GUEST POST | Tobias S. Buckell on Who Gets to Decide to Change the World?

One of the solutions some advance for solving the issue of climate change is a giant technical solution. If we could just launch a mirror into orbit, we could redirect the heat and solve the problem.

That sounds like a great solution, until one considers the fact that a giant, orbital mirror is not far off from being a super-weapon the likes of which Dr. No would have given a body part to have owned. Any dastardly evil villain would love something like that. And other nations would basically object to the sudden weaponization of space, making it a very complicated situation. Who decides who gets to affect the entire planet with one device? And who is responsible if it goes wrong with unintended consequences? All these thoughts planted the seed for a piece of my latest book, Arctic Rising, which looks at the many complications and ins and outs of climate change from the perspective of a thriller.

It may turn out that a technical hack can help. But basically what you're doing is hoping that your descendants can clean up a mess you're handing them. You're hoping that we can basically terraform our own world. We may be able to do that, but I'm willing to bet that an accountant may point that over the long term it'd be cheaper just not to make a mess that needs cleaned up in the first place.

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Halo®: The Cole Protocol. His latest novel is Arctic Rising.

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