The Zero Sum Climate Game

Michael Tobis is to be applauded for being open to the idea of geoengineering,  but he’s delusional if he thinks the climate activist community is also open to it. In my post yesterday, I argued that, for climate activists,

any discussion of climate adaptation is an unwelcome distraction from the debate at hand on mitigation. Why there isn’t room for both discussions to occur beats me.

Tobis says this is a RPJr-ism and

really a very half-baked way of thinking about the [climate] problem. Forcing things under that rubric is simply a distortion.

Now I have no idea what an RPJr-ism is, much less whether I’m guilty of such a thing. Perhaps Tobis or one of Roger’s fans in the climate activist community can define this term for me?

But to the matter at hand, let me direct Tobis back to the same quote from 2020Science that he references. It’s a commentary on the recent Royal Society report on geoengineering, and this is the response that 2020Science predicted (emphasis added):

I suspect that, like most climate change-related reports these days, “Geoengineering the climate: Science, governance and uncertainty” will have ideologues on both sides of the aisle up in arms.  It dares to consider the option of actively engineering the climate on a planetary scale to curb the impacts of global warming, and advocates further research into geoengineering.  In doing so, it will no doubt simultaneously enrage deniers of anthropogenic climate change, and those who fervently maintain that technological fixes are not the solution to the consequences of humanity’s excesses.

The idea that sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere will save us is akin to the hope that a math equation can be solved by erasing one of the numbers.