Search results

Different forms of geoengineering have been proposed: spraying sulfates into the upper atmosphere to block a portion of sunlight, fertilizing the ocean with iron to spark carbon-gobbling algal blooms, or covering sea ice with bags of silicon beads to slow its melting. The idea is controversial, to say the least, but, as a new report shows, geoengineering is edging away from the margins and toward the center of discussions about climate change. The polarized debate surrounding geoengineering exemplifies the difficulties of talking about, much less solving, the problem of climate change, an issue where ethical, scientific, and political questions overlap, blend together, and sometimes obscure one another.

"I'll give you the moon," George Bailey tells his sweetheart in It's a Wonderful Life. The romance of the promise comes from its very impossibility—we may gaze at the moon, write nursery rhymes about it, feel superstitious about its phases, but we cannot own it, whether to keep or give away. But it seems that the development of property rights on the moon—and in outer space in general—is on the horizon. At the end of last year Bigelow Aerospace, a space technology company into which founder and real estate developer Robert Bigelow has already poured $250 million, filed a request with the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation asking that the agency grant a "zone of non-interference" around their future lunar operations.