The SPICE geoengineering test collapsed over an intellectual-property dispute, not scientific opposition.

Evidence

This provoked a great hue and cry in Britain, with more than fifty scientific organizations opposing even this limited test project. In the current neoliberal circumstances, mere political opposition resorting to reasoned arguments that this sort of “experimentation” was dangerous and ill-conceived was nowhere sufficient to stop a well-funded scientific cadre with some ceremonial credibility and political clout. No, what got the experiment canceled before it was finally carried out was a dispute among the team over intellectual property: two members of SPICE, Hugh Hunt and Peter Davidson, had filed for a patent for an “apparatus for transporting and dispersing solid particles into the Earth’s stratosphere by balloon, dirigible or airship” without informing the other members of the team. Other participants, learning of this, called the experiment to a halt. Just like in so many other areas of modern science, faculty here occupied dual roles as academic researchers and CEOs of their own startup firms: not just Hunt and Davidson, but the other participants as well. This speaks louder than any public relations claims about the nominal public-spirited character of the project: geoengineering is not really about saving the planet; it is instead mostly about laying claim to privatization of the global troposphere. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 934

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s broader thesis that the neoliberal ‘thought collective’ extends into climate science and geoengineering economics.
• SEED: An angle: the patenting of the stratosphere itself as a concrete case of enclosure of the global commons.