Harvard Shuts Geoengineering Project To Preserve Climate Narrative

Solving the 'climate crisis' is bad for business

Mar 24, 2024

Note: For the sake of argument, in the text I’ll treat ‘man-made climate change’ as if it’s the gospel truth. I’m sorry for anyone offended. And if it doesn’t offend you, well, I’m even more sorry.

⁶And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes. ⁷For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed.
2 Tessalonians 2

This week, Harvard University has shut down a Bill Gates-funded geoengineering experiment. The controversial Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), run by professors David Keith and Frank Keutsch, aimed to study the potential future implementation of geoengineering by crop dusting sulphuric acid into our stratosphere. Nice.

Even if you put aside the almost instant validity such an experiment would give to conspiracy theories like chemtrails and HAARP, it still sounds a bit too much, playing with our thin air like that — in an unprecedented, and potentially catastrophic, manner too.

But, let’s not kid ourselves. The plug wasn’t pulled over fears of playing fast and loose with the venusformation of Earth’s atmosphere. Nor was it due to Harvard’s faculty’s occasional (yet frequent) dalliance with plagiarism or concerns over the lack of diversity within the ivory tower.

No, according to the MIT Technology Review, it was something else entirely, “even studying the possibility of solar geoengineering eases the societal pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions,” they clarified. The Harvard Crimson picked up the scent too, noting that “a vocal minority of scientists have voiced concern that SCoPEx’s technology may provide an excuse to reduce pressure to cut emissions.”

And that’s the irony. Fixing ‘climate change’ without destroying capitalism and everything the West stands for, does nothing for the revolution. What a waste of a good crisis! It turns out, the climate change business thrives on more climate change alarmism. Whodathunk?

Don’t get me wrong, Harvard did the only thing that made sense: they canned the project. And why? Because the whole thing was rife with conflicts of interest, for starters. Donors turning into faculty, hedge funds and billionaires funneling money through shell NGOs. Suddenly, their testing grounds moved from Arizona to Sweden, where they planned to launch a test flight without bothering for permits or giving the locals a heads-up. All while taking liberties with patent rights and intellectual property.

All Science Is Political Science

“The idea you can strip out politics from medicine or health is historically ignorant. The medical establishment should be much more politicised, not less.”
Richard Morton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet

The Harvard Crimson noted a ‘vocal minority of experts’, among them Chris Field from Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment. Field insists that cutting emissions swiftly is the only way to save the world and, even if geoengineering “worked spectacularly,” it still wouldn’t address “all the impacts” of climate change.

What impacts? Well, fortunately, a letter from the Saami Council, representing indigenous tribes from across the Nordics and Russia, to the SCoPEx Advisory Committee spells it out: “the irreversible sociopolitical effects that could compromise the world’s necessary efforts to achieve zero-carbon societies.”

So here’s what we have in our hands, a new rendition of the classic Mexican standoff: technocratic geoengineering, economic planning, and social revolution, all aiming guns at each other. The fear? If the hoi polloi believe a tech fix is close, they might second-guess the need for human sacrifices to overthrow capitalism and appease the gods of the weather.

Raymond Pierrehumbert, a physics guru at the University of Oxford, sums up the thinking, casting geoengineering as a “painkiller,” or perhaps an iron lung, risking to distract the Tide pod-drinking generation from fighting the good fight. Lucky for us, he’s a physicist, not a physician.

Then there’s the ETC Group, an extreme climate fundamentalist cult, screaming apocalypse if we even think about geoengineering. “These experiments amount to scenes in a high-stakes political theatre,” said ~~pastor Jim Jones~~, I mean Jim Thomas, ETC’s mouthpiece. Thomas is concerned the experiment is a grand scheme to trick the populace into rolling out the red carpet for big money. He has a point.

Even Greta Thunberg throws her two cents in, with her usual doomsday charm. “Nature is doing everything it can; it’s screaming at us to back off, to stop — and we are doing the exact opposite,” she said about this specific experiment. A study in non sequitur.

David Keith of SCoPEx, in defence of his work, compares geoengineering sceptics to the naysayers who once argued against airbags, claiming they would encourage reckless driving. But from where I’m standing, the critics resemble those parents of so-called ‘trans kids’ afflicted with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, who, in their fixation with ‘climate-affirming care,’ recklessly throw all caution to the wind.

Climate Katechons

“The katechon represents the forces that resist the dissolution of meaning and the descent into nihilism, acting as a guardian against the chaos of non-being.”
Paul Tillich

The ‘katechon’ concept comes from Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians in the New Testament. The term in Greek means ‘the one who restrains’ or ‘the one who holds back.’ Saint Paul writes about a force (or figure) that keeps the Antichrist from revealing themself until the time is right, keeping the chaos and lawlessness associated with the Antichrist’s arrival at arm’s length.

By the same token, the katechon delays Christ’s return, holding off the righteous’ final redemption and salvation.

Beyond its origins in Christian eschatology, the idea of the katechon offers a rich framework for socio-political analysis of every hue, as a metaphor for the underlying powers and principles that resist chaos, disorder, or evil, maintaining a semblance of order and preventing complete societal or moral collapse.

As it turns out, the climate fundamentalist cult has its katechons: ‘transition technologies’ like blue hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and geoengineering. Stopgaps that won’t end fossil fuels, only delay what the climate gospel preaches as the inevitable rise of the Antichrist (climate change) that will beckon the Kingdom to come (socialist revolution). Chesterton’s probably rolling in his grave, watching the ‘Christian virtues gone mad’ morphing into vulgar eco-mania.

(Sidenote: Nuclear fusion should be another climate katechon. Yet, it’s unlikely the climate lobby can keep it at bay indefinitely, even if they try. As evidence, despite wars and sanctions, Russia remains a key player in the West’s nuclear fusion plans. A circle surprisingly easy to square.)

The katechon’s allure lies in its ambiguity, open to contradictory, yet complementary, interpretations of how it keeps the train of history from going off the rails, balancing on the edge between a rock and a hard place. By spinning this age-old concept into their own apocalyptic tale, the climate lobby shows it is edging dangerously closer to fully mastering the art of building foundational myths.

Big Bad Fix

“No climate-related geo-engineering activities that may affect biodiversity [should] take place, until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities and appropriate consideration of the associated risks for the environment and biodiversity and associated social, economic and cultural impacts.”
UN Convention on Biological Diversity

Back in 2010, nearly every country agreed to a global moratorium on geoengineering under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Yet, at national levels or in smaller scales, it remains a possibility. Which goes to show that geoengineering, even by the climate lobby’s loose standards, is reckless.

The risks are many and close together: disrupting weather patterns, collapsing ecosystems, compromising food and water supplies for billions. It would likely kick off a dystopian, totalitarian governance drive to top it off. Not to mention that weaponisation is also a real fear.

Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, paints a bleak picture: to make large-scale geoengineering viable, it would require causing something equivalent to a volcanic eruption like that of Pinatubo, but regularly. “It would likely dry out our continents, causing droughts... It’s a foolish gambit,” he said.

Despite Harvard slightly pulling back, the dreamers and schemers push on. The start-up Make Sunsets, for one, is out there launching balloons filled with a few grammes of sulphur dioxide, and lots of trouble, in an effort to “dim the sun”. And then there’s George Soros (who else?), during a recent conference, candidly sharing his daydreams of ‘brightening’ the clouds over the Arctic to reflect the sun’s energy away from the ice caps.

Harvard hasn’t bowed out of the grift, though. The university announced it will continue geoengineering research through its Solar Geoengineering Research Programme, bankrolled by Bill Gates, the Hewlett Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and other deep pockets.

Seeking to score an early ESG landgrab, Harvard established in 2019 the SCoPEx Advisory Committee, to craft governance models for future geoengineering policy-making. Its former co-chair, Shuchi Talati, has since been appointed as chief of staff in the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, under Biden’s Department of Energy.

The Committee grappled with deep questions: Is researching solar geoengineering ethically sound? Who gets to decide on its deployment? Can its use be effectively governed? Though I must note that the SCoPEx project answer was underwhelming, “it should not be the burden for solar geoengineering research.”

So, here’s the skinny on geoengineering research: a handful of elite ivy league ideologues — backed by the wealth and prestige of the usual billionaires — are setting the stage for something big and extremely risky, while entrenching themselves at the core of policy-making. Rarely do so few hold the ability to stir such a big pot of immense consequence —save for nuclear weapons, perhaps.

And, lucky for us all, it has so far self-imploded in a twisted tale where solving the problem would spell disaster for the problem-solvers, exposing them as people with the resources to untie the Gordian knot yet struggling to tie their own shoelaces.