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By Root 739 0

Green movement has discredited without good reason, harming both the climate and the interests of poor people in the process. Some Green groups have also made it very difficult to use the climate-change negotiations as a way to save the world’s forests by insisting that rain forest protection should not be eligible for carbon credits. In addition, environmental and development NGOs in general have been much too easy on rapidly emerging big carbon emitters like China and India, whose governments need to be pressed or assisted to eschew coal in favor of cleaner alternatives. Blaming the rich countries alone for climate change may tick all the right ideological boxes, but it is far from being the full story.

Most Greens also emphatically object to geoengineering—the idea that we could consciously alter the atmosphere to counteract climate change, for example by spraying sulphates high in the stratosphere to act as a sunscreen. But the objectors seem to forget that we are already carrying out massive geoengineering every day, as a hundred million people step into their cars, a billion farmers dig their plows into the soil, and 10 million fishermen cast their nets. The difference seems to come down to one of intent: Is unwitting and bad planetary geoengineering really better than witting and good planetary geoengineering? I am not so sure. At the very least a reflexive rejectionist position risks repeating the mistakes of the anti-genetic engineering campaign, where opposing a technology a priori meant that lots of potential benefits were stopped or delayed for no good cause. Being against something can have just as big an opportunity cost as being for it.

Certainly deciding on something as epochal as intentional climatic geoengineering would involve us in some truly awesome collective decisions, which we have only just begun to evolve the international governance structures to manage. But if we want the Anthropocene to resemble the Holocene rather than the Eocene (roughly 55–35 million years ago, which was several degrees hotter and had neither ice caps nor humans) we will need to act fast. On climate change, meeting the proposed planetary boundary means being carbon-neutral worldwide by mid-century, and carbon-negative thereafter. The former will not be possible in my view without nuclear new-build on a large scale, and the latter will need the deployment of air-capture technologies to reduce the concentration of ambient CO2. On biodiversity loss, we need to rapidly scale up “payments for ecosystem services,” schemes that use private-and public-sector approaches to make planetary ecological capital assets like rain forests and coral reefs worth more alive than dead. To meet the other boundaries we will need to deploy genetically engineered nitrogen-and water-efficient plants, remove unnecessary dams from rivers, eliminate the spread of environmental toxics like dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and get much better at making and respecting international treaties. We can learn a great deal from the success of ozone-layer protection, which remains a shining example of how to do it right.

Most importantly, environmentalists need to remind themselves that humans are not all bad. We evolved within this living biosphere, and we have as much right to be here as any other species. Through our intelligence, Mother Earth has seen herself whole and entire for the first time from space.4 Thanks to us she can even hope to protect herself from extraterrestrial damage: We now operate a program to track large meteorites like the one that destroyed a significant portion of the biosphere at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. The Age of Humans does not have to be an era of hardship and misery for other species; we can nurture and protect as well as dominate and conquer. But in any case, the first responsibility of a conquering army is always to govern.

INTRODUCTION

THE ASCENT OF MAN

Three large rocky planets orbit the star at the center of our solar system: Venus, Earth, and Mars. Two of them are dead: the former too hot,