Earth Power in the New Geopolitics.

• Author: Macaes, Bruno
• Position: COMMENTARY

Introduction

When the term 'geopolitics' was coined at the beginning of the 20th century, it was meant to capture the struggle or competition between states for effective control over territory. The notion of an external environment was part of the concept, but geography or territory was seen as passive objects of state action and jealousy. Later, other sources of state power started to be regarded as more central than having physical control over a large territory: population, industrial prowess, economy, knowledge, and culture. This peaked in the last decade of the past century, during which the free flow of money and ideas were meant to serve as geopolitical conduits taking over the task of maintaining stability. Geopolitics suddenly meant something like 'international relations.' The prefix 'geo' disappeared from the view.

The COVID-19 pandemic signaled a change. In the past three decades, no international upheaval had a deeper impact. All policies were quickly measured and evaluated according to their ability to stop the spread of infection, and several dramatic changes to the way we live were imposed with little or no democratic deliberation as if the final arbiter to which one must appeal had been transferred from the people or the general will to nature or the natural environment, of which the virus stood as representative. Even the most radical political movement could never have dreamt of what the pandemic brought about: a fundamental and uncontested change to collective life. And yet, state after state gladly submitted to the unannounced guest, not only as a brute force but as the arbiter of their actions and decisions, the judge to whom one appealed when determining failure and success.

Of course, the ongoing public debate about climate change pointed to the same conclusion, but with a critical difference: climate change seemed to show that human activity was the problem, or that technology was the problem. The COVID-19 pandemic turns this intuition on its head. Far from believing that our natural environment needs to be liberated from human interference, we are now much more likely to think that it needs to be colonized anew. Nature is once again the problem. The present moment feels like a beginning, almost as if humanity is once again entering the Neolithic.

I speculate that when history books are written around 2050, the COVID-19 pandemic will most likely be seen as the beginning point of a technological acceleration moving in two directions, both signifying radical emancipation from nature: digitization and the metaverse, on the one hand, biotechnology on the other.

The debate on climate change itself changed as a result. We can already witness how the notion of technological restraint is slowly giving way to the call for technological acceleration. If global frameworks aiming at reducing carbon emissions continue to falter, the only option left will be to embrace radical technological solutions such as spraying aerosols into the atmosphere or fertilizing the oceans with iron to grow carbon-capturing algae. Many of these solutions will carry significant risks, but they will have to be measured against the existential risk of climate change. At this point, there are no easy solutions. Some might even see in these new kinds of planetary engineering a form of beauty, "the beauty of an earth system newly cared for, newly loved." (1) The planet may look just as before but there is now a system behind it.

It is possible to conceive that as the consequences of climate change become increasingly more visible, superpowers such as the United States or China will be pushed to deploy their technological and financial might in the pursuit of radical technological solutions. Most likely, they will see this as an opportunity to further entrench their power as administrators of the global systems these technologies will put in place. It is also conceivable that they will try to reach some general agreement on how to proceed. Gideon Rachmanhas noted how, as the deficiencies of the current multilateral process become ever harder to deny, the demand is likely to grow for another approach: geoengineering. That means efforts to alter or transform the climate and the earth system through revolutionary, large-scale technologies. "The leading advocates...