Earth’s future in the Anthropocene: Technological interventions between piecemeal and utopian social engineering

Abstract

An extensive discussion in the academic and policy communities is developing around the possibility of climate engineering through stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). In this contribution, we develop a perspective on this issue in the context of the wider setting of societal development in the Anthropocene. We draw on Karl Popper’s concepts of piecemeal and utopian social engineering to exam-ine how different visions of societal development relate to SAI. Based on this reflection, we argue that the debate on SAI is fueled not only by the inequitable distribution of its effects and potential atmospheric and climatic side effects, as disconcerting as some of these effects and side effects may be, but also, and perhaps primarily, by its apparent privileging of the status quo and incremental change over a more immediate and radical change in societal organization. Although differing ideological orientations might thus help explain the intensity of parts of the debate, the understanding from which they follow, in which societal development is deduced from postulated technological characteristics and assump-tions about a technology’s use, hides from view a more subtle understanding of the relationship between technology and politics.