After Geoengineering

After Geoengineering:Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration

  • Hardback

    + free ebook

    Regular price $24.95 Sale price $19.96
    Page redirects on selection
    Add to cart
    20% off
  • Ebook

    Regular price $9.99 Sale price $8.00
    Page redirects on selection
    Add to cart
    20% off

What if the people seized the means of climate production?

Climate engineering is a dystopian project. But as the human species hurtles ever faster towards its own extinction, geoengineering as a temporary fix, to buy time for carbon removal, is a seductive idea. We are right to fear that geoengineering will be used to maintain the status quo, but is there another possible future after geoengineering? Can these technologies and practices be used to bring carbon levels back down to pre-industrial levels? Are there possibilities for massive intentional intervention in the climate that are democratic, decentralised, or participatory?

These questions are provocative, because they go against a binary that has become common sense: geoengineering is assumed to be on the side of industrial agriculture, inequality and ecomodernism, in opposition to degrowth, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture and climate justice. After Geoengineering rejects this binary, to ask: what if the people seized the means of climate production? Both critical and utopian, the book examines the possible futures after geoengineering. Rejecting the idea that geoengineering is some kind of easy work-around, Holly Buck outlines the kind of social transformation that would be necessary to enact a programme of geoengineering in the first place.

Reviews

  • In the face of rapid climate change, how should we think about geoengineering? In this timely and bold book, Holly Jean Buck lays out a case for approaching geoengineering from the Left. Blending journalistic insight with scientific speculation, After Geoenginneeringinspires much-needed thought experiments about the changes coming to our warmer and weirder world.

    Joel Wainwright, author of Decolonizing Development, Geopiracy, and Climate Leviathan (with Geoff Mann)
  • With After Geoengineering, Holly Buck offers a sobering, prescient vision of a climate realism that we should heed. She decisively alters how the Left might understand the challenges of Planetarity and what anthropogenic intervention may require, both technologically and ethically. There are no easy solutions on offer, only difficult paths to cross while they are still open.

    Benjamin H. Bratton, University of California, San Diego
  • This is the guide to the future. There’s hardly anything scarier than geoengineering, but it is coming towards us, closer for every day of CO2 spewed into the air. It can no longer be wished away – and thankfully, we have Holly Jean Buck to explain what it might look like and how it could be survived, perhaps even used for the good of the planet. Written in graceful prose, combining the latest science with the crystal ball of a sci-fi author, this book shines. Anyone worried about what comes next should read it.

    Andreas Malm, author of The Progress of This Storm and Fossil Capital