Democratic authority to geoengineer

ABSTRACT

Does any existing single actor have, or could any existing single actor come to have, the authority to geoengineer? In this paper, I will focus on Solar Radiation Management strategies (leaving at least some Carbon Dioxide Removal strategies on the table). I’ll argue that global democratic authorization is possible in principle, and could be obtained on the basis of large-scale representative sampling. I present experimental findings from the Australian context showing that democratic authorization would not be granted, and conclude that if we can expect this result to generalize, then the deployment of SRM by a single actor is impermissible.

KEYWORDS:

• Solar radiation management
• democratic authorisation
• representative sampling
• unilateral geoengineering deployment

Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to Jasper Hedges, Katie Steele, and Stephanie Collins; the audience at the University of Reading workshop ‘Geoengineering, Justice and Legitimacy’, September 2018, and the editors of this special issue for helpful comments and discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There are other ways to approach the question; for the argument that governance ought to precede research into geoengineering see Blomfield (2015); for the argument that there is a high risk that geoengineering will involve moral corruption, and even ‘moral schizophrenia’, see Gardiner (2011), Ch. 10; for the argument that research into SRM should be constrained by a principle of non-domination see Taylor Smith (2019).

2. I used the Qualtrics online sample size calculator to get this number: www.qualtrics.com/blog/calculating-sample-size/. Another calculator gave a number that was 11 people higher: www.checkmarket.com/sample-size-calculator/.

3. It was specified that this was a question about biological sex, not gender identity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Holly Lawford-Smith

Holly Lawford-Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. She works on a range of topics across moral, social and political philosophy, including collective agency, climate ethics, and radical feminism. Her first book Not In Their Name: Are Citizens Culpable For Their States’ Actions? was published with Oxford University Press in 2019.