Thank goodness for executive summaries. Otherwise, we’d have had to read all 44 pages of the Biden administration’s latest bright idea for combatting global warming climate change global warming.

At issue is a mouthful of a White House document titled “Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to Solar Radiation Modification,” which introduces a term called “solar radiation modification,” or SRM.

As the document notes, “This Research Plan was prepared in response to a requirement in the joint explanatory statement accompanying Division B of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022, directing the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), with support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), to provide a research plan for "solar and other rapid climate interventions.”

Translation: It’s a research report about blocking out the sun. As Politico reports:

The White House offered measured support for the idea of studying how to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface as a way to limit global warming, in a congressionally mandated report that could help bring efforts once confined to science fiction into the realm of legitimate debate.

The controversial concept known as solar radiation modification is a potentially effective response to fighting climate change, but one that could have unknown side effects stemming from altering the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, some scientists say.

Hmm. Whenever we hear subtle disclaimers like “unknown side effects stemming from altering the chemical makeup of the atmosphere,” we tend to want to tap the brakes. After all, we seem to remember scientists saying there was some sort of solar situation, some sort of atmospheric anomaly, that caused the dinosaurs some angst 65 million years ago.

Indeed, the document explores “atmospheric-based approaches to solar radiation modification (SRM), specifically stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), and marine cloud brightening (MCB),” and “cirrus cloud thinning (CCT).”

Happily, the Biden White House isn’t yet ready to send up a squadron of Stratofortresses and reinvigorate the discussion of chemtrails and such. Politico continues: “The White House report released late Friday indicates that the Biden administration is open to studying the possibility that altering sunlight might quickly cool the planet. But it added a degree of skepticism by noting that Congress has ordered the review, and the administration said it does not signal any new policy decisions related to a process that is sometimes referred to — or derided as — geoengineering.”

Not just yet, anyway. But still, as the report notes: “A program of research into the scientific and societal implications of solar radiation modification (SRM) would enable better-informed decisions about the potential risks and benefits of SRM as a component of climate policy, alongside the foundational elements of greenhouse gas emissions mitigation and adaptation. Such a research program would also help to prepare the United States for possible deployment of SRM by other public or private actors. A research program characterized by transparency and international cooperation would contribute to a broader basis of trust around this issue.”

So far, we’ve been doing a lot of sneering, but Power Line’s Steven Hayward points out that the sort of research being discussed here was actually forbidden territory for the environmental Left until only recently. For years, the ecotheologians wouldn’t discuss anything beyond the elimination of fossil fuels and their (utterly implausible) replacement by wind and solar. Hayward writes:

I dissent slightly from a categorical rejection of “geo-engineering,” though the reasons for deep skepticism are well justified. I’ve been following the debate about this for nearly 20 years, and wrote some early articles about the idea — chiefly the ferocious resistance to it among the climatistas. The IPCC ignored the idea in two of its decennial reports back in the aughts, and proposals even to conduct research were fiercely opposed by environmental groups, because their chief object is to destroy all fossil fuels and repeal the industrial revolution, and geo-engineering solutions to a warmer climate wouldn’t accomplish those Luddite goals. And since environmentalists were so adamantly against it, I was naturally for it! And one important aspect of this current turnabout by the so-called “consensus” climate community is that it represents a tacit understanding on their part that the crusade against hydrocarbon energy — Net-Zero by 2050 — isn’t going to happen.

Hayward adds that the research currently being conducted shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Why? Because if we don’t do it, someone else will. Who might that someone be? “I think a serious research project into the matter is worth doing,” he writes, “in part because this may be one area where an international agreement is worth pursuing (and I hate most international agreements). Do we want a single nation (cough, cough — China — cough, cough) to decide to try to modify the world’s climate on its own? Or Elon Musk III? The analogy here would be the atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty of the early 1960s — about the only positive contribution of the old arms control fanatics.”

What could go wrong with solar radiation modification? Plenty. But it strikes us that the more we know, the less likely we are to buy into something that’ll wipe out human civilization as we know it. Which would be a good thing.