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A few months ago, I came across a headline that didn’t seem to make sense: Republican lawmakers in Tennessee voted to ban solar geoengineering, a largely theoretical method of artificially cooling the Earth.
But nobody in the state had actually proposed trying geoengineering. So why move to ban it?
The idea of geoengineering has been gaining attention from scientists and policymakers as climate change gets worse. How the method works: By injecting aerosols into the atmosphere, scientists think they may be able to reflect some of the sun’s heat back into space.
My colleagues and I on the Climate desk have spent most of this year writing about the topic for “Buying Time.” It’s a series that aims to help readers understand the premise and dangers of geoengineering, and whether it might someday buy humanity time, as we struggle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Something else struck me as odd about the situation in Tennessee: Lawmakers around the United States were introducing similar bans, calling geoengineering a threat to the environment. But those lawmakers were mostly far-right Republicans, for whom environmental protection isn’t typically a top priority.
The bills shared key passages, suggesting they came from the same source. So I set out to discover who was behind it all. The answer promised to reveal a tantalizing piece of the geoengineering story: Who is mobilizing to stop it, and why?
Answering those questions was harder — and more unsettling — than I expected.
ImageA cloud-brightening machine in Alameda, Calif., is one example of solar geoengineering.Credit...Ian C. Bates for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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