Bits, Bots and Blockchains – ein Rückblick der ETC Group auf das Jahr 2017

“The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” —William Gibson, 1992

As the year careens to a close, summing up the trends, portends and hairpin bends of 2017 feels like a Pandora’s unboxing of mashed up dystopias. Call it technological convergence or the fourth industrial revolution, but the familiar cyberpunk themes of robotics, Artificial Intelligence and bioengineered economies are now becoming cyber-industrial fact.

As Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and the usual lineup of luminaries reissued their perennial warning about Artificial Intelligence, for ETC Group a jaw drop moment of 2017 was October 11^th when the AI-enabled humanoid robot Sophia was given a platform to address the United Nations in New York (something Civil Society Organizations and social movements are rarely afforded) and then engaged uncannily in policy banter with UN Deputy Secretary Amina Mohammed. The jaw-dropping-even-lower moment came only a few weeks later when Saudi Arabia decided to award citizenship to Sophia – a basic right that many millions of human beings are routinely denied. Important questions of democratic theory aside, it’s not yet even clear how Saudi Arabia considers the gender of its newest robot citizen. Sophia was allowed to receive citizenship without the abaya, the required head covering for women. Is ‘robot‘ then a new gender? It is illegal to be transgender in Saudi Arabia, but the country turns out to be cool with differently gendered robots. Can Sophia drive a car in Saudi Arabia? (Non-robot women can’t until June 2018.)

There were many anniversaries (there always are). It has now been 25 years since Blade Runner and 20 years since Gattaca. Perhaps most importantly, it has been 70 years since the venerable Bulletin of Atomic Scientists began publishing their ‘Doomsday Clock.’ This graphic displays how close human society and the planet are to likely annihilation (symbolically represented as midnight). In late January 2017, the hands of the doomsday clock were moved to 2.5 minutes to midnight, the closest it’s been to apocalypse since its worst in 1953 – the clock watcher citing in part the new technological platforms.

That’s the now-familiar bad news, but at ETC Group we think we have isolated the optimism gene, and unlike Musk and Hawking we are feeling unseasonably upbeat. Not about the present per se, but about the prospects down the line for 2040. We think there are viable paths to move those doomsday clock hands back a few notches in the next 20-odd years. More of that characteristic cheer below, but first here’s a too-fast annual ABC of the state of the present according to the ETC team of pulse keepers.

A – Acceleration, Artificial Intelligence, Accountability, Algorithmic Governance

From rising CO₂ in the atmosphere to widening gender and income inequality for humanoid citizens and non-citizens alike, we live in a time of accelerating negative trends correlated with the accelerating technologisation and financialization of everything. If one sector has come to symbolize the runaway nature of technology-driven change it is, of course, Artificial Intelligence (AI). Consider the trajectory: two years ago, ETC reported that Google’s AI machine learning algorithms had learned how to play space invaders and sort through cat photos. A year later, AI was gaming parking fines and evolving fascist tendencies on Twitter as a foulmouthed Microsoft chatbot. In 2017, we learned that, bored of cat photos but still addicted to Twitter, AI had also been busy manipulating voter behaviour and maybe stealing an election for Donald Trump (himself a humanoid foulmouthed Twitter chatbot). Trump’s biggest financial backer was, guess who, an AI guru turned hedge fund tycoon: Robert Mercer. For those who missed it, this year the story emerged that Robert Mercer had used his AI-driven voter data outfit, Cambridge Analytica, in a bid to mass-manipulate voter emotions and actions – not only in the US electorate, but also, successfully, during the British Brexit referendum. As 2017 draws to a close, Mercer’s political bot army, after a stint in Kenya, is headed to Brazil. Meanwhile, AI is simultaneously at work in other fields: designing hundreds of thousands of bioengineered organisms and a recent paper even hints at deploying algorithmic approaches to geoengineer the climate: a paper published last month developed an algorithm to precisely instruct where and how much sulphur might be introduced into what part of the atmosphere at what time to stave off climate change – rendering the entire planet an automated injection cooling system.

All of this is risky, but becomes frankly terrifying when considering the rapidly-emerging scholarship around the sticky problem of algorithmic governance. The algorithmic governance conundrum as applied to machine learning goes like this: A deep learning algorithm doesn’t work by any easy-to-comprehend set of instructions programmed by humans – it is a self-evolved pattern emerged out of a neural network whose rationale is a black box of unknowingness. Who then is responsible when an AI algorithm crashes a car (or an economy, or a planetary boundary)? Since no human can understand or take responsibility for the reasoning structure of a machine learning AI algorithm, there’s no human to prosecute or hold accountable – at which point a yawning black hole of unaccountability begins to engulf our legal and governance systems. The European Union is trying to fill that black hole by creating a “right to an explanation” in 2018 for humans who are on the receiving end of an algorithmic decision. New York City is trying to grapple with the algorithmic accountability problem too. But machine learning experts point out that may just not be technically possible. And on that cheery note:

B – Blockchains, Bitcoin, Bye-Bye Banks and Bureaucrats, Bonanza for Billionaires

Accelerating faster than AI (and not unrelated), 2017’s darling tech bubble was decidedly the Blockchain – the distributed digital ledger protocol originally invented to enable the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, whose speculative value skyrocketed from under $800 per bitcoin to almost $20,000 in mid-December before dropping back to around $16,000 a few days later. (Bitcoins’ value has climbed and crashed several times this year – a wild ride that outpaces the risk faced by any other investment sector.) While the sparkle and attention was on the financial baubles of the cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Dash), the serious interest is focusing in on the encrypted ledger itself. The blockchain is now being pitched as the panacea for everything: from trading carbon, land, water, biodiversity and agricultural commodities to dissolving banks, markets, bureaucracies and more. The magic workhorse at the heart of a blockchain-built future are programmed “smart contracts” that allow automated machines to exchange and coordinate value and labour without the human middle-man. Blockchain-enabled smart contracts do for white collar work what automation is already doing for blue collar work (replace it). Those who preach the anarcho-libertarian gospel of “better living through blockchain” believe the day is coming when central banks and government bureaucracies alike will dissolve into the thin air of the blockchain. But, ETC is asking itself, why then are block chains being so warmly embraced by bank consortia for their internal machinations?

As it turns out, the blockchain infrastructure is not so light and airy, or even efficient. Economists revealed this year that every single bitcoin transaction uses 77 KwH of energy (some say more). That’s enough to power a large American house for a week (or a more efficient Dutch house for two weeks). To put it another way, according to the “Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index,” daily bitcoin energy use, which is ballooning, was rivalling the energy use of Qatar by year end – and that’s just one blockchain platform. According to one analysis, if Bitcoin was handling the same number of transactions as Visa it would use the same amount of electricity as the entire world currently uses – or 500 nuclear power stations worth. In reality, it’s also rather slow, taking many hours per transaction – a rather different take on “slow money”. Meanwhile, up to a third of bitcoins, worth around 52 billion dollars, may be actually lost in password-expired purgatory, landfills, or down the cushions of virtual sofas. Concerns are also arising that new quantum computing platforms may be able to break the blockchain by cracking encryption. As UN agencies, companies and NGOs fall over themselves to uncritically embrace Silicon Valley’s blockchain-mania and accept or issue crypto-coins there is an urgent need for governments and social movements to catch their breath and decode who really gains by doing away with bankers and bureaucrats in favour of algorithmic accounting.

Looking at the blockchain hype, it is hard not to notice that the promised dismantling of the administrative state and shrinking of government services chimes perfectly with the ideology and priorities of the current White House. (Interestingly, former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon was previously CEO of a company farming Bitcoin-like electronic money using Chinese prison labour.) Even more significantly, the cryptocurrency ideologues’ desire to dismiss central banks and replace fiat currency with blockchains fits comfortably with the prime obsession of Trump’s AI-fuelled patron, Robert Mercer, who sees the return of the Gold standard and the end of central banking as a means to protect the interests of the sovereign super-wealthy like himself. Theoretically, it could take only a handy financial crisis for the White House to migrate both the dollar and the apparatus of government onto the blockchain, give pink slips to Washington’s bureaucrats and sell off the prime DC real estate to the Trump Corporation. Singapore is already exploring putting their dollar on a blockchain and experimenting with an Ethereum-based national currency coin. In any case, the blockchain, combined with the AI-induced wild ride of uncertainty that the economy is in for. will be a boon for hedge funds. So, keep an eye on the biggest data-driven AI-fuelled hedge fund of them all, Renaissance Technologies, whose analysts this year began using quantum computing for their secretive black box calculations. The CEO of Renaissance just stepped down from the limelight, but he will still be there fiddling with the back end of the Renaissance money machine. His name: Robert Mercer.

C – Consolidation, Big Cons and ChemGens

2017 marked the fourth year in a row that global Mergers and Acquisitions exceeded $3 trillion. Although the estimated $3.5 trillion in 2017 is 1% below last year’s, this is likely due to uncertainties in Washington and caution in Beijing. Barring the inevitable unforeseen, most market analysts expect 2018 to break new merger records as every sector of the economy scrambles to adjust to the Big Data pressures applied by Alphabet (Google’s corporate parent), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. The Fearsome Five are credited with having forced three of the largest defensive mergers in history during 2017. (Source: Financial Times, December 29)

Responding to the same high tech pressures, agribusiness mega-mergers were also all over the news this year, and very present in our minds as well. Last year, ETC was forced to conclude that if the mergers went through, there would no longer be separate seed and pesticide industries, but rather a merged entity we called the ChemGens. By the end of 2017, only the hookup between Dow and DuPont seems clear, while the Bayer takeover of Monsanto remains under question in Brussels and in several other jurisdictions. Although the deal between Syngenta and ChemChina seems to be going through, ChemChina is in trouble back home: its vice-president has been forced to step down and it’s having trouble finding the money to pay for the merger. Even Dow and DuPont – both US companies – are negotiating with activist shareholders and had to agree to revamp their restructuring. Meanwhile, to appease Brussels, Bayer is selling its own seeds division and some of its pesticides to BASF, making it clear that when the dust settles the current joy-of-Six (the big six agrichemical companies) will be reduced to a four-play, with BASF possibly looking for more prey or partnerships.

While we were all watching rigor mortis set in along the first links in the food chain – including the farm machinery and fertilizer companies – other links in the chain were also hardening. Food traders Cargill and Bunge both reached up and down the chain looking for new markets as they watched their historic control over agricultural data erode in the face of digital DNA and the big data around soils, satellites and robotics. 3G Capital – the guys behind the big brewery merger and the Kraft-Heinz deal, working with Berkshire Hathaway – tried to buy Unilever and are still looking for other potential food and beverage takeovers and/or acquisitions at the retail end of the chain. And, as everybody knows, the merger of Amazon and Whole Foods (North America’s biggest organic food retailer) has set the stage for future mergers among retailers. Foodtech meanwhile was the darling of the venture capital set – venture capitalists poured more than double the money they spent investing in food and agriculture start-ups in 2016 and there will be more to come. Alarmed by their declining market share, processors and retailers are also scavenging up and down the chain buying start-ups and looking for specialty craft products and companies. As Big Data devours food and agriculture, nobody anywhere along the Chain feels safe.

Competition Treaty? By mid-year, ETC and many of our partners were looking beyond the immediate mega-mergers and the weaknesses of national anti-trust legislation to the glaring absence of a UN Treaty on Competition. Although the UN Conference on Trade and Development has fashioned a Model Law on Competition Policy, there is no international agreement. An OECD study concluded that national regulators are increasingly sympathetic to giant mergers; that remedies are often driven by technology needs; and that, in the absence of a binding treaty, the “home” countries of merging enterprises should be allowed to take the lead. That is, the OECD is telling the Global South not to interfere, disregarding their sovereign right to do so – even though the impact within any single country could be greater than in the home countries, and the technologies that are driving the mergers may play out in unexpected ways. As we look to 2018, we expect to be talking with our partners about the feasibility of a new UN Treaty on Competition.

D – Deepening Distrust of Driverless Cars

Yes, driverless cars are still being sold by politicians on a promise of being ‘safer,’ but in the face of growing algorithmic uncertainties (see “A” above) proponents of autonomous cars will still be sighing with relief if 2017, unlike 2016, screeches to a halt with nobody actually dying from a driverless car accident. There were some close calls: in November, Britain’s ultra-alpha-male car celebrity, Jeremy Clarkson, disclosed that he had twice almost been killed by the bad driving of an autonomous car. Uber, determined to be first with a totally driverless car fleet, upped its chances of claiming death number two (Tesla got the first) as it made a deal with Volvo to buy 24,000 cars decked out with its driverless technology. Uber, it seems, is already vying with Monsanto for title of world’s most unpopular company, having been besieged with scandals through 2017 about links to the White House, systemic bullying and sexual harassment. In one of Uber’s more bizarre episodes in 2017, a would-be Islamic terrorist in the UK drove his Uber to attack Windsor Castle (the Queen’s residence) but his navigation system brought him instead to a pub of the same name. Police did not buy his claim that his four-foot sword was to slice pizza, though 10% of all Uber Eats rides are now for pizza deliveries.

But in truth it’s not just Uber, Tesla and Alphabet setting the driverless pace – all the biggest automobile manufacturers are racing to bring us driverless cars. Looking back at how those same companies have been handling safety these past few years, Jeremy Clarkson and his public may have good reason to be wary. Remember how General Motors was caught in 2014 hiding a deadly ignition switch malfunction that killed 124 people, how Toyota was slammed for failing to disclose faulty accelerator pedals on 9 million cars, and how Volkswagen gamed emissions standards? Well, in 2017, VW, Porsche, Audi, Daimler and BMW all fell under EC anti-cartel investigation for also fixing emission equipment and standards. Takata was forced into bankruptcy, faced with at least 18 deaths caused by malfunctioning airbags, and Nissan let slip that its car inspectors were sometimes uncertified. Mitsubishi (allied to Renault and Nissan) admitted to faking records on aluminum car parts, Subaru conceded to similar failings, and Toray Industries apologized for faking inspection certificates on cords used to strengthen car tires. Forget driverless cars – how about careless manufacturers??

E – Enlightened Elites Extract Data-Driven Excellence from Brilliant Beneficence Bots Built for Billionaires

There can’t be a Fourth Industrial Revolution without upgrading its accompanying philanthro-capitalism. From the First to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the enduring assumption has been that the Rich know best how to dispense charity. The world’s billionaires (now 1542 of them) upped their net worth by almost 20% last year to a combined total of $6 trillion (and that’s before counting the bitcoins: if the anonymous Bitcoin-inventor ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ were right now to cash out on their stash of bitcoins, they would shoot to the top half of Bloomberg’s billionaires list).

So-called “emerging markets” have a billionaire boom as well – and they are no more generous. From sporting just one billionaire in the 1980s, Brazil now counts 43 (of Latin America’s 87) with a combined net worth of $172 billion. Just one has made the Gates/Buffett pledge (see below)– and immediately lost their big B status. By contrast, Africa has just 25 billionaires and three have signed up to donate half or more of their wealth to “charity.”

Although much was made of the philanthropy of the new billionaires in China, India and Brazil, the heir and CEO of Korea’s Samsung was jailed for bribery while his foundation stands accused of channeling the bribes. Meanwhile, the US government can’t seem to find anything “charitable” in Donald Trump’s foundation and, in 2017, the Clinton Foundation was – as ever – under fire. In fact, most of the nouveau super-riche seemed to be squirreling away their money in anti-poverty crusades sheltering homeless Vermeers and Picassos.

To deflect attention, billionaire philanthropists led by Gates and Buffett announced a major upgrade in their collective giving – still harnessing their entrepreneurial algorithms and technological genius to end hunger, climate change, disease, gender discrimination, etc.

To the list of Zuckerbergs, Buffets and Gates, a new rising kid on the philanthropic block to watch is the Open Philanthropy Project, the plaything of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna (Dustin is billionaire #63). Their seemingly ultra-rational “effective altruism” approach tries to crunch the numbers on where billionaire bucks can be spent for maximum global bang. The outcome is that Open Philanthropy seems to be moving in block-step with Bill Gates techno-utopian playbook: channelling dollars into propping up gene drives, syn bio fake meats, and solar radiation geoengineering.

Even with their own data-driven take on philanthropy, the techno-fixers of the Fourth Industrial Revolution continue to believe that their entrepreneurial skills and technological genius make them the best judges for what humanity needs, and apparently what it needs is more technology of the sort that made them rich. It’s not likely that Elon Musk will build an Almshouse on Mars but if he does, we expect Uber will have the food contract and the driver will be paid in bitcoins.

The other Es: Eugenics and Enhancement

“I want to live in a world where people get drunk and instead of giving themselves tattoos, they’re like, ‘I’m drunk, I’m going to CRISPR myself.” – Josh Zayner, Biohacker and CEO of The ODIN (DIY CRISPR Kits)

Embryos get CRISPRd. In July, a team from Oregon Health and Science University, with colleagues in California, China and South Korea, reported that they had used the CRISPR gene editing method in dozens of human embryos to “fix” a mutation that causes a common heart condition. While not the first CRISPR embryo study (those were in China in 2015) the study dangerously ‘mainstreamed’ the idea of human germline intervention editing out diseases – although some of its claims were later disputed.

Biohackers get CRISPRd. Josh Zayner is the biopunk CEO of The Odin, who sell CRISPR- home kits online and also ship brew-it-yourself syn bio glow-in-the-dark beer kits. Zayner claimed this year to be the first person to ever CRISPR themselves when he started self-injecting with CRISPR DNA and RNA designed to increase muscle growth. He accompanied his self-editing stunt by releasing a DIY Human CRISPR Guide and selling $20 DNA to promote muscle growth.

Grampires lose their whiskers (“Grandpa, What Big Veins You Have!”) Blood transfusions from young mice to old mice make old mice younger. Scientists theorize that transfusions for us would do likewise – including slowing or reversing Alzheimer’s. A California start-up, Ambrosia, is charging $8000 per shot of ‘young blood.’ Look out Little Red Riding Hood!

F – Fake Foods Face Flops Amidst False Starts

2017 was supposed to be the year that biotech’s fake meats, fake dairy and fake food ingredients went full throttle into the mainstream. But the ‘vatitarian revolution’ seems to be sputtering. Two years ago, the leader of the syn bio pack was Solazyme, who, having faced an initial backlash for injecting syn bio algae oil into supposedly ‘natural’ washing detergent, renamed themselves as Terravia and took aim instead at displacing cocoa farmers with their algal butter. This year, however, Terravia waved the white flag and went bankrupt. Their competitor Evolva didn’t quite follow them into oblivion, but its founder Neil Goldsmith was unceremoniously dumped by the board as Evolva switched its strategy away from trying to grab global markets in vanillin and stevia to the rather less glamorous nootkatone (grapefruit flavour) and resveratrol byways of the ingredients world. Terravia had already suffered after being implicated in the great Soylent scandal of 2016. In 2017, Soylent (the fake meal replacement drink that boasts its GMO content) itself was facing its own tribulations with Canada’s food inspection agency banning the drink for failing to meet the definition of a ‘meal replacement.’

With Terravia by the wayside, the new leader of the pseudo-food pack emerged as Impossible Foods’ meatless ‘Impossible Burger’ – a vegan patty doused in a syn bio blood substitute known as heme that gives the impossible burger a meaty taste. But Impossible Foods also jumped the gun, rushing its product to market. In August 2017, ETC Group and Friends of the Earth US shared freedom of information disclosures from the US Food and Drug Administration that showed Impossible Foods had failed to convince the regulator that its pseudo-patty could be ‘generally recognised as safe.’ Impossible Foods had boasted that its burger would be in over 1000 restaurants by the end of 2017. So far, it’s less than half way and has just managed to resubmit its safety dossier for consideration. Meanwhile, the darling of Silicon Valley’s fake food set, Hampton Creek, switched its attention from mayonnaise to lab-grown meat and found itself embroiled in a failed coup, a resignation of the full board, allegations of attempts to game sales figures and being barred from retail giant Target. Equally telling were the fake food announcements that never were. For example, 2017 was supposed to be the year that syn bio start-up Perfect Day debuted its fake cow milk – but so far, no moo.

G – Gene Drives

In 2017, gene drives continued to accelerate as a threat to peace, biodiversity and food security. Gene drives are a synthetic biology invention that force an engineered trait to spread from one generation to the next. As the theory goes, you can genetically engineer one wild fly with a gene drive and then the genetically engineered trait spreads like… well, wild flies… until all flies in the wild carry that trait. The technology has the potential to modify or destroy an entire species. As 2017 drew to an end, ETC Group collaborated with Prickly Research, Third World Network, Friends of the Earth and others to publicly release the ‘Gene Drive Files’ – a cache of 1200 emails released under Freedom of Information laws that shed a light on a world of pro-gene drive jockeys itching to move ahead with the technology. Things we learned about gene drives in 2017 included:

Gene Drives may not work very well – A handful of papers pointed to the phenomenon of “gene drive resistance” that organisms engineered with gene drives will likely mutate in the real world and may eventually stop ‘driving’.

Gene Drives may work too well – Primo gene drive jockey Kevin Esvelt of MIT published a much noticed ’mea culpa’ in November when he and a co-author concluded that CRISPR gene drives may be too powerful to use in conservation since gene drive organisms could become aggressively invasive. Dr Esvelt had previously championed using gene drives in conservation: “I feel like I’ve blown it,” Dr. Esvelt told the New York Times. Championing the notion was “an embarrassing mistake.”

There’s still no such thing as a ‘local’ gene drive – Dr. Esvelt and others are now placing their hopes on making gene drive systems with in-built failure mechanism as a way of keeping spread ‘local.’ ‘Local’ gene drives would be of much more interest to corporate types wishing to sell gene drives as a service (and to military weaponeers) but in truth they are totally theoretical at this point.

The US Military and Bill Gates is in the driving seat – The clear conclusion from the Gene Drive Files is that this fast-advancing field is being structured and funded by the largesse of Bill Gates (who hopes for a quick fix for malaria) and the interests of the US defence establishment (who see a powerful potential weapon). The secretive military JASONS group this year undertook a classified study into hostile and agricultural uses of gene drives.

Agricultural and corporate interest in Gene Drives is rising – A secret JASONS study heard (secretly of course) from a senior staff from Monsanto and Cibus, and the California Cherry board is funding gene drive research on agricultural pests and have established Agragene – one of at least two private gene drive start-ups to commercialise the technology (the other is Synbal).

Millions of dollars are being spent to stave off oversight and buy government support – The Gene Drive Files also revealed the lobbying maneuvers of Emerging Ag – a private PR firm run by a former biotech lobbyist that received 1.6 million dollars from the Gates Foundation to fight back against any moratorium on gene drives. The Open Philanthropy Project meanwhile gave over $2.3 million to the African Union’s NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa’s Development) to “support the evaluation, preparation, and potential deployment of gene drive technologies in some African regions.”

H – Hands off Mother Earth! How Geoengineering got Normalized

For ETC Group, one of the most disturbing trends of 2017 was the ongoing, rapid normalization of the idea that we may soon geoengineer the planet. At the year’s onset, we watched several geoengineering enthusiasts sweep into key US government positions (one of them, thankfully, is out again, but only after writing the plan to eviscerate the EPA). At the international level, the UN’s climate science body, the international Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), began their special report on how to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. They included a pro-geoengineering Exxon scientist and a Saudi Aramco scientist as authors, sparking an outcry in May from 108 civil society organizations who signed a letter demanding the IPCC review the authors’ conflict of interest (the IPCC, incredibly, responded that it did not in fact contradict their Conflict of Interest  policy). By the time September rolled around, it was becoming clear that not only is geoengineering expected to play a prominent role in the much-vaunted 1.5 degrees report in 2018, it is also being ‘mainstreamed’ as a topic across the more significant Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC.

By October, when geoengineers met in Berlin to show each other their latest technofixes and to be seen talking earnestly about governance, some were already boasting that they hoped to sneak geoengineering into the UNFCCC process in 2018 via the Global Stocktake. By the time the UNFCCC met for its November meeting in Bonn, geoengineering was a major topic in the corridors, spurred in part by a rare US Congressional Committee hearing on geoengineering chaired by a leading Exxon-sponsored climate denier, Lamar Smith. So effusive was Smith about geoengineering as America’s best solution to something he previously didn’t believe in, even leading geoengineers asked Republicans to tone it down a bit: “In some ways the thing we fear the most is a tweet from Trump saying ‘Solar geoengineering solves everything – it’s great! We don’t need to bother to cut emissions,’”  said Harvard Geoengineer David Keith at a November 7^th forum. “That would just really make it hard to proceed in a sensible way.” However, he omitted to mention that a bill to boost geoengineering research  in the US had already been introduced.

Keith himself is still gunning to proceed with his long-delayed SCoPEx balloon experiment, to be launched from a spaceport outside Tucson, Arizona – close to the Mexican border. North America has three regional solar radiation management experiments slated for the coming year: high altitude balloons spraying particles in the desert southwest (that’s SCoPEx), spraying seawater to brighten clouds in California and floating plastic micro-beads on Hudson’s Bay. Even if Trump doesn’t tweet his support, if his administration (and that of Justin Trudeau – not likely) quietly give the nod to these experiments, the world will take a big lurch closer to a geoengineered future.

To prepare for these experiments, a new initiative on geoengineering governance also began in 2017: the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative (C2G2). As ETC predicted in our end of year report last year, C2G2 has been busily racking up Air Miles to inject the ‘geoengineering governance’ message into many fora. Unfortunately, it is doing so with unhelpful ambiguity, which most listeners interpret as promotion of geoengineering. While C2G2 is clear that it supports a hold on ‘deployment’ of SRM, it also seems to give the nod to real world SRM tests.

Weiterlesen: ETC Group’s Irreverent Year in Review… again