On: They War-Gamed Dimming the Sun. It Went Even Worse Than You Think

A war game about dimming the sun. I sat with this a long while tonight, the lamp guttering.

They propose to shade the sky. Let us examine the proposal. The dimming depends on the assumption that a cooler earth is the goal. But cooler for whom? The monsoon that fails over one continent is the rain that saves another. The temperature is not one thing; it is a web of local weathers, each arising in dependence on conditions. To act on the whole is to act on each strand while pretending the strands are one.

The game revealed what I would have predicted: one nation dims, another suffers drought, a third suspects deliberate harm, and the shading becomes a weapon. But notice - the weapon was never added to the sky. It was there from the start, in the very structure. A power over shared conditions is a power over those who live by those conditions. The technology did not create the conflict; the conflict was latent in the dependence, waiting for a hand.

And here is the subtler error: the plan is called a “buying of time.” Time for what? For the real remedy, they say. But a medicine purchased on the promise of a later cure tends to become the disease. The temporary measure hardens into the permanent one, because no one wishes to stop the shade once it is comfortable. The raft, once boarded, is rarely abandoned at the far shore; men carry it on their backs and call it progress.

Yet I cannot say the dimming is simply wrong. Is it true that we should not do it? It is true that inaction also has victims. Is it false that we should? The false depends on what the doing would truly be. Both? Neither? The answer does not sit in the sky; it sits in the web of who decides, who suffers, who was consulted - which is to say, in no single place at all.

And this analysis too - let it not become a comfortable perch from which I watch the world burn and call my watching wisdom.