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.

"Original, thought-provoking...Accounts of cutting-edge technologies...are shot through with interludes of speculative fiction, which inject human nuance into risk-laden scenarios." - Nature

"After Geoengineering...hints, though, that the movement is at last starting to offer strategic thinking commensurate with the crisis at hand." - Boston Review

"Original, thought-provoking" - Nature

"A book to be read on its own terms...Buck's eloquent and useful text seeks to disentangle a varied and complex cluster of technologies from the intimidating labels of 'climate intervention' or 'geoengineering'." - New Socialist

"Buck expertly the nuance and complexity of figuring out what to do with the remains of an industry on which the entire global economy currently depends." - Issues in Science and Technology

"Besides her exemplary and comprehensive survey of current and near-future decarbonization technologies, one of the strengths of Buck's approach to narrative nonfiction is the treatment of an issue often too complex for individual imaginations.Incisive commentary and strong prose." - Elizabeth Garbee