Governing Climate Geoengineering and Climate Technologies

The risk of climate overshoot is not only high – alarmingly, this risk is increasing as greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow. This suggests that even drastic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and other climate mitigation strategies are unlikely to keep us under the 2°C target set by the Paris Agreement. While rapidly reducing carbon dioxide emissions remains the most important climate mitigation strategy in the near term, a range of climate interventions spanning the gamut between the absolutely necessary to the wildly speculative are gradually gaining traction. This course will critically grapple with the governance climate geoengineering and its component organisations and technologies.

Climate Geoengineering (CG) proposals might be born of desperation: technologically-optimistic responses seeking to square runaway greenhouse gas emissions with responses capable of assuaging the negative impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Climate Geoengineering is the ‘deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change’, and broadly comprises two sets of intervention: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR); and Solar Radiation Management (SRM). Rounded off with regional and targeted interventions, and exotics, these will be the three substantive sections for this course.

We begin with an open exploration of what Climate Geoengineering and Climate Technologies might entail. One major question for us would be whether or not we should confine ourselves narrowly within the parameters of CDR and SRM (with a few outliers grouped awkwardly as included but other), or where we should be more expansive in our treatment of what we need to think about and why we might need to govern these developments. We start the course by covering a range of theoretical background topics that are necessary for exploring CG.

We then move to Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), also known as negative emissions, which involve technologies that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and increasing the capacity of carbon sinks at a sufficient scale to alter the composition of the climate. CDR involves processes which capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it for decades, centuries, and millennia. We begin with this because according to the IPCC CDR is necessary to meet climate goals, a reliance that raises governance challenges in its own right. It is also the least controversial climate intervention because: it directly addresses the root causes of anthropogenic climate change; involves relatively well-understood processes; and poses relatively low risk. At least this is what its advocates will tell you: there is also recent research to suggest that there are asymmetrical effects between adding and removing atmospheric carbon dioxide (intuitively because of the extremely long time scales involved in planetary homeostatic processes, but practically involving ocean acidity levels). This type of research undercuts the efficacy of technologically-driven attempts to ‘roll-back’ anthropogenic climate change.

Much more controversial is Solar Radiation Management (SRM), which has been described by its strongest advocate as a ‘terrible idea whose time has come’. SRM involves techniques to affect the earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, from incoming solar radiation. Curiously, SRM and in particular a version that essentially would involve floating ping pong balls over large swathes of the oceanic surface, was immediately proposed as a response to the newly-recognised problem of anthropocentric climate change presented to the White House in 1965! The Cold War era fuelled interest in weather and climate control technologies, and environmental modification as potential strategic capabilities, but climate geoengineering fell out of favour in the 1970s. SRM discussions remained taboo until 2006 when the late Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen published his opinion that sulphate aerosol injections would not damage the Ozone Layer, and the Royal Society published its influential 2009 reports. SRM proposals have largely converged upon injecting sulphates into the stratosphere that mimic observed cooling in the aftermath of volcanic eruptions.

For us, SRM offers a ‘perfect moral storm’. The requisite technology is already available and implementing a SRM programme would be well within the capabilities of any single G20 country, costing about USD 1 billion to initiate, and another USD 1 billion per year to run. SRM is tempting. It enjoys ‘incredible economics’ by offsetting the effect of greenhouse gases in an effectively costless way. SRM might offer immediate, effective relief from major effects of climate change, and limit irreversible losses such as coral reefs and polar ice sheets. It may also lead to permanent, unpredictable, and serious differential regional effects with dramatic human rights impacts. SRM is also likely to exacerbate international security challenges and play into the strategic balance, as well as increase the power of authoritarian regimes. As The Royal Society concluded: ‘[t]he greatest challenges to the successful deployment of geoengineering may be the social, ethical, legal and political issues associated with regulation, rather than scientific and technical issues’. SRM will stretch our governance imaginations because any SRM programme will: be long-term (decades to centuries); involve increasing scale (at least until net-zero carbon emissions); require novel forms of managerial governance frameworks; operate at a global scale; and suffer the prospect for termination shock, whereby sudden SRM cessation would trigger abrupt and possibly catastrophic temperature rise.

While there is plenty to discuss with CDR and SRM alone, because of the interactive-complexity of CG, this is an area where regional and targeted interventions will have global ramifications. The third section of this course will engage with such interventions, and the array of possible actors involved given the often-low barriers to entry and general absence of regulation. We also explore what might be called ‘exotics’ – speculative technologies that would not be out of place in the pages of speculative fiction. These include building underwater walls at the mouths of unstable glaciers to slow or reverse their collapse, and exploring new, potentially riskier, and more comprehensive interventions to protect coral reefs. We finish the course by taking the outsider big picture to draw analogies from proposals to terraform Mars: what might we learn from those perspectives for terraforming Earth?

The prospect of climate geoengineering remains deeply divisive, and perhaps unsurprisingly the position that climate experts take on geoengineering is strongly correlated with their prior beliefs in the impact of climate change. While some form of climate geoengineering seems to be necessary to meet the Paris Agreement’s long-term targets, and in the case of CDR needs to be scaled-up and broadened considerably, these remain overly entangled. Critically engaging with burgeoning climate geoengineering and climate technologies is necessary to complete the picture for coherent climate policy, and given the cardinal importance (albeit often implicit) of Climate Geoengineering to staying within safe boundaries, it is crucial to now bring these issues into the educational limelight.