"...an idea whose time has come"

"Welcome to the desert of the real"

Except they're not going to darken the skies to fight the machines, they're advocating to darken the skies so they can continue to burn fossil fuels.

CANCUN, Mexico (AP) — Like the warming atmosphere above, a once-taboo idea hangs over the slow, frustrating U.N. talks to curb climate change: the idea to tinker with the atmosphere or the planet itself, pollute the skies to ward off the sun, fill the oceans with gas-eating plankton, do whatever it takes.

As climate negotiators grew more discouraged in recent months, U.S. and British government bodies urged stepped-up studies of such "geoengineering." The U.N. climate science network decided to assess the options. And a range of new research moved ahead in America and elsewhere...

Schemes were floated for using aircraft, balloons or big guns to spread sulfate particles in the lower stratosphere to reflect sunlight, easing the warming scientists say is being caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted by industry, vehicles and agriculture.

Others suggested assembling gargantuan mirrors in orbit to fend off the solar radiation. Still others propose — and a German experiment tried — seeding the ocean with iron, a nutrient that would spur the spread of plankton, which absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide...

Specialists regard the stratospheric sulfates proposal as among the most feasible. The U.S. government's National Center for Atmospheric Research has undertaken computer modeling to assess its effect, for one thing, on the protective ozone layer...

a report from U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon, a Democrat from Georgia who chairs the House Science and Technology Committee, urged the government to consider climate-engineering research "as soon as possible in order to ensure scientific preparedness for future climate events."

The U.S. panel had collaborated in its study with a British House of Commons committee.

"We may need geoengineering as a 'Plan B,'" the British report said, if nations fail to forge agreement on a binding treaty to rein in greenhouse gases.

Perhaps most significantly, the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, the global authority on climate science, agreed in October to take on geoengineering in its next assessment report. Its hundreds of scientists will begin with a session next spring...

Activist Ribeiro's Canada-based ETC organization accuses Washington of taking a "coalition of the willing" approach to geoengineering, going ahead with its British ally and perhaps others, disregarding the rest of the world.

Ribeiro said the United Nations must be in control: "It can't be voluntary schemes outside the U.N. when you're talking about manipulating the climate."

Critics suggest the Americans, whose resistance to mandatory emissions reductions has long helped block a global climate deal, view "Plan B" as a "Plan A," to avoid having to rein in emissions.

The U.S. and British parliamentary reports seem to diverge on governance. The House of Commons committee concluded, "The U.N. is the route" to a regulatory framework. The U.S. report never mentions the U.N...

Doubtless Somebody realizes the potential to scam billions from the United States government to legally pollute the planet