webinar register page

Between the Green New Deal and the Green New Look | Daniel Zimmer

Please confirm the time and date of the webinar at cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/cisac-events as dates and times may change.

The past decade has witnessed both mainstream policymakers and the general public begin to realize that it is by now too late to avert the massively disruptive impacts of global heating through mitigation efforts alone. With the early effects of warming already beginning to bite, debate will continue to shift towards questions of climate adaptation versus climate change preemption. While those who advocate climate adaptation anticipate spending many trillions of dollars to harden infrastructure and retrench critical sites (and perhaps entire cities) away from vulnerable areas, some leading advocates of climate change preemption urge spending a small fraction of that amount to decouple global temperature from rising greenhouse gas concentrations by using geoengineering techniques such as solar radiation mitigation (SRM). While nationwide adaptation strategies have often been referred to as a Green New Deal, this presentation argues that SRM proposals can best be understood as a “Green New Look.” The talk begins by revisiting the history of the first New Look policy of the 1950s—which spurred the mass production of thermonuclear weapons in an effort to provide “maximum deterrence at minimum cost” and introduced the phrase “more bang for the buck”—to illustrate how contemporary SRM proposals fit neatly into a long history of American leaders opting to knowingly place all human life on Earth in jeopardy for reasons of economic expediency. It concludes by providing several reflections on the potential long term effects of learning to live with the prospect of thermonuclear annihilation that may impact the looming choice of whether or not to attempt to dim the sun to preemptively defuse the climate crisis. 

May 23, 2023 01:00 PM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)