Introduction

Climate engineering, a set of technologies proposing large-scale manipulations of the planetary environment aimed to counteract anthropogenic climate change, has in recent years attracted increasing attention. As meaningful climate policy remains elusive, speculative technologies play an ever-growing role in the public and, importantly, scientific imagination. This chapter introduces climate engineering as a set of speculative technologies, introducing its two major strands: solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal. Furthermore, it introduces how climate engineering might be dreamed into being based on speculative assumptions, as well as how and why climate engineering research necessitates intense scrutiny of its underlying assumptions and ‘ways of seeing’. Based on a theoretical framework deriving from science and technology studies and the environmental humanities, this introductory chapter explains how particular visions, referred to here as ‘ways of seeing’, influence visions about desirable climate engineering futures. Lastly, this chapter introduces an empirical comparison between the German climate engineering research consortium SPP-1689 and the Harvard-based solar radiation management (SRM) research conducted by the David Keith Group.