and the Expert? - I

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the rise of a controversial suggestion within climate-policy agendas around the globe: Geoengineering suggests to deliberately intervene in the Earth’s climate system to address global climate change. Instead of resonating as a positive vision of socio-technical innovation, however, geoengineering manifests as a daunting option of last resort—a Plan B in tackling one of the most defining challenges of our time. How can we make sense of this highly conflicting process of innovation? How does geoengineering emerge within climate-policy—despite insoluble scientific complexities and fierce political contestation?
The paper addresses these questions by tracing the “career” of geoengineering within U.S.-politics: Drawing from documentation of federal proceedings (1990–2015), it systematically follows geoengineering through congressional hearings, legislative procedures, and Executive Branch reports. This perspective suggests that the formulation as a Plan B merely marks the latest chapter in a longstanding history: Throughout its emergence, geoengineering has substantially changed its shape; it has been problematized in shifting political contexts, and devised by a diverse infrastructure of scientific experts. Neither by turning exclusively to climate-policy, nor to climate-science, this career is sufficiently accounted for. Instead, it unfolds as a function of the mutual interdependence of science and politics in addressing anthropogenic climate change.
The dynamic trajectory of this career thus challenges linear conceptualizations of the science-politics-nexus. Precisely in its dissonance as a Plan B, geoengineering unravels the diverse channels in which scientific expertise becomes politically relevant. It serves as a prism for the reciprocal and historically contingent science-politics interrelationship.

Author

• Julia Schubert, Forum Internationale Wissenschaft