Subcommittee on Environment & Subcommitt

Geoengineering Subcommittee on Environment & Subcommitt

Geoengineering is a set of climate interventions that aim to manipulate our climate to either remove greenhouse gases from our atmosphere or reduce the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth. Now, some may argue that geoengineering is a way to use technology to bypass important mitigation and adaptation strategies that address the impacts of climate change, but even with geoengineering, our first and primary actions to address climate change must be mitigation and adaptation strategies. Geoengineering is an option our country should explore. The state of current geoengineering research makes clear that we are years or perhaps decades away from potential deployment, and the risks of deployment are not well understood. A key finding in the U. S. Global Change Research Program's Climate Science Special Report determined that further assessments of the technical feasibilities, costs, risks, co-benefits, and governance challenges of climate intervention or geoengineering strategies, which are as yet unproven at scale, are a necessary step before judgments about the benefits and risks of these approaches can be made with high confidence.