Publication Date:
Source:
Author:
Professor David Victor is quoted in MacLeans in an article discussing changing opinions of scientists about the feasibility of geoengineering to combat climate change:
But somewhere amid reports of melting icefields, worsening droughts, and soaring CO2 concentrations, previously closed minds snapped open. In the last two years, geoengineering has gone from the implausible purview of Dr. Evil-style kooks to a subject of serious scientific and political debate...
...
“As recently as last year, nearly the whole community would fit comfortably in a university seminar room,” David Victor, the head of Stanford University’s Program on Energy & Sustainable Development, and his co-authors write in “The geoengineering option,” a piece in this month’s issue of Foreign Affairs. “And the entire scientific literature on the subject could be read during the course of a transcontinental airplane flight.”
...
Twenty years ago ... ideas—lumped together under the broad rubric “geoengineering”— could hardly be discussed in polite scientific company. Even less so in environmental circles, where many viewed any proposal to manage climate change as a threat to efforts to stop it.
... many of those who were around the table [in those days] are among the voices now calling for more research. David Victor is one. ...
...
The focus is already shifting to the next big challenge surrounding geoengineering: how to regulate it. The early estimates that make sulphate scattering look both technologically simple and incredibly cheap—an annual cost of less than 0.5 per cent of global economic output, suggests Keith—also make it dangerous. “You need a strategy because it’s not inconceivable that you could see one country, or even a very wealthy individual, decide to intervene in the climate system,” says Stanford’s Victor. Last spring, he organized a Council on Foreign Relations workshop to kick-start discussions about an international regulatory framework. Another meeting, involving representatives from several European nations and the EU, will take place in Portugal next week.