Enclosing Albedo: Race and Geoengineering in the Arctic

In May 2017, three individuals unloaded millions of white silica “microspheres” into a permafrost thaw pond outside of Utqiagvik, Alaska, with the consent of the private landowner, the Alaska Native-owned Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation. Unbeknownst to most of Utqiagvik’s hunters, fishers, and gatherers who draw food and spiritual sustenance from the land, an ambitious startup was getting an early opportunity to conduct a small-scale field test for a much bigger prospective geoengineering vision: brightening the surface of the Arctic Ocean to reinforce the albedo cooling effect of diminishing sea ice. Journalist Rachel Reiderer, in a 2023 New Yorker article, described the microsphere pollution as “sand floating atop the water” and “an elegant solution,” which it might be for someone who has never lived in the Arctic. These individuals undertook this experiment as the Silicon Valley-based Ice911 project, a name eerily reminiscent of the apocalyptic compound Ice9 from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Cat’s Cradle. This experiment was the first step towards their vision to seed “strategic locations” of the Arctic Ocean with these microspheres enough to stall climate change. The company has since folded, but its architect, Leslie Fields, launched the similar Bright Ice Initiative for “glacier preservation” while another like-minded coalition, Real Ice™, focuses on a patented system called “Aquafreezing.” In each instance, Arctic Indigenous organizations and community organizers voiced serious and principled opposition to any continuation of the project. However, representatives of Ice911’s successor, the Arctic Ice Project (AIP), claim in a 2023 BBC news clip that “every degree counts” before disclosing “15 years. This gives us 15 years that we sorely need to make the transition to sustainable fuels”. In prescribing an imbalanced tradeoff between particular futures and presents, they employ what Mark Carey (2024) calls the “charismatic temporalities” of out of time and buying time, both of which narratively and materially serve the political economic status quo, empowering technocrats to engage in a range of industrialized, more-than-human violences. After decades of corporate foot-dragging on decarbonization and unmitigated material reliance on fossil fuels, should the long-term health of the Arctic and its people be risked so recklessly for such scant time?

Central to the debate around geoengineering (euphemistically described as “climate intervention”) are issues of not only feasibility and scalability, but of ethics and environmental justice. Geoengineering arises as an elaboration of historic colonial logics, wherein proponents of Western science and ways of knowing deny the existence of Indigenous sovereignty and act against Indigenous peoples’ inalienable rights to decision-making regarding their environment. Pangaanga Pangawyi of the Indigenous Environmental Network, was quoted in the Nome Nugget, saying of AIP that “regardless of whether or not the science is sound and safe, they still need free, prior, informed consent (FPIC)… Any debate beyond the fact that they don’t have free, prior and informed consent honestly is just noise…” (Gannon, 2022). The Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corporation, she pointed out, did not represent Tribal interests and did not have the standing to act unilaterally on issues of environmental concern. The willful neglect of both de jure and de facto rights of Alaska Native Peoples to FPIC before certain activities take place on their lands placed AIP in a position of flagrant misconduct with regards to the national and international laws and norms enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. At this juncture in geoclimatic history, geoengineering emerges as merely another application of the Christian imperial law of terra nullius, the legal basis for the Doctrine of Discovery that declared Indigenous lands in the “New World” belong to no one, providing permission for conquest. In the name of a global humanity, climate interventionists act from the position that scientists and engineers have unique authority over lands and waters under the capitalist state, which always turns out tolerant of risk and permissive of destruction.

The threat of technologized thermochemical manipulation of our shared environment cannot be treated lightly. A large group of polar scientists (Siegert et al., 2024) recently published a damning assessment of proposed cryospheric geoengineering projects, determining that they are all scientifically dubious, environmentally unsound, unreasonably expensive, and entirely unscalable. "Polar geoengineering interventions," they assert, "are largely a fantastical science fiction. They will play no role in mitigating global warming. Decarbonizing to net zero is the only feasible approach to the problem, and this requires our complete attention without unnecessary distraction or diversion." Regardless, polar geoengineering has not retreated from the discursive landscape and continues to garner support from some scientists and venture capitalists (Elliott 2026), who actively normalize a once inconceivable level of confidence in fundamentally unpredictable experimental projects across the entire world’s oceans and atmosphere. A list of prospective techniques and technologies is available from the Geoengineering Monitor, including those that involve carbon capture and sequestration, chemical conditioning of air, ice, and water, or intervention in microbiological processes. None of these can be validated as least risky or harmful and all are encumbered with implicit externalities and fundamental uncertainties. They are politically positioned as “options” that require further research and appropriate governance frameworks.

Despite being a signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which explicitly prohibits geoengineering, the UK is preparing to allow field tests to move forward on “solar radiation management” (Carrington, 2025), which primarily involves the release of chemical aerosols into the atmosphere to alter atmospheric reflectivity. Western science has jettisoned the precautionary principle countless times before and the track record for corporate abuse of technologized geochemical power has a long lineage going back at least to DDT poisoning in the rural US in the 1960s and events like the 1978 Love Canal disaster or the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Accepting externalities and indulging risk is a hallmark of capitalist technology and science; negative outcomes (i.e. life-destroying catastrophes) are typically a result of negligence and overconfidence, and corporate capture of national politics often prevents settlements or solutions commensurate to present or future harms. Geoengineering disasters, should we have the misfortune of witnessing them, would emerge from similar scientific hubris, but with the crucial difference that alteration of fundamental life-enabling processes is the explicit goal. It is not merely pollution or alteration but “virtuous” pollution or alteration, backed by scientific models, but emergent from the same technopositivist matrix that has devastated land, water, and climate for hundreds of years. The very development of environmental regulation as a sphere of government was to contain, sequester, and limit risks to life-enabling processes, resulting in the range of troubled but important standards for reducing and mitigating environmental harms. Yet here, in response to the regulatory state’s failure to limit destructive industrial practices, climate interventionists continue to locate the source of the problem “out there” and are prepared to cause further irreversible harm to entire ecosystems in the name of an abstract victim called “humanity”.

Climate colonialism all over again

Climate interventionism, the ideology of geoengineering, demonstrates techno-utopian and salvific trademarks common to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs; like the Elon Musk(s) and Jeff Bezos(s) of the world, prospective geoengineers tend to operate from a position of whiteness and privilege. They position themselves as climate science-driven “business leaders” but conduct themselves with the righteous entitlement of saviors. Their vision, however, evinces pathological logics of Modernity that ensure the path dependence of mechanisms of mass (inter)national economic and industrial design and coordination. These logics structure relations at this massive scale and in the lived, situated rationality of (post)Modern subjects alive today. Under late-stage capitalism, the taken-for-granted logics of the free market, self-interest, and accumulation constitute a Social Darwinism that guides the net behavior of large firms and governments. The role of governments, banks, and capital in commodifying and speculating on the future have given climate intervention an economic legitimacy, fitting it firmly into the risk society of competitive private investment. Like emerging carbon credit markets and ecosystem service designations, the potentiality of climate intervention serves a logic for the insurance and distribution of costs of criminal environmental collapse, invariably favoring the interests of the wealthy and powerful over those of the Earth and Indigenous Peoples. Geoengineering projects, even in their experimental stages, repeat patterns begun in the first years of colonization in the 15^th century: a self-righteous, divinely-inspired, and chauvanistic invasion and transformation of sovereign Indigenous lands and waters, legal or political nullification of territorial claims, and the imposition of a proprietary, universalizing logic over places and regions they have no cultural connection to. Where throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, land was transformed to suit culturally-situated imperatives for agriculture and industry, tomorrow, waters and air may be transformed to suit culturally-situated imperatives for climate adaptation. Rooted in a “rational scientific” worldview, contemporary earth systems models inspire capitalized scientific enterprises to carelessly impose their will upon what they see as a planetary machine and upon those whom they label as emotional, reactive, and non-scientific.

Yet, it is climate interventionists as a whole who are beholden to emotions, who build their edifice of control on the fundament of their fear, not just of climate change but of social change. Seeking to preserve planetary stability not for its own sake but for the persistence of a particular political economic form, geoengineers betray a pessimism for alternate futures and untarnished faith in the project of scientific Modernity. Meritocracy, entrepreneurial acumen, and personal enrichment are irreducible virtues within our globalized capitalist society. These virtues compel economic behaviors and actions that perpetuate the uneven global competition for resources and underlie international and inter-firm failures at cooperation. There are proposed adaptations to climate change that emphasize degrowth, equity, and redistribution of resources and there are others that constitute an “anti-politics,” which “repose political questions as matters of technique” (Li 2007, 3). The unproven yet theoretically lucrative industry of climate intervention firms would combine expertise from environmental consultants and engineering contractors towards state-sanctioned large-scale experiments with air, water, and soil, sidestepping political questions in favor of technical ones. Firms specializing in “nature-based solutions,” “climate intelligence,” and “carbon credits” fit snugly in the emerging green economic or sustainable development discourse, which does not fundamentally challenge the free market as the ideal organizing principle for society. Capital-intensive technologies, whether for commodity production or climate stabilization, reassert the centrality of the corporation and the (neo)liberal state. Reliance on such technologies falsely averts the need to examine our social organization, material culture, or political economy, which cannot be dealt with through mathematical, engineering modalities. Geoengineers see the world as a machine and eschew the messy solutions within social life in order to “pollute virtuously” and preserve the developed world’s ill-gotten, unsustainable civilizational model.

The systems of inequality, exploitation, and hierarchy that have created our current global crisis will be exacerbated rather than alleviated by climate interventions when they inevitably “go wrong”. Not all may “go wrong” right away, or in ways immediately felt, but many will. Situated in the imperial metropoles of the Global North, shareholders and venture capitalists will survive failed investments and begin looking for the next big bet, while the Global South will have to live with any negative fallout, and austerity governments find ways of reducing their responsibility to multiple generations of victims. Colonial capitalism categorizes specific lives and ways of living to ensure that risks are appropriately distributed among poor and marginalized communities and that maximum benefits accrue upward. It also ensures that harms are made invisible. As Nixon (2011, 35) writes, “It is a pervasive condition of empires that they affect great swathes of the planet without the empire's populace being aware of that impact - indeed without being aware that many of the affected places even exist.” The polar regions are only one instance of proposed climate sacrifice zones (Juskus 2023) that are sufficiently peripheralized to escape the political scrutiny of the democratic populace. The issue of precarity is systemic, but its misapprehension is the source of geoengineering logic; the source of global crisis is political economy, not atmospheric chemistry. Climate interventionists are lying if they say they can manipulate the planet at ecological scales without unanticipated consequences. At this point in our socially and ecologically compromised era, geoengineering projects are steeped in a fear of the future, a problem-solving (and thus problem-creating) posture that is blind to its own constructive and enabling role in environmental and social injustices and the production of precarity. While Indigenous protestors rallied outside AIP’s financial institution, its executives anesthetized themselves with the fantasy of elegant, scalable climate solutions. The sector is riddled with such self-styled geniuses, performing selfless interest for some global victim, “we”.

In a geosocial sense, all industrial development has been a deliberate climate and ecological intervention. What we refer to today as geoengineering is little more than the application of “reason” and “rational management” to processes that Euro-Western civilization has manipulated through its very existence. Human societies the world over have intervened in the climate in thousands of ways, through land use change, deforestation, husbandry, and urbanization, but only recently have some done so at such scale and with such technological acumen that we can conceive of systemic, planetary-scale consequences. Peoples of the Earth have endured uncountable apocalypses throughout history, but there was always somewhere else, some place to relocate to, a spatiotemporal orientation to cyclic stabilizations and destabilizations. The political economy that has given rise to the problem of industrial-anthropogenic climate change, in contrast, affords only the spatiotemporal orientation of growth, progress, and transcendence, without escape. The kinds of social endeavors that emerge from the capitalist system are predicated on the surety of technological progress, which insists upon its validity even when faced with the evidence of its violences and errors. As Naomi Klein has written, capital accelerates through crises and transforms disaster into profit. Geoengineering thus aspires to rescue Western industrial science from itself, from the environmental consequences of a multi-century quest for power and domination. But it can only engineer, reduce, and manipulate. It cannot heal our relationship with the Earth. The stakes of abandoning the Western mandate to achieve “mastery over nature” are so high, so laden with existential fear, that some of us would sooner risk eternal infamy than strive to work within planetary limits. Geoengineering stands preeminent among the false solutions of the “Anthropocene.” Wanting only to save itself, to enhance the resilience of this particular “civilization” with all its unevenly distributed comforts and suffering, the rational Western mind becomes a hammer, everything in nature that doesn’t serve Man’s well-being becomes a nail, to be driven into the beams of a perilous tower.

Ask not what you can do for the Arctic, but what the Arctic can do for you

Empowering the state to intervene in the affairs of geological, biochemical, and ecological processes, again, is not new. What makes our current situation different is not the contemporary wisdom available or the purported good intentions, but the concern for a particular kind of stability, the stability of our current political economy (international capitalist order) narrowly tied to the stability of the climate. Here, we return to the Arctic, which has long been conceived of as a “living laboratory” (Finger 2016), i.e. an exceptional scientific space beyond political or economic influence. The efforts of Bright and Real Ice™ initiatives demonstrate characteristics of what Eyak scholar Jen Rose Smith (2021, 2025) calls “temperate normativity”, a geosocial positionality that racializes and instrumentalizes ice, polar life, and coldness for the ostensible benefit of temperate regions. In the careless, racist representation of ice and Indigeneity in universalist narratives of climate crisis, “the specificities of Indigenous political autonomies and their ongoing relationalities with one another and more-than-human kin go overlooked and are therefore made more precarious” (Smith, 2021, 159). Why must the Arctic, the Ocean, the Antarctic, and the rainforest be first subjected to this new desecration? There are countless lifeworlds available for intervention (why, for example, aren’t they putting effort into advocating for the most obvious approaches to albedo enhancement, such as painting roads, roofs, and other heat-absorbing infrastructure white?). The Arctic, long castigated by European explorers as barren, miserable, and intolerable, remains one of the last imaginary “outsides” to temperate civilization. There is a perception that political barriers to intervention are lower and the potential advantages for the industry are high, whether or not interventions succeed. In a recent press release by Hands Off Mother Earth (HOME), the definitive motivation ascribed to geoengineering advocates is participation in the emerging carbon offset economy. Climate interventionism and geoengineering can be seen then as primarily economic phenomena, where whole socio-environmental systems (obfuscated as “climate services”) are commodified, and commons resources (the ocean and atmosphere) are enclosed and conditioned with treatments, no different from the application of chemicals to lawns or farmland. As a commons, the cryosphere presents a space resistant to and “unspoken for” by state-capitalist interests, whereas cryospheric interventions might prove an enduring sector in the global economic marketplace.

We can think of geoengineering efforts to preserve sea and glacier ice as the enclosure of albedo, the transformation of spectral whiteness into a resource to be controlled and managed by private-public interests. If one follows this logic, then the profitability or at least financial stability of Bright and Real Ice™ would be directly tied to their ability to preserve, expand, and even intensify the physical whiteness of the Earth. Here, we encounter a telling slippage. It is the whiteness, not the biodiversity or culture of cryospheric places that is being valued. And it is whiteness of civilization, not its cultural diversity, that ultimately benefits. Whiteness, as Harris (1993) wrote, is both a racial construct and a hierarchical sociality, arising in conjunction with systems of property, entitlement, privilege, domination, and subordination. It shares with property the logic of the right to exclude, thereby underpinning the socioeconomic hegemony. And as geographers Baldwin and Erickson (2020, 3) write,

“lurking just beneath the surface of the Anthropocene concept is a racialised narrative about white Earthly possession… the signature of the Anthropocene is the signature of racism, the global colour line inscribed into planetary history recalibrated as geology. It bears the geological traces of white supremacy as much as it does Indigenous dispossession, primitive accumulation, and the plantation economy” (ibid. 6).

The white ice and its albedo, once the cause of dismay and consternation for European explorers and colonizers, have become vital resources and potent symbols for their descendants, now faced with climatic and social threats to the familiar, established order. Another slippage intensifies the parallel, as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the US pursues a fascist agenda of “purifying” the body populace of non-white immigrants. Just as the phenomena of polar and alpine ice have become one locus of the contradictions of late industrial capitalism, simultaneously celebrated for their role in stabilizing the climate and their deterioration into open shipping routes and mineral stores, so too does ICE’s mission heighten capitalist contradictions, violently removing marginalized groups whose exploited labor undergirds multiple economic sectors. Preserving ice and ICE are both expressions of elite resistance to change, neither accepting the responsibility of white society in producing and exporting conditions of socionatural precarity globally. Polar geoengineering and Trumpian fascism are both reactionary movements, catering to white comfort and anxiety at the expense of multiple human and nonhuman others.

Hi’ilei Hobart, in her book Cooling the Tropics (2023), brought the colonial relationship to ice into sharp relief in the context of Hawaii, where ice came to define social attitudes towards climate, food, and race. Imported and artificial ice embodied newcomers’ temperate normativity in a hot climate and brought comfort and balance to white settler senses. In geoengineering, the same attitudes are unleashed at a planetary scale. As ice was central to settler comfort, cuisine, and refreshment at the interpersonal scale, ice is essential to geoengineers and those who would finance and promote them. But unlike the systemic violences visited upon the Hawaiians by colonial America, the violence of climate change will not, ultimately, discriminate (though impacts will be born differentially over the course of centuries). There is no stopping the change that has begun, the precarity and transformative violence that have intensified over hundreds of years of colonialism, itself at the root of our present environmental devastation. The current configuration of the globe is deeply unstable and the rise of climate barbarism seems to have vented any belief that tipping points could be avoided. As Klein described it,

“Climate barbarism is a form of climate adaptation. It’s no longer denying that we have begun an age of massive disruption, that many hundreds of millions of people are going to be forced from their homelands, and that huge swathes of the planet are going to be uninhabitable. And then, in response to that, rather than doing all the things that are encoded in the UN Convention on Climate Change, which recognizes the historical responsibility of many of the countries that happen to have a little more time to deal with the impacts of climate change — are insulated both by geography and relative wealth — instead says, look, we simply believe we are better, because of our citizenship, because of our whiteness, and our Christian-ness, and we are locking down, protecting our own, pulling aid” (Stephenson 2019).

Climate change represents an existential threat to humanity, to Western capitalist-industrial society, and to whiteness, and has therefore provoked the fight or flight response of climate interventionism.

Capitalist-industrial society has prematurely ended the Holocene, and now geoengineers aim to wring its pale Anthropocene imitation out from the cryosphere’s increasingly ghostly albedo. They smugly yet tremblingly ask, if we don’t save the ice, if we don’t preserve the cold, what disasters will unfold? Isn’t it irresponsible to not do anything to keep the cryosphere intact, even with risks? To which I respond, why do you care? I know full well the answer: “I am afraid. I am afraid of a future where I, we, do not have control. Where nature has wrested control from us. Therefore, I must seek control, consolidate it under the nation state, and in doing so improve my own lot and hopefully the lot of others in the process.” Altruism is at the periphery while control and mastery are at the core of the geoengineering dream, anthropocentric aspirations that have time and again been shown to be impossible. The pursuit of control always encounters resistance among people and nature, a mastery never fully realized for its insatiable greed. Humans have never had control, least of all over the dynamics and processes of the Earth. Our technical achievements are playthings to the planet. We shall not conquer the ocean, let alone the stars. We are ineluctably part of the Earth’s unfolding, part of the biosphere. Half-measures like Arctic geoengineering don’t tackle the growth-oriented political economy that turned industrial civilization into a planetary geophysical force in the first place. It will not be able to help us live better or more sustainably in the Anthropocene, but will simply produce more uncertainty, risk, and disorder. The international community, if it still exists, can move gracefully into this tumultuous boundary event between climatic epochs, or we can do what we are doing now, drowning ourselves in atrocities, dithering and prevaricating, crudely chained to a history of bloody conquest and subjugation. Calling a new form of pollution a “climate intervention” only adds silica, aerosols, and alkalizers to the toxic brew we will all have to deal with.

Works Cited:

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Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard law review, 1707-1791.

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