Unsurprisingly, his conclusions are similar to my own:
The scientific academies in the leading industrialized and emerging countries -- which often control the purse strings for major research grants -- must orchestrate a serious and transparent international research effort funded by their governments. Although some work is already under way, a more comprehensive understanding of geoengineering options and of risk-assessment procedures would make countries less trigger-happy and more inclined to consider deploying geoengineering systems in concert rather than on their own. (The International Council for Science, which has a long and successful history of coordinating scientific assessments of technical topics, could also lend a helping hand.) Eventually, a dedicated international entity overseen by the leading academies, provided with a large budget, and suffused with the norms of transparency and peer review will be necessary.Abundant research, deep transparency, and global cooperation are the only ways to deal with geoengineering safely.
It's heartening to see that the kinds of ideas I've been hammering on for a few years now are starting to trickle out into the mainstream. I doubt that Victor has seen my work on geoengineering; what's happening is that the debates about geoengineering in the green blogosphere (where my stuff gets read) and the high-level debates in the academic punditocracy have started to converge. And because this is in Foreign Affairs, it's likely to become a topic of discussion in Washington, DC.
One sign that this is underway is the announcement that DARPA -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- is hosting a colloquium on geoengineering at Stanford this week. Ken Caldeira will be there, of course, and I would be shocked if David Victor wasn't also invited. DARPA is a weird agency that is ostensibly under the Pentagon, but has historically supported a number of projects without clear military applications. Still, the very fact that a Department of Defense agency is looking at geoengineering is raising hackles, even among attendees.
“The last thing we need is to have DARPA developing climate-intervention technology,” says Caldeira. He says he agreed to go to the meeting “to try to get DARPA not to develop geoengineering techniques. Geoengineering is already so fraught with social, geopolitical, economic, and ethical issues; why would we want to add military dimensions?”
Unfortunately, we don't need to "add" military dimensions -- they've been there from the beginning. A technology with the potential to alter critical aspects of the global environment, with differential effects across regions, and not dependent upon a massive industrial base (so even available to non-state actors)? As I said in 2007, only partially tongue-in-cheek, no state wants to find itself facing a "terraforming gap." Wise or not, smart or not, geoengineering is a geopolitical issue, with all that entails.