Marine Guglielmo Weber, Irsem researcher. “Our way of life is not suitable for our planetary system”

Madame Figaro. – Your book is about geoengineering. What are we talking about? ?
Fleet by Guglielmo Weber. – All techniques or projects that deliberately aim to modify our environment on a fairly large spatial scale, at least a region, or even a continent, sometimes up to the entire planet, with the aim of providing technological solutions to climate change.

How would we achieve this? ?
We distinguish two big families. The first is the extraction of carbon from the atmosphere using huge CO2 vacuums that filter the air, or, for example, biomass-based techniques. is from our atmosphere to artificially cool the planet.This is due to the spread of aerosols, clouds or thanks to the reflective power of the oceans or, for more sci-fi projects, mirrors in orbit around the Earth.

Who is driving these disruptive innovations? ?
The American tech sector, above all. Entrepreneurs, investors and philanthropists see this as both the opening of a new market and the emergence of climate change solutions that are compatible with our way of life. The American government is also funding projects and even has a radiation balance a national research program that sets it apart from other states. The European Union, for example, advocates a moratorium on these technologies.

However, don’t they promise benefits? ?
They remain potentially and cause an infinite number of problems. if, for example, biomass-based solutions were applied on a global scale.As for artificial cooling, its global impact would put us at risk of cascading climate effects under

Before “entering a new age” you write…
It would be like putting the planet on life support. The very stability of the atmospheric system would depend solely on technological devices. And if they no longer work. For example, after a fifty-year change in the radiation balance, the temperature increase will occur within a decade. This is called a “terminal shock” and we will not be able to adapt to its consequences. Geoengineering benefits from the flow of funds it continues to be compatible with growth, the unlimited extraction of natural resources and the expansion of capital. But the climate crisis reveals this to us; our way of life is not suitable for our planetary system.

Wind power and photovoltaics are important to escape the fossil world, but they are not enough

Fleet by Guglielmo Weber

We still need some technology…
Yes, but it all depends on what role we give them in our society. Wind power and photovoltaics are important to move away from a fossil fuel world, but they are not enough. These technologies must be supported by public sobriety measures, or we will continue to over-consume and over-produce without planetary limits. Scholar Yamina Saheb, who contributed to the writing of the 6^e The IPCC report says it well. if we gave the same visibility to smart solutions that are also innovative as we give to geoengineering, we would solve the problem.

Are we caught up in arrogance? ?
Rather, the atmospheric system pre-exists us, and is composed of finite natural resources. The return to our physical knowledge reflects the forgetting of these limits , the stability of our planet is at stake, our ability to live well, but also to survive. We will still be here in a hundred years.

Marine de Guglielmo Weber is a researcher at Irsem (Military School Institute for Strategic Studies).