IN SALON, ELIZABETH SVOBODA WRITES ON GEOENGINEERING FOR GLOBAL WARMING:

Gregory Benford thinks Al Gore’s a good guy and all, but he also thinks the star of “An Inconvenient Truth” is a little delusional. Driving a hybrid car, switching your bulbs to compact fluorescents and springing for recycled paper products are all well-meaning strategies in the fight against global warming. But as UC-Irvine physicist Benford sees it, there’s a catch. Those do-gooder actions are not going to be effective enough to turn the temperature tide, and even incremental political changes like reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mining alternative fuel sources are not forward-thinking enough. “I never believed we were going to be able to thwart global warming through carbon restriction,” Benford says. “Carbon restriction requires nations to subvert short- and midterm goals for a long-term goal they’ve read about online, and that’s just not going to work.”

As an alternative, Benford has cooked up a plan that amounts to a manmade Mount Pinatubo eruption. He has proposed shooting trillions of tiny particles of earth into the stratosphere, where they will remain suspended to help blot out incoming solar rays. Dirt is cheap, chemically unreactive and easily crushable, he argues, making it a simple matter to test this strategy on a small scale over the Arctic before total global deployment.

I think it’s important to research this stuff, but I’d be very slow to move to “total global deployment,” especially given that recent years seem to have been cooler. On the other hand, this passage captures the more, er, religious tone of many objections:

Questions of usefulness and necessity aside, grand-scale sun-blocking schemes feel dubious in part because they challenge our intuitive sense that large-scale wrongs can be atoned for only with equally large-scale sacrifices. Drastic emissions cutbacks require drastic lifestyle changes, like taking shorter showers and scrapping the Hummer. Such changes feel right because they’re a little painful; putting the squeeze on ourselves is suitable penance for the collective sin of spewing tailpipe fumes into the atmosphere for the past 100-plus years.

Geoengineering, by contrast, seems like an undeserved dispensation.

Sin, penance, and dispensation — the key elements of a scientifically-based climate policy!