Sunnyvale's Jeff Goodell talks about Geoengineering

On Monday night, Jeff Goodell gave an entertaining lecture at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. A local boy, Jeff was born and raised in Sunnyvale in the heart of Silicon Valley. As a child, he remembers reading ‘Sunset Magazine’ with its vision of life in the West. This magazine showed him the power of the press and inspired him to become a journalist. He thanked Bill and Jean Lane who published the magazine and are also the sponsors of this lecture series.

One of Jeff’s early jobs was as a technical writer at Apple. He left as he didn’t see a much of a future there! His career then led him on several sidetracks as a blackjack dealer, a bartender, a glazier and an editor. He then moved into journalism and worked in New York covering politics. His current day job is reporting on energy and the environment for Rolling Stone magazine.

Jeff Goodell is the author of five books including a memoir of growing up in Sunnyvale and the dirty secrets behind Big Coal. The subject of Monday’s lecture was his latest book ‘How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate’.

Geoengineering is large-scale fixing of the climate to offset carbon emissions. Jeff focused on one big idea, using a ‘parasol’ to shade the Earth from the sun. The parasol is made from millions of tiny sulphur particles that are fired from airplanes into the atmosphere.

Computer modeling has shown that reflecting just 2% of sunlight could lower the Earth’s temperature to pre-industrial levels. And that it would only cost a fraction of other methods to have a global impact on our climate.

Is geoengineering the ‘most powerful conservation tool created’ or the ‘most dangerous invention since the nuclear bomb’?

Read more about Jeff Goodell's talk at at Geoengineering: the quick fix for global warming? and decide for yourself!