On this day 32 years ago, in the middle of the first big public and legislative wave around the issue, the Washington Post carried a report about what we now call “geo-engineering.”
IRONING OUT ‘GREENHOUSE EFFECT’ By William Booth Washington Post May 20, 1990 Scientists trying to battle the “greenhouse effect” have seriously proposed dumping hundreds of thousands of tons of iron into the ocean to create giant blooms of marine algae that could soak up much of the excess carbon dioxide believed to be responsible for global warming. If the massive scheme is carried out, researchers say, it would be among the greatest manipulations of nature ever attempted.
This image below, from a Guardian newspaper article from 2013, sums up the mechanism by which is is supposed to work..
Why this matters
Geo-engineering is still on the table – space mirrors, sulfur cannons, you name it. And we will do it because rich people will figure “hell, why not, nothing left to lose.”
What happened next
Big geo-engineering “solutions” kinda disappeared into their own niche, to get occasional media coverage (see here). They are slowly climbing into policymaker awareness. Expect some big publicity campaigns and action in the coming decade, when it is clear that everything else – ETS, BECCS etc, have failed…