Europe’s Geoengineering Future?

WSJ, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., Aug. 11, 2026

Politicians spent trillions on climate without any effect on heat waves and fires.

The energy needed to cool your house is energy that causes global warming. Therefore, cool the planet, not your house, say European activists and politicians during a time of deadly heat waves, wildfires, etc.

A few problems crop up. There’s no plan to cool the planet, so Europe’s activists are telling Europe’s seniors to keep dying at a rate of 47,000 to 60,000 a year amid warmer summers.

U.S. residential and commercial space heating consumes twice as much energy as cooling; globally, the ratio is closer to 4 to 1. It doesn’t follow that, in a warming world, more air conditioning means more emissions overall. Not to mention air conditioning is usually powered by electricity, an energy source undergoing palpable decarbonization. Heating, which a warming world will need less of, is still dominated by combustion fuels.

Then there’s the conundrum: Consumers trade off more highly valued energy uses against less-valued ones. How does it make sense to discourage air conditioning in order to favor the energy Europeans use to drive to the Kwik-E-Mart for a Slim Jim?

Unfortunately, as JPMorgan energy guru Michael Cembalest recently put it, we’re “in divinity school” where rationality is roughly equated with atheism when the subject is climate and energy.

I spent the first three paragraphs of a recent column distinguishing between acknowledging failed climate policy and questioning climate science. You might drop this paper with an “ick” if you knew how many readers proved my point by shrieking “denier” at me.

Many Americans and Europeans have in common that they are passionate about climate change without being passionate to know anything about it. They put less effort into evaluating policy proposals than they do picking out a toaster at Best Buy.

Democratic theory tells us how to expect politicians to behave in the presence of such incentives. The bill is now many trillions of dollars for policies that have had no effect on the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere.

A few years ago, a top Biden and Obama climate official sighed when I pointed out the wrong turn in climate policy. He added, “I have to believe that putting a price on carbon” at some point will return to the world’s agenda. His sigh is a standing indictment of the press, especially the New York Times, for failing to criticize the turn toward climate pork that, as studies of every partisan and nonpartisan stripe have pointed out for decades, doesn’t disincentivize emissions.

In the service of public understanding, something else also can’t be repeated often enough: Two-thirds of the warming in climate models comes not as a primary effect of increased CO2. It comes from poorly cataloged and measured “positive feedbacks.” This is why climate models vary significantly in how much warming they forecast.

If reading this makes you want to shout “denier,” this column is for you. If you think no price is too high for reduced emissions, stop exhaling. Each time you emit approximately 95 milligrams.

If you think acknowledging the uncertainties of climate science and the wrong turns of climate policy is denialism, this could be an additional reason to stop exhaling.

Europe’s air-conditioning and wildfire puzzle may be a breakthrough moment. There’s no guarantee that present trends will continue, but if they do, the European Union could be the first top-tier world player with an incentive actually to alter global temperatures. It could do this by injecting particulates into the atmosphere to produce a 1% reduction in sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface.

No, this project, which comes with an estimated price tag of $5 billion to $20 billion a year, wouldn’t quench specific heat waves or fires. Europe’s wildfire problem in particular calls for changes in land-use policy (also true in the U.S.).

But geoengineering-by-sulfates by now has been widely modeled. It’s considered in the climate community to be the likeliest proposal for offsetting about 1 degree Celsius of planetary warming that computer models attribute to accumulated emissions.

Get ready for this to bust through even the clotted mindset of the Times, last seen falsifying why climate scientists have repented of their worst-case emissions scenarios—it wasn’t because of the success of green energy, as the paper was obliged to admit in a non-retraction retraction.

Expect it also to bust through the clotted mindset of Europe’s policymakers. The ugly truth is, like policymakers everywhere, they’ve been waving their hands and imposing costs without getting called out for producing zero real-world effect. Now their voters will be demanding a real-world effect they can see and feel if Europe’s heat-wave and wildfire trends continue.

Only experience will tell us how much temperatures actually change in the coming decades. The data probably will never tell us reliably how much fossil fuels were responsible. It won’t matter if mankind develops a taste for adjusting climate because it can.