Geo-Engineering: A Curse or a Blessing for Liberal Democracy?

Two basic answers to the challenges of the Anthropocene exist: adaptation (to the inevitable) and mitigation (of the inevitable). Several of the ‘inventors’ of concepts like global warming and the Anthropocene support a third strategy, strictly speaking a form of mitigation but quite a bit more ambitious in not accepting anything climatic as inevitable: geo-engineering, the global management of the entire planet’s system of ecosystems. Geo-engineering is mostly science fiction so far, not due to any technical or physical causes since no lack of adequate data has ever before stopped scientists and engineers, but for political reasons: it is, rhetorically and perhaps ideologically, several bridges too far for existing liberal-democratic nation-states. Yet real existing states (up to and including those same liberal democracies) are already implementing environmental policies with global effects, e.g. water management policies in the Middle East, the south of Russia, and California; or the Brazilian and Indonesian rainforest policies. In some respects then, geo-engineering is already a political fact. Geo-engineering poses several interesting dilemmas for ecological or ‘green’ liberals, both social and classical, not the least of which is that it seems to demand the replacement of allegedly classic nature/culture dichotomies. My focus will however be on a dilemma in political philosophy rather than ontology: on the one hand, controlling the environment means liberating humans from the bonds of nature, and countries that already implicitly engage in geo-engineering force the hand of those that don’t; on the other hand, if there is one perfect illustration of megalomaniac paternalistic totalitarianism, an ultimate way of dictating life plans, opportunities and perspectives, it must be geo-engineering. My paper will try to structure and elucidate the dilemma: in what sense exactly is or can state-guided geo-engineering be a curse, in what sense a blessing?