The Gendered Subject of Geoengineering and the Denialist Unconscious

In our breathtaking period of spectacular symptom formation, when climate denialism has surreptitiously abandoned much outright refusal for subtler forms of repression, perhaps no fantasy wields more pernicious power than geoengineering: proposed large-scale technology projects to counteract global warming by directly manipulating the climate system. The year 2024 was a watershed moment for geoengineering. Hurricane Milton elicited cries of geoengineering conspiracy from right-wing figures like U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Jewish Space-Laser fame, who wrote on the social media platform X, “Yes they can control the weather,” while a chorus of users speculated that Milton was an “October surprise” meant to target right-wing voters before the impending U.S. presidential election (Owen 2024). This geoengineering conspiracy theory garnered enough attention that U.S. President Biden felt the need to respond, calling it “so stupid” (Shabad et al. 2024). This year was particularly significant for geoengineering's solar variety, also called solar radiation management, which promises to produce a countervailing global cooling effect by dispersing stratospheric particulates to regulate solar radiation entering Earth's atmosphere. Following years of indigenous resistance, Harvard finally closed its controversial geoengineering research program, one year after its key researcher left for the University of Chicago's new Climate Systems Engineering initiative (Temple 2024). Amid record temperatures, mainstream news platforms have run articles explaining solar geoengineering, often endorsing or condemning, with headlines such as “This climate change fix could save the world—or doom it” (USA Today) and “Silicon Valley Renegades Pollute the Sky to Save the Planet” (The New York Times). Meanwhile, a team of scientists has considered conducting stratospheric aerosol injection using, instead of sulfur dioxide, diamond particles—unaware of or indifferent to the irony of combatting the consequences of emitting carbon in one form by emitting carbon in another (Vattioni et al. 2024). The pattern is unmistakable: Geoengineering in general and solar geoengineering in particular are rapidly occupying more central positions in climate change discourse. This increasing centrality is indexed and aided by a burgeoning cultural production field of science fiction (SF) novels, films, and digital games that mobilize the unique affordances of these varied mediums to narrativize geoengineering, resulting in a geoengineering megatext comprising both critiques and propagandistic valorizations. At stake in the constitutive internal antagonism of this megatext is the formation of a denialist unconscious that seeks to overdetermine the field of possible climate futures by seizing hold of the language, images, and procedural actions by which we make sense of and attempt to intervene in our real historical situation. While the total manifold complexities of the denialist unconscious exceed the grasping capacities of this single essay, we can learn much about its character and function through analysis of one crucial aspect and its production in the film Geostorm (2017), novel Termination Shock (2021), and digital game Planet Crafter (2024): the gendered subject of geoengineering.This is about all forms of geoengineering, but one form in particular plays an outsized role. Solar geoengineering is often framed as “seriously weighing up all our options as we stare down the barrel of near-certain climate doom” (Landymore 2024). The narrative commonly repeated throughout this discourse is that the hour is late, even if all carbon emissions stop tomorrow there will still be climate catastrophes with which we must contend, and therefore we must not refuse whatever tools we might find ready at hand. Yet the prominence of solar geoengineering arises less from concern for the well-being of the living planet and more from, at best, an inability to break free from a fossil capitalist realist imaginary, or, at worst, fear of the radically transformed social order required to stop climate change and other capitalist ecological devastations, once and for all. In either case, geoengineering functions as an instrument of denial.Andreas Malm has argued that solar “geoengineering would represent a materialized and institutionalized repression of the climate crisis” (italics in original; Malm 2023, 17). 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