Indeed, if geoengineering has anything going for it, it is that it slots perfectly
into our most hackneyed cultural narrative, the one in which so many of us have
been indoctrinated by organized religion and the rest of us have absorbed from
pretty much every Hollywood action movie ever made. It's the one that tells us
that, at the very last minute, some of us (the ones that matter) are going to be saved.
And since our secular religion is technology, it won't be god that saves us but Bill
Gates and his gang of super-geniuses at Intellectual Ventures. We hear versions of
this narrative every time a commercial comes on about how coal is on the verge of
becoming "clean," about how the carbon produced by the tar sands will soon be
sucked out of the air and buried deep underground, and now, about how the mighty
sun will be turned down as if it were nothing more than a chandelier on a dimmer.
And if one of the current batch of schemes doesn't work, the same story tells us
that something else will surely arrive in the nick of time. We are, after all, the
super-species, the chosen ones, the God Species. We will triumph in the end
because triumphing is what we do.