The U.S. needs to make a grand bargain with China regarding climate change.

The U.S. needs to unleash its tremendous research and innovation capacities to develop carbon-replacing and carbon-removal technologies. China needs to enlist its enormous manufacturing capacities to bring these to market around the world. There needs to be an agreement that divides investment and proceeds equitably between both countries. There needs to be recognition of each other’s strengths.

At the same time, a consortium led by the U.S. and China needs to examine, develop, deploy, and manage potential solar geoengineering. This is the biggest blind spot in contemporary climate change debates. Atmospheric warming causes sea-level rise; warming also undermines Antarctic ice caps, which could increase sea levels precipitously. Most of the world’s infrastructure, populations, and economic activity is on coastlines. This is especially true for China, but the U.S. as well. There are over 30 countries (and almost as many billionaires) with financial means to deploy stratospheric particles. With so much at stake, governments will not resist. But unless this is done through a concerted, international effort, it may be handled poorly. Without U.S. and China leadership, expect a poorly planned, crudely executed, solar geoengineering debacle, with unnecessary and unpredictable side-effects. Every drought and hurricane around the world will be blamed on it, leading to international conflict.

The U.S. government needs to sweep aside petrochemical interests, including ideological followers corrupted by them, in order to make these major foreign policy moves. This requires scientists and technologists, activists and progressives, to have a unitary foreign policy priority. Only in that way can the U.S. take up its role as international arbiter, with China as strategic partner.

Up to this time, climate change activists have sought to corral different nations into commitments to reduce carbon emissions. This is important, but it isn’t enough. There are few carrots and only small sticks to push reductions.

By focusing on an international agreement to invest in climate mitigation technologies, and an international agreement to work on solar geoengineering, national interests can be aligned with preventing climate change goals. American companies will be laser-focused on the potential to innovate, with a Chinese manufacturing commitment, if the details protect IP and share profits. China will be extremely interested in exploiting U.S. IP, if they are equals in global profits. But this isn’t something to pull out of thin air. It will take years to hammer out binding rules, including mechanisms to handle disputes. This isn’t a trade agreement, it’s a load sharing model.

Solar geoengineering is too critical to leave to individual countries, much less billionaires. Both the U.S. and Chinese militaries will be engaged, and businesses across both countries. But these will only work to a common goal if negotiated road-maps are setup up soon, with transparent thresholds, and exacting rules and violation penalties.

A mature climate change political effort recognizes the need to base international efforts in foreign policy reality. The financial carrots of carbon mitigation technology, and the crisis that a narrow-minded solar geogineering project could promote, are powerful facts. A China-U.S. agreement around them will galvanize businesses and governments, the very thing needed to overcome special interests from the carbon sector.

Carbon reductions will then be much easier to achieve.

And by the way, screw you Medium. You won’t promote this or any of my articles, because they aren’t the kinds of hot topics your algorithms detect. I post this here like I’m filing it in a folder. Perhaps sometime later I’ll be able to use it.