News from a Changing Planet -- This Week on Earth #40

Controlling solar geoengineering, Biden's new historic investments in cleaning up industry, restoring coral reefs, new ways petrochemicals are making us sick and much more.

This graphic illustrates a few different kinds of solar geoengineering which is helpful to see, but we are talking about the release of reflective aerosols in this case. Credit CarbonBrief

WHO GETS TO RUN PLANETARY EXPERIMENTS? Right now, experts say it’s way too easy for anyone to do it. (E&E News)

Solar geoengineering, the idea that we could spray aerosols of one kind or another into the atmosphere to slow or prevent warming, has usually been discussed at the margins, but some kind of experiment seems like it could actually happen, despite some recent backlash.

Right now, in the U.S., it’s really easy to experiment in geoengineering: “Currently, a U.S. company or citizen with plans to inject aerosols into the atmosphere is required to fill out a one-page form with the Commerce Department 10 days before they do so.” That’s all they have to do! The government can’t stop them!

David Bookbinder, advisor at the Niskanen Center and former chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club, told E&E News: “I am more concerned about this than anything else.”

Climate solutions “are not going to get deployed in time, which is only going to create more of a demand for something like this….There’s no governance on the international level, national governance, there’s no state governance, there’s nothing.”

This is a giant Branchiocerianthus hydroid (over 3ft tall!), which lives on the abyssal plain at the bottom of the ocean and was only recently discovered. Credit Schmidt Ocean Institute

DEEP-SEA MINING SHOULD NOT BE RUSHED: But the international body governing sea-bed mining is being careless with our common treasures. (Nature)