The Planet After Geoengineering

Geoengineering refers to technologies that counteract the effects of anthropogenic climate change by deliberately intervening in Earth systems. Climate scientists and policymakers are deeply divided over which forms of geoengineering to pursue, if any. What looms for the planet as the window for action on climate change is closing rapidly? “The Planet After Geoengineering” is a speculative fabulation about climate engineering technologies. The project portrays a series of possible Earths following the deployment of such promissory technologies, all while situating them within a genealogy of climate-control projects from 19th-century rainmaking machines and volcanic eruptions to Cold War military plans. The series of five chapters––Petrified Carbon, Arctic Albedo, Sky River, Sulfur Storm, and Dust Cloud—are assembled into one planetary section from the deep underground to outer space. Each geostory constructs the worlds of such technologies accounting for its inadvertent externalities—of sites, scales, economies, values, and lifeforms.