After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration

I was copying the link to this book to recommend it for the umpteenth time to a friend and was reminded there is only one review so far! This is crazy! HJB's book is tied in my mind for the most important "everyone should read this book!" I know (the other is probably "Resilient Leadership 2.0," by Duggan and Theurer). The climate crisis is bearing down upon us hard. The window for effective action is narrowing since the climate is a system, and positive inputs will take a long time to show up. Climate-improving actions also need collectively to be big, quick and sure-fire enough to make a difference. From what has mostly been on the news and written in book-form, people assume that emissions reductions alone is the solution.Emissions reduction is like turning off the faucet when there is a dangerously full tub. Yes, turn off the faucet...and the IPCC's recent special report acknowledges the need also for extensive carbon removal. Given how long excess CO2 stays in the atmosphere - centuries, or "the 1,000 year ouch," - we need a drain and/or buckets. This will involve massive public learning to drive political will to get a wise suite of carbon removal strategies going at scale. Right now, "get it done" means starting with even a modest investment in basic research. Explaining the situation, plus short- and long-term options, is where Buck's book shines.As one dives into the science it becomes clear that the timeframe for safe, slow clean-tech transitions has been shortened dramatically by the jump-up in extreme weather (see research by Jennifer Francis, Dim Comou, and Michael Mann). So, we have an urgent shared global problem on our hands, and a woefully under-informed public.What I find remarkable about this book is how Buck combines astute analysis with vibrant storytelling, including adding fictional scenarios to help us imagine the impact of various policy choices.She has dug down into the practicalities of various carbon removal and radiation reflecting approaches now known. Yet she pairs this clear knack for understanding science, numbers, and technology with a deep love for people. The book starts out brilliantly with fictional scenarios akin to "choose your own adventure" (which some of us will remember from childhood). HJB leads us into shared imaginings of what is coming and the room we still have for choice, movement, and love in the face of all that.She demolishes easy escapes we might want into over-simplification, either left- or right-leaning. Her middle ground isn't simplistic and lukewarm. It's nuanced and sophisticated. She can convey practical information in an engaging way; she also delves deeply into the mental frameworks we humans apply to everything - puncturing simplistic binaries we may have constructed to make ourselves more self-satisfied.Note: The term "climate engineering" also includes biological interventions like upping sustainable ag, planting more (of the right kind of) trees, and boosting kelp production. Humans have been geoengineering arguably for centuries with massive logging to build ships, and indisputably since the industrial age. In that time we have accumulated a massive waste dump of excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and ocean surface (~50% more than pre-industrial times). The "you broke it; you fix it" rule now applies.As an example of how much value I've found, like, everywhere in the book, I wanted to add a pic showing some of the notes I've taken while reading. I opened to a random page... See what I mean?Critiques:- I would prefer more emphasis on the role of government in investing and coordinating the deployment of the wisest climate engineering approaches. The scale of the challenge is huge and still one I'm struggling to get my mind around (even with a leg up because of a math degree). Challenges in grasping the scale make it easier to imagine we can leave solutions up to the market. How successful would the U.S. have been leaving fighting of WWII up to the market? Some things are big enough and far-reaching enough that they become jobs for government. In the U.S. at the moment this kind of government-led climate responsibility may seem far-fetched. Yet all doing begins with imagining.-This information is shared in a super easy-to-read and engaging way. But it's not simple. It deserves care and reflection. I wish there were a reading/discussion guide, interactive activities online, and maybe some short videos to help folks unpack these big ideas. They deserve to be savored and digested.In conclusion, read this book! ...Even if it takes a while and you end up rereading and adding stickies and notations like I have.

Buck is a sharp, engaging writer. The world is unlikely able to avoid surpassing a global temperature rise of 1.5C API without the use of large scale carbon dioxide removal approaches, including soil and forest restoration as well as industrial approaches like Direct Air Capture. This book provides tools to imagine possible futures in which carbon removal approaches could be understood, designed and deployed in ways that reduce climate harms and make the world a better place, rather than replicating or making worse existing inequalities. As well for solar radiation modification approaches which are yet to leave the lab, carry significant risks, but also must be considered, if we fail to mitigate and remove enough. Importantly, Buck tells stories well, and throughout the book introduces characters experiencing future worlds that help us understand more of what these ideas called geoengineering could mean for people.

Holly is the best voice talking about both the technology we need, and the social impacts of it. Very solid book with great insights.

From the title we are led to think that this book focuses on solar geoengineering -- spreading stratospheric aerosols, typically sulphates, to block sunlight. But the bulk of it is actually on various means of sequestering carbon -- removing it from the atmosphere.The title is explained on pages 26-27: "...[I]f a solar geoengineering program is to be ended on a meaningful timescale, it will rely on mitigation and carbon removal. If a regime begins solar geoengineering, it needs to keep putting those particles up there year after year, until carbon emissions are brought down. Thus, the hard thing isn't beginning the project, but ending it: ensuring that what comes *after geoengineering* is livable. This is a battleground that's currently obscured in most discussions of geoengineering."What we fear is that corporations and governments will at some point turn to solar geoengineering *because they have failed to reduce CO2 emissions,* and use it as an excuse to continue profitable CO2 emissions. If the program ended under such conditions, the Earth would suffer "termination shock" with a sudden spike in temperatures. Buck believes that we should not leave it to the Fossil Fuel Industry and those they control to make such decisions, and so her book is an intervention into the discussion on behalf of the rest of us, to provoke our participation, to think and talk about the unthinkable.But most of the book looks at various options for sequestering carbon -- in rocks, in the ocean, through direct capture, and so forth. She only comes back to solar geoengineering at the end. She interviews thoughtful, ethical scientists who are thinking about it and how it might be done responsibly along with (obviously) CO2 emissions reductions and sequestration.The book includes lots of interviews with those working on these issues. It also includes fictional scenarios and characters to provoke us to think about possible hopeful futures, which is a welcome addition to a topic clouded by a pervasive sense of doom.