Since the dawn of humanity, people have cooked food. From roasting meats over a fire to sourdough starters passed down from one generation to the next, cooking has been a deeply personal yet communal part of the human experience. But if you'd rather cast aside centuries of subjective, place-based, family-driven cooking and turn from the warmth of the hearth to a cold and sterile session in a chemistry lab, then The Wall Street Journal's opinion page has the perfect (fake) climate solution for you!
A new column by Tunku Varadarajan, a WSJ contributor and fellow at the polluter-backed American Enterprise Institute, lavishes praise on Nathan Myhrvold, the boy-genius-turned-Microsoft-executive-turned-chef-turned-geoengineering-advocate.
While most WSJ opinion pieces call for delay or downplay, deny, distort, and deceive readers about the reality of climate change, Varadarajan instead mirrors Myhrvold's acceptance of the problem, while still missing the point. The headline, for example, starts with the bald-faced lie that "emission cuts will fail to stop climate change" and then asks what we should do instead, in order to set up Myhrvold's stance that geoengineering is an answer.
Aside from a misrepresentation of the lag between emissions and warming, Varadarajan doesn't try to prove that reducing the fossil fuel pollution that's causing the climate crisis would "fail to stop climate change." Instead, he trades on Myhrvold's admittedly impressive credentials to lull readers into an unearned sense of trust. With multiple degrees and a stint at Microsoft, Myhrvold's also the man who made a five-volume, multi-hundred-dollar cookbook for "Modernist Cuisine" that invented modern cooking in the same way Christopher Columbus "discovered" America, full of recipes requiring multiple multi-hundred-dollar gadgets and gizmos. Myhrvold essentially boiled down one of the most pleasurable human experiences into the sort of precision laboratory drudgery normally requiring closed-toed shoes, safety goggles, and a firm rule to never taste your science experiment. (There's also a version for home cooks, which at a still-shocking $140, is a perfect metaphor for his climate approach.)
Instead of simply replacing fossil fuels with renewables, a technologically simple but politically challenging task, Myhrvold thinks we should fight pollution with pollution and pump a bunch more chemicals into the atmosphere in order to block out some sunlight.
But much like adding extra icing on top of a cake that you accidentally baked with salt instead of sugar isn't going to make the cake edible, you can't just spray some chemicals into the atmosphere to fix climate change. With potential downsides like disrupting monsoon seasons that millions of people rely on for farming, hundreds of scientists recently warned of the incredible risks geoengineering presents.
These scientists spoke out specifically in response to the Biden administration's plans to research "climate interventions," so even as Myhrvold overstates geoengineering’s viability and ignores its risks, his complaint that people who care about climate change are ignoring this possible solution is also misleading! For example, on the same day the WSJ quoted Myhrvold complaining that "there's no evidence I can see that many of the people involved in the climate debate want a solution,"Fox News ran a piece targeting none other than George Soros for his comments about his interest in (a form of) geoengineering.
Soros offered a much more nuanced version of the pitch to use geoengineering to keep the Arctic frozen, including reference to "proper scientific safeguards" and saying it should be done "in consultation with local indigenous communities."
But Soros, one of the biggest funders of climate groups in the world, is advocating for geoengineering in addition to reducing fossil fuel use, not as an alternative to it. Because, among other things, even if it worked perfectly and without unintended consequences, solar radiation management does absolutely nothing for ocean acidification. Spray all the chemicals you want into the air to block out the sun and temporarily suppress the warming trend in the air, and you're still going to turn the oceans into a coral-killing acidic soup that melts oyster and crab and lobster and shrimp shells.
But of course The Wall Street Journal and its polluter-backed contributors like Tunku Varadarajan don't actually care about solving climate change. They care about keeping fossil fuels in business for as long as possible, and apparently they are shifting from saying there's no need to reduce pollution, to saying it's too late to reduce pollution, so we better double it instead.