Image: NASA Earth Observatory

I’ll admit it: I’m scared of the future.

By now we’ve all heard frightening speculation about a future of rising carbon emissions and intensifying climate change. I often find myself overwhelmed by the unrelenting reality that humans have thrown the entire planet out of whack and now we’re paying the price. Some days I see human extinction as the only possible outcome. Life in the meantime seems futile.

I’m not alone in my climate despair. Last year, the American Psychiatric Association reported that over two thirds of Americans are anxious about climate change. Young people especially are struggling with imagining a future in a world that seems so unstable. 

Resigning ourselves to climate doom won’t solve climate change. It makes us apathetic and unmotivated to look for innovative solutions or push for emissions reductions. If we want to stave off complete climate catastrophe, we need at least a little bit of hope.

Enter solar geoengineering, the brilliant and controversial idea to release reflective particles into the atmosphere to block out some sunlight and slow down the greenhouse effect. No other proposed climate solution would be anywhere near as fast, effective, or cheap.

A lot of people, including climate scientists and environmentalists, think it’s a terrible idea; it’s slapping on a bandaid while corporations continue to hemorrhage fossil fuel emissions. If geoengineering provides any relief, people might stop feeling the sense of urgency that’s driving other climate action.

There is a lot that could go wrong with trying to engineer the climate. Right now, the research is mostly computer models and speculation. A leading research group at Harvard had planned to conduct some of the first field experiments in Sweden this summer, but they were shot down by Swedish environmental groups and the Saami Indigenous people for failing to consider the interests of local communities.

There’s certainly merit to the criticism. Geoengineering shouldn’t be entered into lightly or without engaging local communities and prioritizing justice and equity. But as I teeter on the edge of a pit of climate doom, the idea that we could buy ourselves more time to get our act together is tantalizing, and I think we should consider it.

Reducing emissions on the scale we need to, in the time we need to do it, seems impossible. Even if the Green New Deal hadn’t crashed and burned two years ago, implementing its massive structural changes to zero-out carbon emissions by 2050 or sooner would be enormously expensive and challenged by conservative politicians at every step of the way. 

Geoengineering could give us a positive action to rally around and make us feel like we’re doing something. Even if it doesn’t work like we expect it to, it could reinvigorate climate action and pull us back from the brink of climate fatalism. 

Maybe we don’t need to geoengineer our way out of a climate catastrophe– just our climate despair.

Nobody can predict what a geoengineered future will look like, but we need to try to imagine it. Last summer, I learned a lot about prison abolition, and something I’ve been carrying with me is the importance of imagination. According to Angela Davis, imagination is one of the most important tools for solving big problems like the prison system. This works for climate change, too: imagine what you want a geoengineered world to look like, then think about what needs to happen to make that a reality.

I’m imagining a world where we’ve embraced geoengineering. It’s a world where fewer people have to move inland to escape rising sea levels, where coral reefs have time to adjust to warmer water, and agricultural belts continue to thrive. It’s also a world where I could hope to see a glacier in real life one day. Sure, it’s just speculation, but I think attitude matters. Geoengineering offers us the opportunity to reframe climate change as an opportunity to build a world we want to live in.

If we really want to stop climate change, we need to stop burning fossil fuels. But a simple answer isn’t always the easy one, and energy transition is going to turn our world upside down. Geoengineering could buy us just enough time to make that  transition thoughtfully, not frantically.

Geoengineering isn’t our only hope– it’s not even a real solution– but it could give us some hope when we desperately need it.