In the media: Xavier Landes on risks of geoengineering
Portal Satori features a new article (in Latvian) from Associate Professor Xavier Landes. In this article titled "Ko es atklāju, pētot klimatinženieriju" ("What I discovered, researching geoengineering), Landes highlights four aspects of the technologies for climate manipulation that surprised him and justifies opening up the debate on those techniques.
Xavier Landes writes:
"Geoengineering is still largely perceived as a science-fiction topic, Landes explains. However, when conducting this 5-year research, I unearthed several disturbing facts.
First, geoengineering is already here, studied by academic teams, included in policy reports and sometimes even employed.
Second, and more troubling, when a government or a company announces a grand plan for becoming carbon neutral by mid-century, most of the time it relies on the future implementation of geoengineering methods (carbon dioxide removal).
Third, some technologies, which modify solar radiation, will create new regional climates. In many instances, those novel conditions will harm further vulnerable populations. Fourth, geoengineering presents substantial dangers of "lock-ins". As a result of their deployment, humanity might remain trapped into fossil energies or indefinite climate alteration.
Those are reasons why in Latvia, within the European Union, and globally we need to have discussions about how to regulate and govern those interventions."