Prometheanism and the Precautionary Principle
David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering
MIT Press, 112pp, £10.95, ISBN 9780262019828
reviewed by Nick Srnicek
To put it mildly, David Keith’s A Case for Climate Engineering is a timely book. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recently released its latest report on the state of climate science, issuing new warnings about the severity of climate change. At the same time, observers are worried that a political stalemate is likely to emerge from the Warsaw meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). We have new certainty about the coming devastation of climate change and yet less international means to mitigate carbon emissions. In the tension between these two events, Keith’s book makes the case for an additional approach: climate engineering. Specifically, Keith focuses on solar geoengineering: the dispersal of sulphuric acid into the stratosphere in order to reflect sunlight back into space. As such, it should be made clear that the proposed geoengineering project is aimed at combatting warming – and not the other effects associated with climate change (e.g. ocean acidification).
Yet in making a case for geoengineering, the book is immediately confronted by a series of often outspoken critics. This visceral reaction many have to the idea of geoengineering (‘science gone mad’) does serve a productive function though, in concisely indexing the contemporary approach to complexity and uncertainty. In the face of seemingly inscrutable and complex systems (economic, political, or natural), the dominant tendency today has been to adopt some variant of the precautionary principle: the notion that an action must first and foremost avoid doing any harm, and that the proponents of an action must demonstrate this avoidance before any action can be taken. It is an inherently conservative principle, aimed not at solving problems, but instead at avoiding creating problems. It has become a sort of beautiful soul principle for the policy world: ‘at least we did no harm’. In its ubiquity, the precautionary principle manages to highlight the standard reaction to complexity and uncertainty. Indeed, from the dominance of the precautionary principle, to the lack of utopias in popular culture, to the political left’s inability to propose a systemic alternative to neoliberalism – caution, hesitancy, and lowered expectations pervade the debates about how to respond to global problems.
Here we see that Keith’s book stands in for a larger issue. Faced with imposingly complex and frighteningly interconnected systems all around us, there is a significant debate to be had: is the answer to retreat from the advances of the enlightenment, the rise in living standards, and humanity’s abilities to more rationally organise the world – or should these tendencies instead be accelerated into a modern version of Prometheanism? Geoengineering stands as a key fulcrum of this debate, but the debate is implicit throughout the social and political world. Issues over genetic engineering are rapidly rising in prominence and invoke the same split between Prometheanism and the precautionary principle. Similarly, such a split can be seen in political debates amongst the left. Horizontalism, anarchism, and communisation theory all critique the grand ambitions of classical leftism – raising images of ponderous totalitarian systems, inexorably perverted centralisation, and misguidedly certain programmatism. In their place, leftism has in practice turned towards the precautionary principle: privileging participation to the point of exhaustion, emphasising structural power to the point of fatalism, and valuing anti-hierarchy to the point of transience. Keith points out that this political common sense lies at the heart of many leftist approaches to climate change as well: in particular, the belief that the local is inherently virtuous and can resolve global problems. From this framework, geoengineering figures as an imposing monolith of technical mastery that looms over the local.
By contrast, Keith’s book is a clarion call to replace the precautionary principle with a twenty-first century version of the enlightenment belief in reason’s ability to change the world for the better. What is necessary is a Prometheanism at home with complexity, uncertainty, and flexibility. The dream of top-down total control is long gone, left alongside the ruins of totalitarian systems. Keith’s book embodies this, emphasising tentativeness in approaching the problems of geoengineering. Alongside calling for more research, the proposal advocates actions such as slowly ramping up the amount of sulphuric acid to be put in the atmosphere – allowing ongoing research to discern the effects of the engineering plan and respond accordingly. Likewise, acting in and on a complex system requires the rejection of classical ideas of mastery and planning. Amongst technical fields there is an increasing realisation of the uncertainty and unpredictability involved in complex systems. As a result, ‘we should expect surprise.’ Plans about how to geoengineer the earth system will necessarily be transformed in the process of implementing them – as technology changes, as politics changes, as the climate changes, and as feedback loops between all these realms take over. Rather than leveraging technology to smoothly alter an external system, the mastery of geoengineering is a mastery that requires flexibility and an experimental approach. Like traditional engineering, certain experiments with a complex system can examine components independently (as with testing the turbine blade of an aircraft, or the chemical transformations caused by aerosols). Yet such experiments must also be wedded to an understanding that the system as a whole can produce unintended effects – thereby limiting predictive capacities and requiring large-scale experimentation to be more tentative (rolled out in phases) and responsive to any unexpected consequences.
Yet as Keith well recognises, the issues with geoengineering are not simply about a scientific understanding of risks. More fundamentally, they are issues of designing the right problem and engineering a proper solution. These latter two rely on scientific assessments, to be sure, yet go beyond a mere calculation of facts in taking account of political and material tendencies. For instance, is the problem one of how to reduce climate change’s impact on the poorest? Or is the problem one of how to maximise food productivity? As Keith states, ‘the designer’s conception of the problem to be solved plays a huge role in shaping the resulting technology.’ If the design of the questions is not to simply exacerbate existing structures of power, they must be developed collectively. Indeed, one of the key refrains running throughout Keith’s book is the reminder that ‘we lack the social tools to make sound collective decisions about planetary management.’ Any project aimed at significant political change must encompass this as a crucial goal – a mechanism to ward off the threat of centralised (or privatised) Prometheanism.
The way forward then, as Keith’s book makes clear, is not to revert back to a romanticised localism, but instead to march ahead through the difficult path of creating collective structures for planetary deliberation, as well as adopting a Prometheanism at home with uncertainty and complexity, yet capable of solving truly global problems such as climate change. A Case for Climate Engineering is therefore a significant intervention: it’s written concisely, it’s humble in its limits, and it clarifies the stakes of the debate. In the end, it is an important call to move beyond the stultifying precautionary principle and to embrace a modern Prometheanism.
Yet in making a case for geoengineering, the book is immediately confronted by a series of often outspoken critics. This visceral reaction many have to the idea of geoengineering (‘science gone mad’) does serve a productive function though, in concisely indexing the contemporary approach to complexity and uncertainty. In the face of seemingly inscrutable and complex systems (economic, political, or natural), the dominant tendency today has been to adopt some variant of the precautionary principle: the notion that an action must first and foremost avoid doing any harm, and that the proponents of an action must demonstrate this avoidance before any action can be taken. It is an inherently conservative principle, aimed not at solving problems, but instead at avoiding creating problems. It has become a sort of beautiful soul principle for the policy world: ‘at least we did no harm’. In its ubiquity, the precautionary principle manages to highlight the standard reaction to complexity and uncertainty. Indeed, from the dominance of the precautionary principle, to the lack of utopias in popular culture, to the political left’s inability to propose a systemic alternative to neoliberalism – caution, hesitancy, and lowered expectations pervade the debates about how to respond to global problems.
Here we see that Keith’s book stands in for a larger issue. Faced with imposingly complex and frighteningly interconnected systems all around us, there is a significant debate to be had: is the answer to retreat from the advances of the enlightenment, the rise in living standards, and humanity’s abilities to more rationally organise the world – or should these tendencies instead be accelerated into a modern version of Prometheanism? Geoengineering stands as a key fulcrum of this debate, but the debate is implicit throughout the social and political world. Issues over genetic engineering are rapidly rising in prominence and invoke the same split between Prometheanism and the precautionary principle. Similarly, such a split can be seen in political debates amongst the left. Horizontalism, anarchism, and communisation theory all critique the grand ambitions of classical leftism – raising images of ponderous totalitarian systems, inexorably perverted centralisation, and misguidedly certain programmatism. In their place, leftism has in practice turned towards the precautionary principle: privileging participation to the point of exhaustion, emphasising structural power to the point of fatalism, and valuing anti-hierarchy to the point of transience. Keith points out that this political common sense lies at the heart of many leftist approaches to climate change as well: in particular, the belief that the local is inherently virtuous and can resolve global problems. From this framework, geoengineering figures as an imposing monolith of technical mastery that looms over the local.
By contrast, Keith’s book is a clarion call to replace the precautionary principle with a twenty-first century version of the enlightenment belief in reason’s ability to change the world for the better. What is necessary is a Prometheanism at home with complexity, uncertainty, and flexibility. The dream of top-down total control is long gone, left alongside the ruins of totalitarian systems. Keith’s book embodies this, emphasising tentativeness in approaching the problems of geoengineering. Alongside calling for more research, the proposal advocates actions such as slowly ramping up the amount of sulphuric acid to be put in the atmosphere – allowing ongoing research to discern the effects of the engineering plan and respond accordingly. Likewise, acting in and on a complex system requires the rejection of classical ideas of mastery and planning. Amongst technical fields there is an increasing realisation of the uncertainty and unpredictability involved in complex systems. As a result, ‘we should expect surprise.’ Plans about how to geoengineer the earth system will necessarily be transformed in the process of implementing them – as technology changes, as politics changes, as the climate changes, and as feedback loops between all these realms take over. Rather than leveraging technology to smoothly alter an external system, the mastery of geoengineering is a mastery that requires flexibility and an experimental approach. Like traditional engineering, certain experiments with a complex system can examine components independently (as with testing the turbine blade of an aircraft, or the chemical transformations caused by aerosols). Yet such experiments must also be wedded to an understanding that the system as a whole can produce unintended effects – thereby limiting predictive capacities and requiring large-scale experimentation to be more tentative (rolled out in phases) and responsive to any unexpected consequences.
Yet as Keith well recognises, the issues with geoengineering are not simply about a scientific understanding of risks. More fundamentally, they are issues of designing the right problem and engineering a proper solution. These latter two rely on scientific assessments, to be sure, yet go beyond a mere calculation of facts in taking account of political and material tendencies. For instance, is the problem one of how to reduce climate change’s impact on the poorest? Or is the problem one of how to maximise food productivity? As Keith states, ‘the designer’s conception of the problem to be solved plays a huge role in shaping the resulting technology.’ If the design of the questions is not to simply exacerbate existing structures of power, they must be developed collectively. Indeed, one of the key refrains running throughout Keith’s book is the reminder that ‘we lack the social tools to make sound collective decisions about planetary management.’ Any project aimed at significant political change must encompass this as a crucial goal – a mechanism to ward off the threat of centralised (or privatised) Prometheanism.
The way forward then, as Keith’s book makes clear, is not to revert back to a romanticised localism, but instead to march ahead through the difficult path of creating collective structures for planetary deliberation, as well as adopting a Prometheanism at home with uncertainty and complexity, yet capable of solving truly global problems such as climate change. A Case for Climate Engineering is therefore a significant intervention: it’s written concisely, it’s humble in its limits, and it clarifies the stakes of the debate. In the end, it is an important call to move beyond the stultifying precautionary principle and to embrace a modern Prometheanism.