By Jeff Goodell

Rolling Stone

Oct. 4, 2011

In 2006, when I wrote a profile of physicist Lowell Wood for Rolling Stone, the notion that we might "geoengineer" the Earth’s climate to reduce the risk of climate change – to build what amounts to a global thermostat – was an idea that only half-crazy Cold War-era geniuses like Wood would ever talk about openly, much less advocate.

My, how times have changed! Today, the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington D.C. – a most respectable think-tank – issued a report (PDF) by an 18-member blue-ribbon panel of scientists, Nobel Laureates, and former ambassadors arguing that geoengineering is not only an idea that needs to be taken seriously, but also one that the U.S. government needs to start funding research on today. Other respectable institutions and think tanks have issued reports on geoengineering in the last year or so – the British Royal Society among them – but today’s report, which the New York Times covered, legitimizes geoengineering as a respectable topic of policy discussion among Beltway policy wonks. Depending on how you feel about geoengineering, that may or may not be a good thing.

Geoengineering – or "climate remediation" as the BPC report chose to call it – is usually defined as large-scale, deliberate manipulation of the Earth’s climate to reduce the risks of climate change. There are two basic techniques: one is to build machines or develop technologies to remove carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere; the other – far more risky – is to engineer ways to deflect a small amount of sunlight away from the planet, perhaps by shooting sulfur particles high into the stratosphere.

Read the full article here

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Energy Project, Task Force on Geoengineering, Energy Innovation Initiative