Governing Climate Geoengineering and Climate Technologies
Course content
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.
The course is open to students on the Master's program in Security Risk Management at Department of Political Science and exchange students at the master's level.
Knowledge:
- To describe and explain what Climate Geoengineering entails: as technologies, as techniques, and as social and societal consequence.
- To contexualise Climate Geoengineering within a range of different contexts, fields, literatures, and approaches. For example, to understand its governance from a law and technology perspective, or to explain how Normal Accidents might occur with a Climate Geoengineering programme.
- To apply and to distinguish scenarios and case-studies as lessons for Climate Geoengineering governance.
- To explain the controversies raised by Climate Geoengineering.
Skills:
- To apply a range of different approaches to the governance challenges posed by Climate Geoengineering. For example, to ‘think in systems’ rather than linearly; to connect underlying narratives to particular problem formulations; and to understand the rhetorical and narrative contexts.
- To understand and critically evaluate the deep ramifications of powerful technologies, and to connect these beyond only climate tech debates.
- To navigate the positions and debates in Climate Geoengineering in an engaged and critical manner.
Competences:
- The ability to draw analogies between adjacent, proximate, and distant ideas, concepts, examples and scenarios in order to apply relevant lessons from vastly different areas.
- The cognitive flexibility to distinguish, dissect, evaulate, critique and to synthesise arguments under conditions of ignorance or uncertainty, and to be able to incorporate and accommodate for new information and ideas: effectively the competence to change one’s mind when its justified to do so.
- To critically engage with emotive and controversial topics in a logical and empirical fashion, and to be able to discuss heated questions in an open, playful, and respectful manner.
- To craft policy recommendations under conditions of ignorance and uncertainty.
- To apply systems thinking to Climate Engineering questions, and beyond.
This is a research-led course dealing with problem-finding
orientations. As such, there is no field or literature to ‘master’
as such. Instead, the purpose of this course is to engage deeply
and critically with a range of questions raised by Climate
Geoengineering. To do this, we have a set of readings that seek to
maximise exposure to the breadth and depth of the topic, but there
is no expectation that students read exclusively and
comprehensively from the reading list (this also matches the
assessment style of an individually researched written assignment).
A heuristic for the pedagogy is that it involves in the Socratic
Method. Students are expected to be prepared for each seminar,
having researched into the topic for the session, and to contribute
their thinking as relevant in an open, playful, and respectful
manner. We will seek to draw connections and distinctions between
the material in and beyond the readings, and to guide the seminar
in a way that yields new insights, or directions for further
research. The purpose for the seminars is both to expose students
to substantive material relevant to their interests and individual
written assessments. The seminars should also exercise their
capacities to be cognitively flexible when appropriate, and
analytical, skeptical, and critical when the occasion calls for
it.
Anderson K and others, ‘Controversies of Carbon Dioxide Removal’ (2023) 4 Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 808-814. (6 pages)
Barrett S, ‘The Incredible Economics of Geoengineering’ (2008) 39 Environmental and Resource Economics 45-54. (8 pages)
Baskin J, ‘Competing Imaginaries of Solar Geoengineering’, Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the End of Nature (Springer International Publishing 2019) 123-161 (38 pages)
Crutzen PJ, ‘Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?’ (2006) 77 Climatic Change 211-219 (6 pages)
Dannenberg A and Zitzelsberger S, ‘Climate Experts’ Views on Geoengineering Depend on Their Beliefs about Climate Change Impacts’ (2019) 9 Nature Climate Change 769-755 (5 pages)
European Commission: Directorate-General for Research and Innovation and Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, ‘Solar Radiation Modification’ (Publications Office of the European Union 2024) (31 pages)
European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, ‘Scoping Paper: Solar Radiation Modification’ (European Commission 2023) (5 pages)
Fleming JR, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia University Press 2010) chapters 7 & 8 (79 pages)
Ho DT, ‘Carbon Dioxide Removal Is Not a Current Climate Solution — We Need to Change the Narrative’ (2023) 616 Nature 9 (1 page)
Jinnah S, Morrow D and Nicholson S, ‘Splitting Climate Engineering Governance: How Problem Structure Shapes Institutional Design’ (2021) 12 Global Policy 8-19 (9 pages)
Liu H-Y, ‘Constituting the Anthropocene: Towards the Synthetic Age’ in Han Somsen and Emre Bayamlıoğlu (eds), Law, Environment, and Technology: Reinventing Environmental Law and Governance in the Anthropocene (Edward Elgar Publishing 2025) (17 pages)
——, ‘Governing Cyborg Gaia: Responsibility, Dependency, and Enslavement to Solar Radiation Management’ [2025] European Journal of Risk Regulation (13 pages)
Liu H-Y and Maas MM, ‘“Solving for X?”: Towards a Problem-Finding Framework That Grounds Long-Term Governance Strategies for Artificial Intelligence’ (2021) 126 Futures 102672 (18 pages)
Lockley A and others, ‘Glacier Geoengineering to Address Sea-Level Rise: A Geotechnical Approach’ (2020) 11 Advances in Climate Change Research 401-414 (11 pages)
Mace MJ. and others, ‘Large-Scale Carbon Dioxide Removal to Meet the 1.5°C Limit: Key Governance Gaps, Challenges and Priority Responses’ (2021) 12 Global Policy 67-81 (12 pages)
McDonald M, ‘Geoengineering, Climate Change and Ecological Security’ (2023) 32 Environmental Politics 565-585 (15 pages)
McKinnon C, ‘Sleepwalking into Lock-in? Avoiding Wrongs to Future People in the Governance of Solar Radiation Management Research’ (2019) 28 Environmental Politics 441-459 (12 pages)
——, ‘The Panglossian Politics of the Geoclique’ (2020) 23 Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 584-599 (11 pages)
McLaren D and Corry O, ‘Clash of Geofutures and the Remaking of Planetary Order: Faultlines Underlying Conflicts over Geoengineering Governance’ (2021) 12 Global Policy 20-33 (13 pages)
McLaren DP and others, ‘Beyond “Net-Zero”: A Case for Separate Targets for Emissions Reduction and Negative Emissions’ (2019) 1 Frontiers in Climate 1-5 (4 pages)
Michaelowa A, ‘Solar Radiation Modification - A “Silver Bullet” Climate Policy for Populist and Authoritarian Regimes?’ (2021) 12 Global Policy 119-128 (7 pages)
Möller I, ‘Winning Hearts and Minds? Explaining the Rise of the Geoengineering Idea’ in JP Sapinski, Holly Jean Buck and Andreas Malm (eds), Has It Come to This?: The Promises and Perils of Geoengineering on the Brink (Rutgers University Press 2020) 21-33 (11 pages)
Moore JC and others, ‘Targeted Geoengineering: Local Interventions with Global Implications’ (2021) 12 Global Policy 108-118 (9 pages)
Owen R, ‘Solar Radiation Management and the Governance of Hubris’ in RM Harrison and RE Hester (eds), Geoengineering of the Climate System (The Royal Society of Chemistry 2014) 212-248 (31 pages)
Parker A and Irvine PJ, ‘The Risk of Termination Shock From Solar Geoengineering’ (2018) 6 Earth’s Future 456-467 (10 pages)
Pasek A, ‘Provisioning Climate: An Infrastructural Approach to Geoengineering’ in JP Sapinski, Holly Jean Buck and Andreas Malm (eds), Has It Come to This?: The Promises and Perils of Geoengineering on the Brink (Rutgers University Press 2020) 163-175 (11 pages)
Perrow C, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (Princeton University Press 2011) 304-352 (48 pages)
Robbins K, ‘Geoengineering and the Evolution of Dueling Precautions’ in Wil Burns, David Dana and Simon James Nicholson (eds), Climate Geoengineering: Science, Law and Governance (Springer International Publishing 2021) 249-262 (13 pages)
SAPEA, ‘Solar Radiation Modification’ (SAPEA 2024) (167 pages)
Smith SM and others, ‘The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal’ (The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal 2024) (195 pages)
Sovacool BK, Baum C and Low S, ‘The next Climate War? Statecraft, Security, and Weaponization in the Geopolitics of a Low-Carbon Future’ (2023) 45 Energy Strategy Reviews 101031 (14 pages)
Szocik K, ‘Ethical, Political and Legal Challenges Relating to Colonizing and Terraforming Mars’ in Martin Beech, Joseph Seckbach and Richard Gordon (eds), Terraforming Mars (John Wiley & Sons 2021) 123-134 (10 pages)
Takacs D, ‘Standing for Rivers, Mountains—and Trees—in the Anthropocene’ (2022) 95 Southern California Law Review 1469-1500 (32 pages).
Yuan T and others, ‘Abrupt Reduction in Shipping Emission as an Inadvertent Geoengineering Termination Shock Produces Substantial Radiative Warming’ (2024) 5 Communications Earth & Environment 1-5 (5 pages)
Zickfeld K and others, ‘Asymmetry in the Climate–Carbon Cycle Response to Positive and Negative CO2 Emissions’ (2021) 11 Nature Climate Change 613-617 (5 pages)
It is illegal to share digital textbooks with each other without permission from the copyright holder.
Good command of English
- Students enrolled at Faculty of Law: Self Service at KUnet
- Students enrolled at other UCPH faculties or Danish universities, who holds a pre-approval from their Study Board: Credit student application form
- All other students or professionals: Single subject application form (tuition fee apply)
- ECTS
- 15 ECTS
- Type of assessment
-
Home assignment
- Type of assessment details
- Individual written assignment
- Aid
- All aids allowed
Read about the descriptions of the individual exam forms, including formal requirements, scope and deadlines in the exam catalogue
Read about practical exam conditions at KUnet
- Marking scale
- 7-point grading scale
- Censorship form
- No external censorship
- Exam period
-
Hand-in date: 15-12-2025
- Re-exam
-
Hand-in date: 28-01-2026
Single subject courses (day)
- Category
- Hours
- Preparation
- 356,5
- Seminar
- 56
- English
- 412,5
Kursusinformation
- Language
- English
- Course number
- JJUA55326U
- ECTS
- 15 ECTS
- Programme level
- Full Degree Master
Full Degree Master choice
- Duration
-
1 semester
- Placement
- Autumn
- Price
-
- Students enrolled at Faculty of Law or holding a pre-approval: No tuition fee
- Professionals: Please visit our website
- Schedulegroup
-
Please see timetable for teaching hours
- Studyboard
- Law
Contracting department
- Law
- Department of Political Science
Contracting faculty
- Faculty of Law
Course Coordinator
- Hin-Yan Liu (11-6b6c71307c6471316f6c78436d7875316e7831676e)
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