Geoengineering: Hacking Planet Earth | Thomas Kostigen

04/21/20 • 28 min

“I believe the private sector and the scientific community has a bit more of a nimble opportunity here to change things more rapidly than what we keep looking at, you know, governments to do for us.” ~ Thomas M. Kostigen, author of Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering Can Help Us Reimagine the Future

Today we’ll be speaking with Thomas M. Kostigen, a New York Times bestselling author and journalist and has written for such publications as National Geographic, Discover, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times. As a journalist, Kostigen has traveled across the world to report on everything from war zones to extreme weather. I could go on listing Thomas’s many accomplishments but I'll let them speak for themselves. Today we’ll be focusing primarily on his new book, Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering Can Help Us Reimagine the Future. We’ll talk with him about things that frankly seem more fitting for a sc- fi novel than a climate change podcast, things like zapping clouds with lasers to make it rain and using nanoparticles to reflect the sun’s rays back into space.

Thomas: Hacking Planet Earth really goes into my definition of geoengineering, which is how we can take better control of not only the climate but what the climate accelerates and is connected to. And that's pretty much everything in our lives. So our food systems, mobility systems, how we conduct urban planning and how we are going to even socialize and interact in the future. And given today’s circumstances, the unfortunate circumstances With COVID-19, we're getting a little taste of what invisible threats, just like climate change, can do to our everyday life. So within the pages of Hacking Planet Earth, I get into all sorts of technologies that can affect with a big “E” the climate today, not 10 years from now, or 20 years from now or 30 years from now but today. And these technologies range from different types of devices that can deflect the sun to taking carbon out of the atmosphere, to better enhancing our soil for agriculture, to all sorts of things that we have on the innovation front and mad, mad geniuses have gotten behind, we just need to bring to scale. And so the book is really a marriage or a call for a marriage between the investment and business community and the science community. Clearly the government and political forces that traditionally would be our societal benefactors and protect us from things like climate change or other public health issues such as COVID aren't there for us. So we need to take matters into our own hands and start to do what nature can no longer do for herself. And that is to manipulate the climate for the better for all of us.

David: When I first heard about geoengineering, I thought it sounded...

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