Opinion Why there is no diet pill for climate change

Why do the hard work of overhauling an unhealthy lifestyle if one can simply pop a diet pill or, if you can afford it, get liposuction? With each year that passes, as nations, people and companies fail to implement the most obvious solution to the climate crisis — consume less, burn less and waste less — silver bullets, however unrealistic, start to look more and more attractive. Take the recent decision by the US government to research the possibilities in the controversial idea of solar geoengineering, so far seen only in science fiction works such as the Neal Stephenson novel Terminal Shock. The plan involves shooting reflective particles into the stratosphere to deflect the rays of the sun and help bring down terrestrial temperatures.

The last time such a thing happened was in 1991, when the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines brought about a “volcanic winter”, with global temperatures cooling by about 0.4 degree Celsius. That at least one government is seriously considering something that, so far, was done by volcanoes is perhaps the clearest illustration of the desperate times the planet is in. It can only be hoped that the inevitable knock-on effects of tampering with the earth’s system are seriously considered. These, as history shows, are likely to be considerable: The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia led to the “year without summer” in Europe, worldwide harvest failures and food riots.

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Perhaps it is possible for human intervention to stave off the disaster that, right now, seems inevitable. On the other hand, believing in such a possibility betrays a hubris of the kind that led to Icarus’s fall. The fantasy of a planet-saving technological intervention is, no doubt, comforting, but the best solution may be to go on a consumption diet.