Who Is Geoengineering?

Unless you’re lucky enough to live on another planet, you’ve probably heard about the climate crisis. It’s a problem we must address if we want humanity--and the rest of the Earth’s animal and plant population--to continue to survive and thrive. But in order for that surviving and thriving to happen, we must immediately and definitively cut emissions and begin the transition away from fossil fuels. How’s that going? As you’ve probably heard, not so well, and as a result, more radical approaches are increasingly in the mix. Geoengineering is one of these, and while it won’t solve the climate crisis, it may enable us to remove some of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted and even artificially lower global temperatures while we detox from fossil fuels. The catch? We don’t really know what would happen if we did it, and we may not be able to undo it. On this episode of “Who Is?,” it’s a look at one of the big choices we may have to make in the not so distant future.  

• Elizabeth Kolbert, who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Her most recent book, “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future,” was published in February of 2021 
• Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G). Pasztor was previously United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Change in New York under Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

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