The Myth of the Sci-Fi Solution

This week-old article in the Christian Science Monitor (actually a decent paper) has been nagging at me. I feel like this represents science trying to hit a 465-foot home run when all that is needed are some opposite-field singles. It seems to me like there's too much effort put into stopping global warming with "the big idea" rather than with a series of little ideas. In addition, this search for the big idea ignores the elephant in the room, that it's global dependence on fossil fuels that is the real problem, and no amount of giant space mirrors or atmospheric carbon vacuums or massive algae blooms is going to really change that.

I'd like to think that there's some technological "killer app" that can make global warming obsolete, but it just doesn't seem like the best way to address the issue. This is science as practiced in Hollywood movies ("We can push the asteroid BACK into space with a giant slingshot!") rather than one applicable to the present day. I agree with Bill McKibben, quoted in the article:

But others say the discussion over mitigation seems to have gotten ahead of itself. Why talk about fixing symptoms when we have the technology to address the root cause? "There's no getting around the fact that we're in a very desperate situation," says Bill McKibben, author of "The End of Nature" and more recently "Deep Economy." But "before geoengineering, let's do a little policy engineering first."

Indeedy.