The Dangers of Mainstreaming Solar Geoengineering: A critique of the National Academies Report

ABSTRACT

The U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) 2021 report on solar geoengineering research is a political intervention in global climate politics. Although the NASEM report explicitly acknowledges the risks of unilateral research without broad-based public participation and global governance, the report minimizes these concerns by recommending that the U.S. act swiftly to establish a publicly funded national research program. By providing details for how the research program should be designed, the report contradicts its own recommendations for an inclusive and international process. By mainstreaming solar geoengineering, the report risks increasing the likelihood of international conflict and unilateral deployment, and further exacerbates delays in prioritizing other climate actions. Instead of expanding research on global manipulation of the earth’s climate, the United States, like other countries around the world, should commit to multilateral, coordinated efforts to phase out fossil fuels, advance global climate action, and invest in climate justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Geoengineering
• National Academies
• climate action
• climate justice

Main text

Once on the fringes of climate policy, solar geoengineering is gaining increased mainstream attention with the March 2021 release of a National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) report recommending that the U.S. government develop and fund a new solar geoengineering research program (NASEM 2021). Solar geoengineering refers to potential technological approaches to cooling the planet by reflecting sunlight back to space. The leading solar geoengineering proposal, known as Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), involves continually spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to block some fraction of incoming sunlight.¹

As social science researchers with expertise in technology, policy, climate governance and climate justice, we are concerned about the grave political implications of how the NASEM report legitimizes SAI and about internal contradictions within the report. The report explicitly recognizes the dangers of unilaterally advancing research without broad-based public participation and without a coordinated global governance structure to manage the research. However, the report’s central recommendation to establish a new United States research program includes a detailed initial research program design with prioritized research areas, specific proposed budgets and suggested time-frames that were all developed without public participation, and in the absence of a global governance structure. The report itself, therefore, undermines the importance of global governance and public participation in two ways: (1) by failing to integrate public participation or global governance in its own processes, and (2) by failing to recommend that the establishment of any research program should be conditional on prior development of international governance mechanisms and substantive public participation. The report’s detailed recommendations on a future research program constitutes a de facto preemption of effective public inputs to shape research needs and decisions (Gupta et al. 2020). By effectively designing and prioritizing what a solar geoengineering research program for the United States should look like, the report and its recommendations make invisible the growing grassroots opposition to solar geoengineering among global climate justice activists, the highly contested and politicized landscape of climate policy, and the contentious role of the United States in international politics.

Given the many risks of advancing solar geoengineering research (Stephens and Surprise 2020), here we describe why the recommendations of the NASEM report risk running counter to widely-supported goals of global cooperation, inclusive public engagement, and avoiding a ‘slippery slope’ from research to deployment.

Global cooperation

The report highlights the importance of inclusive global cooperation and coordination, recognizing the dangers of a single country advancing solar geoengineering research unilaterally. The report states that ‘there are political risks associated with research, especially if research is perceived as unilateral and self-interested based on actors’ past policy decisions’ (NASEM 2021) (p. 112, italics added for emphasis). Contrary to this cautionary note, however, the report nonetheless unconditionally recommends immediate investment of up to $200 million U.S. dollars to establish a United States solar geoengineering research program, even though a system of international research governance has not yet been developed. History shows that when the U.S. takes the lead on international issues, international governance institutions have been dominated by the U.S.: e.g. World Bank, International Monetary Fund, etc. The NASEM report does not adequately acknowledge this history – nor does it offer suggestions and recommendations for how to avoid U.S. dominance in international governance of solar geoengineering. Instead, the NASEM report recommends setting up an ‘ad hoc working group … to address future governance needs for SG research’ (p. 190), and includes a vague suggestion that the US research program should be developed ‘in coordination with other countries’ (p. 145). Depending on the type and extent of international coordination, if the U.S. acts to invest substantially in solar geoengineering research, it could preempt global cooperation and further marginalize vulnerable groups and communities who might be most affected by solar geoengineering (Biermann and Möller 2019). Moreover, a unilateral U.S. research program could catalyze global competition among countries) and is likely to orient future development of both research and its governance toward a U.S.-centric, technocratic vision of climate response (Gupta et al. 2020). This undermines efforts to elevate the perspectives and priorities of the people around the world most affected by climate change.

The U.S. has become the world leader in solar geoengineering research during the past five years, with multiple private philanthropies funding research at major universities. Harvard researchers have received the most private research funding so far, and their proposals for outdoor field experiments – the SCoPEx (Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment) project – have already triggered international controversy (Fountain and Flavelle 2021). The NASEM report recommends expanding these philanthropic-academic research efforts substantially through federal policy and increased public investment to support more research. To be clear, ceteris paribus, a publicly funded research program is preferable to a privately funded research program. Yet, the report notes that public funding should not replace philanthropic funding, but suggests that U.S. public and private sector funding agencies should coordinate to develop codes of conduct for responsible research (p. 157). This recommendation provides legitimacy for continued philanthropic funding of solar geoengineering research, which has primarily attracted white male tech-billionaires and other wealthy individuals or their foundations (Biermann and Moller, 2019). . In the absence of effective public engagement and broad-based global governance, public U.S. funding would be supporting a top-down and exclusive research program that is driven by and legitimizes U.S. interests. It also risks promoting the interests of billionaires and other powerful actors that tend to dominate the U.S. policy process, and are already shaping solar geoengineering research in the U.S. (Stephens and Surprise 2020, Kumbamu 2020).

Given widespread mistrust of the U.S. on climate change, and the legacy of the U.S. taking unilateral action in international affairs, we are concerned that U.S. unilateralism in advancing solar geoengineering technology will increase geopolitical risks, including increased securitization and the potential for militarization of this planetary-scale intervention (Biermann and Moller, 2019, Surprise 2020). Proponents and critics of solar geoengineering alike draw attention to the dangerous potential for geopolitical conflict or military involvement in solar geoengineering research and deployment (Parker et al. 2018, Surprise 2020), but this concern – and the wider U.S. reputation in this context – is given scant consideration in the report. A unilateral approach also risks disrupting ongoing international efforts to build trust toward global cooperation on solar geoengineering research (Jinnah et al. 2019), including initiatives within the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity and at the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA), where the US, stood alongside Saudi Arabia,² to block efforts for international cooperation on solar geoengineering governance and research (Stefanini 2019).

Public engagement

The report emphasizes the importance of broad public and stakeholder engagement in advancing solar geoengineering research and designing any solar geoengineering research program (p. 187). However, the report then goes on to make very detailed recommendations for pursuing specific research topics without having integrated public participation in deliberation about the content, timing, and the direction of a future research program. If public engagement is to serve as an essential component of co-developing the goals, purpose and practices of a coordinated research program, then public engagement must precede – rather than follow – the determination of the specific budget and research agenda that is recommended by the NASEM. Ironically, the report explicitly separates out public engagement as something distinct from its recommendations on the goals and context of the research program (p. 193). In doing this, the report perpetuates a narrow technocratic view of public engagement as a tool to be deployed in an instrumental manner to legitimize predetermined plans of an exclusive scientific body.

Social science research about community engagement and public participation is expansive in highlighting concerns about instrumental and manipulative engagement, undertaken in pursuit of pre-determined goals (White 1996). This kind of engagement is particularly problematic when there are large power differentials between those organizing public engagement and the publics involved, such as in engagement with disadvantaged communities and indigenous groups in an international settings (White 1996). The NASEM report does not address these problematic forms and uses of ‘participation’ and does not specify how public engagement will – or should – transparently influence research and governance.

Public engagement strategies need to be designed to ensure that researchers, funders and program managers can accept public input as a genuine source of guidance on the acceptability, wisdom, purpose and conduct of their work (Frumhoff and Stephens, 2018, Chilvers and Kearnes 2020). But the NASEM report seeks to incorporate ‘public engagement … into the development and planning of solar geoengineering activities to increase legitimacy, build trust, reduce conflict, and provide accountability’ (p. 236; italics added for emphasis). This suggests that the report treats public engagement as an instrument to promote ‘solar geoengineering activities’, rather than as an opportunity to assess whether civil society, vulnerable countries, and marginalized groups even consider solar geoengineering research to be legitimate. The recent controversy over the proposed SCoPEx field experiment in Sweden has revealed the extent of resistance to solar geoengineering among Indigenous communities around the world. The Saami people successfully opposed the project and subsequently convened a wider coalition of indigenous groups opposing solar geoengineering research everywhere: ‘As representatives of Indigenous Peoples, we do not approve legitimizing development towards solar geoengineering technology, nor for it to be conducted in or above our lands, territories and skies, nor in any ecosystems anywhere’ (Saami Council 2021). Ironically, the NASEM report mentions SCoPEx as a positive example of public engagement in decision making over solar geoengineering research (p. 180 Box 5.1). Now, the postponed SCoPEx experiment demonstrates the dangers of deploying public consultation instrumentally and as an afterthought to a research program that has already been planned (Frumhoff and Stephens, 2018). The instrumentalization of public engagement as a strategy to solicit public consent is particularly problematic given the practical and political challenges involved in attempting to separate geoengineering research and deployment, a risk that is acknowledged frequently in the NASEM report (McLaren and Corry 2021).

The National Academies are private, non-profit institutions that operate under an 1863 congressional charter to provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, technology and medicine. Unlike many National Academy reports that are commissioned and supported by the U.S. Congress, this report was not requested by legislators, elected officials or policy-makers. Our inquiries to NAS regarding who commissioned the report and how it evolved did not yield a clear response.³ We do know that it was funded by a conglomeration of private foundations and government agencies (NASA, NOAA and the Department of Energy contributed some financial support). Decisions regarding who funds, advocates for, participates in, and covers National Academies reports are deeply political. Because NASEM reports carry considerable weight in policy circles, and expert-level reports shape public opinion and policy development, full transparency concerning who advocated for the report and guided the timing of its release would help address concerns about potential political influences.

Although the report was commissioned in late 2018 (close to three years ago), it was released at a ‘politically opportune moment’ just a couple of months into the Biden/Harris administration during a time of renewed priorities for climate investments (Tollefson 2021). The timing of the report and the specific recommendations were celebrated by many of those who been advocating for solar geoengineering research for years (Voosen 2021). For example, David Keith, director of the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program, called the report ‘thrilling’ (Voosen 2021), indicating that the report’s tenor and recommendations skew heavily towards the opinions of solar geoengineering advocates rather than those who are critical of this climate response.

Separating research from deployment

Although all the high-level summaries and presentations about the report explicitly state that the committee is not recommending deployment of solar geoengineering, the report specifically acknowledges unavoidable links between research and deployment in several sections (NASEM 2021). The official charge of the NASEM committee was to investigate research and research governance, not deployment, but in several places the report explicitly addresses deployment. In Chapter 3 on decision-making, for example, the report suggests that an explicit goal of research is to understand the risks and benefits of deployment. Moreover, the report spends considerable time discussing details of deployment including the retrofitting and development of airplanes that would be necessary for deployment (p. 87–88).

The report does suggest that if research shows solar geoengineering is dangerous, then the research program could be ended (through the provision of what it describes as ‘exit ramps’). But specific mechanisms for how, when and who would end solar geoengineering research are not addressed. The report also fails to adequately acknowledge existing research that has already revealed unacceptable environmental (Trisos et al. 2018) and geopolitical (McLaren and Corry 2021) risks of solar geoengineering. Much existing research that has analyzed the politics and socio-cultural and environmental effects of geoengineering already suggests serious dangers (Biermann and Möller 2019, Stephens and Surprise 2020). This evidence has been considered by the NASEM, however, not as reason for precaution, but as an argument to increase research, based on an implicit presumption that more research would somehow ‘reduce uncertainties’, even though the report acknowledges that some types of uncertainties can only be reduced through ‘actual SG deployment’ (p. 117). With only an abstract suggestion about the possibility for terminating research sometime in the future, it is difficult to see under what conditions additional future evidence of risk and danger would change the way proponents for geoengineering research conceptualize the need for expanding research.

A central political consequence – acknowledged in the report, but not explicitly addressed in the recommendations – is that more research, especially research designed to promote solar geoengineering activities, might raise expectations about solar geoengineering which could discourage emissions reductions and the societal transformation away from fossil fuels. This risk is termed ‘mitigation deterrence’ (McLaren 2016), and arises through political, social and economic tradeoffs. The risk of mitigation deterrence is demonstrated acutely by the increased interest in solar geoengineering among those opposed to investing in mitigation and those resisting efforts to reduce fossil fuel reliance (Ellison 2018). Expanding research into solar geoengineering legitimizes the promise of a future technological solution and thereby risks further delays in developing plans for urgently needed mitigation action. The NASEM report fails to acknowledge that expanding solar geoengineering research via a unilateral U.S. research program could increase the risk of climate catastrophe rather than reduce it; this is particularly evident given the additional risk of a rapid termination shock if solar geoengineering were initiated, but then could not be sustained because of social and political conflicts (McKinnon 2019). Pushing forward with substantial solar geoengineering research now, and hoping concerns like this will eventually be addressed through global governance, increases these risks.

Conclusion

The multiple inconsistencies and contradictions within the NASEM report appear to follow a pattern in which risks and dangers of conducting research are clearly acknowledged, but then the report’s actual recommendations disregard those very same dangers. These contradictions raise serious questions about how the committee reached consensus on such a contested and controversial set of recommendations. The report’s deliberations were conducted beyond the purview of public forums, and the NASEM selects its own elite experts in a non-transparent process. The majority of the committee were U.S. residents and the committee lacked representation from critics of solar geoengineering. The minimal representation from the social sciences and humanities is likely to have contributed to a more narrow, technocratic assessment of the complex political and social implications of advancing solar geoengineering research. This is problematic because geoengineering governance is an especially wicked problem which demands engagement with complex social and political processes in a deeply unequal world marked by power asymmetries arising from structural racism and the legacies of colonialism. We fear that the limited regional, epistemic, and political diversity on the committee may have contributed to inadequate consideration of the social and political implications of the recommendations.

By wading into the nitty-gritty of what a future geoengineering research program should focus on, the report preempts public deliberations and global discussion of the design of a solar geoengineering research program. Given the stature of the national academies as an institution, and the degree of detail in the recommendations, the report itself constitutes a de facto form of solar geoengineering governance (Gupta et al. 2020). Yet, it was created in the absence of the very forms of governance it recommends: international coordination, inclusive participation, and a precautionary approach to maintain the strict separation of research from deployment. The NASEM report is itself a significant unilateral intervention in the global governance of solar geoengineering. But the report reads as if those involved in the processes of designing, writing, publishing and releasing this report are separate from and therefore not accountable to following their own recommendations. The process and context of this report raise serious concerns about whose voices are being amplified, about whose perspectives are being dismissed or minimized, and about the dangerous politicization of solar geoengineering research. The NASEM’s recommendation to establish a new U.S. research program fails to acknowledge that ultimately neither scientists nor those funding research will have control over deployment; it will be political and economic power that will determine how, when and by whom solar geoengineering research will be applied.

Given the deeply contested and controversial nature of unilateral solar geoengineering development, the recommendations of this report undermine efforts on the part of the Biden-Harris Administration to establish global leadership on climate change. The US, as the world’s largest historical polluter with a track record of diluting international climate policy, should not be advancing solar geoengineering research but should instead expand efforts to invest directly in the transformative changes that are needed to phase out fossil fuels and commit to multilateral, coordinated efforts to advance global climate action and climate justice.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank three anonymous peer reviewers for their critical engagement and valuable feedback. We also acknowledge collaboration and strategic advice from the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN), the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship, Northeastern's College of Social Science and Humanities Multi-Generational Research Team Program, and Det Frie Forskningsråd, Grant/Award Number: 116716

Notes

1. Other proposed solar geoengineering approaches include enhancing the reflectivity of clouds over the ocean and increasing the reflectivity of the Arctic by spreading glass microspheres across the ice. The governance implications of these approaches are different from those of SAI.

2. The US and Saudi Arabia blocked a Swiss effort to develop geoengineering governance at the UN Environment Assembly in March 2019.

3. Electronic personal communication, NASEM Staff, Amanda Staudt, 20 April 2021.