Joshua Horton

The emergency framing of solar geoengineering: Time for a different approach

Solar geoengineering has been proposed as a possible response measure in the event of a ‘climate emergency’. Scientific evidence for climate emergencies in the form of tipping points, however, is contested and unsettled. Furthermore, declarations of emergency entail authoritarian political tendencies that historically have given rise to repression and abuse. By definition, an emergency must exhibit a combination of high risk, urgency and necessity; no plausible climatic tipping point displays all these attributes simultaneously. A weak scientific basis together with genuine societal peril argues against the continued emergency framing of solar geoengineering.

The Asia-Pacific’s role in the emerging solar geoengineering debate

Increasing interest in climate engineering in recent years has led to calls by the international research community for international research collaboration as well as global public engagement. But making such collaboration a reality is challenging. Here, we report the summary of a 2016 workshop on the significance and challenges of international collaboration on climate engineering research with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region. Because of the region’s interest in benefits and risks of climate engineering, there is a potential synergy between impact research on anthropogenic global warming and that on solar radiation management. Local researchers in the region can help make progress toward better understanding of impacts of solar radiation management. These activities can be guided by an ad hoc Asia-Pacific working group on climate engineering, a voluntary expert network. The working group can foster regional conversations in a sustained manner while contributing to capacity building. An important theme in the regional conversation is to develop effective practices of dialogues in light of local backgrounds such as cultural traditions and past experiences of large-scale technology development. Our recommendation merely portrays one of several possible ways forward, and it is our hope to stimulate the debate in the region.

Solar Geoengineering: Reassessing Costs, Benefits, and Compensation

In their article ‘Ethical and technical challenges in compensating for harm due to solar radiation management geoengineering,’ Svoboda and Irvine argue that setting up a just system of compensation for solar radiation management (SRM) geoengineering ‘faces severe difficulties’ that might be insurmountable. At the same time, they contend, ‘instituting a just SRM compensation system might be a necessary condition for SRM to be ethically permissible’ (italics original). I agree that building a just system of SRM compensation would entail overcoming serious technical and ethical challenges. However, I believe that these problems are more tractable than Svoboda and Irvine appreciate, and that a proper concern for ethics demands that critics of geoengineering take the possible benefits of SRM much more seriously. In this brief commentary, I will consider the true severity of several of the obstacles identified by Svoboda and Irvine, and make the case that a comprehensive ethical perspective on SRM requires a more complete exploration of the potential costs and benefits of solar geoengineering. Svoboda and Irvine start from the premise that, ‘If deployed, SRM geoengineering likely would result in harm to some persons and benefit to others, thus creating both “winners” and “losers”’; unequal distributional consequences across countries and regions, they argue, would necessitate some form of SRM compensation system. The meme of regional ‘winners and losers’ is common in the literature on geoengineering, but new evidence from innovative modeling work suggests that realistic SRM deployment scenarios might produce few if any losers while benefiting virtually all regions of the world. Moreno-Cruz, Ricke, and Keith (2012) developed a basic model demonstrating that SRM can successfully compensate for more than half the world’s climate change-related temperature and precipitation damages while leaving no region worse off. Kravitz et al. (2014) build on this work to show that, if both temperature and precipitation changes are valued, all regions of the world are better off (closer to preindustrial conditions) with some SRM than with no SRM. According to these and other research efforts, the unequal impacts of SRM may be much less severe than typically assumed, reducing the potential for conflict and lessening demands on any compensation system. The need to provide compensation to possible victims of SRM deployment may be less acute than previously thought; nevertheless a workable compensation system is likely to

Stopping Solar Geoengineering Through Technical Means: A Preliminary Assessment of Counter‐Geoengineering

Counter-geoengineering is the idea that a country might seek or threaten to counteract the cooling effect of solar geoengineering through technical means. Although this concept has been mentioned with increasing frequency in commentary on geoengineering, it has received little scholarly attention. We offer a preliminary analysis. We begin by distinguishing two kinds of counter-geoengineering: countervailing with a warming agent and neutralizing with a physical disruption. Based on this distinction, we review prior suggestions and describe novel methods by which either method might be accomplished, within the constraints imposed by deep technical uncertainties and substantial technical challenges. We then reflect on the strategic requirements and motivations for developing counter geoengineering and use a simple game-theoretic framework to demonstrate how counter-geoengineering might interact with the free-driver dynamic of solar geoengineering to shape climate geopolitics. We find that any state that could credibly threaten counter-geoengineering would effectively have a veto over the use of solar geoengineering, which could reduce the prospects of unilateral deployment. Alternatively, the development of geoengineering and counter-geoengineering capabilities could lead to dangerous brinkmanship. We conclude that the development of counter-geoengineering would face considerable practical obstacles and would signal continuing political failure to manage climate risks on a cooperative basis.

Solar Geoengineering and Democracy

Some scientists suggest that it might be possible to reflect a portion of incoming sunlight back into space to reduce climate change and its impacts. Others argue that such solar radiation management (SRM) geoengineering is inherently incompatible with democracy. In this article, we reject this incompatibility argument. First, we counterargue that technologies such as SRM lack innate political characteristics and predetermined social effects, and that democracy need not be deliberative to serve as a standard for governance. We then rebut each of the argument’s core claims, countering that (1) democratic institutions are sufficiently resilient to manage SRM, (2) opting out of governance decisions is not a fundamental democratic right, (3) SRM may not require an undue degree of technocracy, and (4) its implementation may not concentrate power and promote authoritarianism. Although we reject the incompatibility argument, we do not argue that SRM is necessarily, or even likely to be, democratic in practice.