“Gives new meaning to company town.”

From the Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies reported by Jeff Goodell and brought to our attention by Brad Plumer:

It was generally agreed that for CO2-sucking technologies, private investment was not a problem [n.b., assuming we have some sort of cap-and-trade system in place]. Sunlight-reduction technologies, however, are another issue. if some company (or entrepreneur) is able to develop a new way of injecting particles into the stratosphere that becomes indispensible to the survival of the human race, well, that gives that company or person a lot of leverage.

“I’m not interested in selling my soul to some company who is going to control how much sunlight hits the planet,” said Phil Rasch, a climate modeler at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state. (As one audience member quipped, “Gives new meaning to company town.”) Granger Morgan, the head of the department of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, argued that the creation of a profit motive would inevitably lead to a geoengineering lobby: “Lobbying is the last thing we need on this.”