Geoengineering, Persuasion, and the Climate Crisis: A Geologic Rhetoric

Abstract

Critical discursive analyses of geoengineering have gained traction in academia within the past decade, with scholars discussing the rhetorical strategies, think tanks, and persuasive power of geologic alteration as a solution to combat global climate change across various disciplinary journals. As a subdiscipline of the rhetoric of science, geoengineering’s persuasive force comes from naturalization, audience perception, and disciplinary knowledge. In Sikka’s (2012) article, “A critical discourse analysis of geoengineering advocacy,” the author examined additional structures, mainly political and economic, that have contributed to and funded geoengineering efforts, identifying four “discursive frames” of geoengineering: scientific neutrality, technological determinism, philosophical exceptionalism, and the presentation of market-driven solutions. These four frames create the foundation of Pflugfelder’s book, Geoengineering, Persuasion, and the Climate Crisis: A Geologic Rhetoric, both in terms of how the author approaches analysis of “geological rhetoric” and also as presentative of the reexamination of ideological structures through a geological lens (p. 18). Pflugfelder’s analysis of climate change ideology takes a similar approach to what has been discussed by ecocritical theorists such as Morton, identifying the entanglement of social, political, economic, and geologic scales that form the rhetoric of the environment. As technical and professional communication (TPC) is not only concerned with scientific discourses but also the ethics of those discourses, continuing research that actively engages with current climate change solutions is imperative. Along with bringing new in-depth theoretical analysis that situates geoengineering within climate change’s discursive techniques, Pflugfelder also collates various analyses that have been separated from each other into one comprehensive text. While the theoretical basis of geoengineering advocacy is discussed throughout, the book also refers to actual geoengineering experiments that are “on the table” such as carbon-dioxide removal (CDR), solar radiation management (SRM), or stratospheric particle injection (SPI) or ones that have already been completed like the open fertilization demonstration in 2002 (p. 3–5; p. 132). Though the primary focus of the book is on geology and human manipulation of the environment, the chapters also address various persuasive methods of climate change, environmental policy, corporate engineering, and the economic and scientific function of carbon dioxide. The concern of the book’s research is temporally significant as it shows the rhetorical relationship between climate change and geoengineering. Though there have been forms of human manipulation on earth systems in the past, the type of geoengineering analyzed in Pflugfelder’s book is in reaction to climate change. For this approach, the author uses an assemblage of analyses, presenting topics of the environmental, the socioeconomic, the cultural, and the political to critically analyze the rhetorical features of each and how they interact with each other to create the environmental ideology of today. The introduction familiarizes the reader with the main concepts, geoengineering and rhetoric, and what is at stake for each by defining the first concept through examples of officially sanctioned geoengineering experiments, the companies funding these experiments, and the history of terraforming. The author then defines the second concept through a material and geologic lens that is constantly tying back its persuasive force, ultimately, to reveal the rhetorical structures underlying the allowance of geoengineering as a viable option toward deferring climate change. The book’s purpose can then be divided into two arguments: 1) critically analyzing the rhetoric of geoengineering is vital due to its