Ways of seeing intervention and control

Abstract

This final empirical chapter connects debates in Chapters 4 and 5 to what are essentially contested worldviews on morality. In this chapter, climate engineers grapple with ontological and metaphysical questions about the relationship between humans and their environment. This chapter zooms in on existentially troubling nature of questions around deliberate climate control. Dreaming of a designer climate—even falling short of actual design and control—raises many questions about morality, including questions of justice, metaphysics, and the ontological status of ‘the human’. This chapter addresses how certain conceptions of human-nature relationships influence positions on the desirability of climate engineering—as well as how particular views of the climate and politics create certain conceptions of ‘the human’ and justice and vice versa.