Ethan Xu (10) | STAFF REPORTER
Luscious green grass, beautiful forests, and nature’s beauty can be found everywhere in our world. That’s what you would’ve seen in the past. However, just like humanity, the Earth has also gone through many significant changes, all because of humanity. When you look outside you might still see beautiful green grass and some wonderful trees, but now with the addition of someone’s half eaten piece of candy, some wrappers, smoke billowing out of factories and more. It’s true that we’ve started to recognize the effects of climate change on our beloved planet, shown through things like passing bills and even more notably the creation and meetings of the G20 summit. Clearly climate change is important to us, but what do we do when most of our efforts are futile?
Thus, the idea of geoengineering is introduced. Geoengineering, in short, is the deliberate modification of Earth using specific techniques to counteract/mitigate the effects of climate change. Geoengineering aims to change specific parts of Earth’s natural systems to address environmental issues, primarily global warming. But for something that seems so fool proof, why would we ever not want to geoengineer the planet, especially at a time where all else seems futile?
One main, and also big, counter argument to geoengineering is that we would simply use it as an excuse to justify the production of more greenhouse gases. After all, why would we try to take more responsibility if we already have been avoiding responsibility for our actions? But to this, I say that I think at the end of the day we still need to try and efficiently solve climate change. While it runs the risk of producing more greenhouse gases, it’s not like geoengineering is an immediate change, and it’s likely that it will require the continued efforts of many countries who are most likely also the primary reason for climate change.
Because of their constant interaction with geoengineering, it can be considered likely that these countries will take into consideration all the effort they’ve done into trying to solve the problems they created, and thus decide to keep working towards the path of remedying climate change instead of turning back. Furthermore, many countries have already spent a lot of time and effort actively researching ways to combat climate change, so it is once again unlikely that they will actively want to go back to the old ways, especially since newer technology has also proved to be very efficient.
Overall, I believe that geoengineering is at least worth a shot, and we should be allowing scientists to attempt to remedy climate change with geoengineering. At the end of the day, climate change should still not be taken lightly, and we should be actively trying to save our beautiful planet for the future generations.
