Sleepwalking into lock-in? Avoiding wrongs to future people in the governance of solar radiation management research

ABSTRACT

Arguments are advanced for two ways in which we can avoid the reckless endangerment of future people in the governance of solar radiation management (SRM) research, which could happen through lock-in to SRM deployment from research. SRM research is at an early stage, one at which the mechanisms of lock-in could start to operate. However, lock-in fit to endanger future people could be slowed or stopped through targeted governance. Governance of SRM research that does not include provisions to detect, slow, or stop lock-in fails the test of an intergenerationally adequate precautionary principle, and research governed without these provisions cannot itself be justified as a precaution against the impacts of climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Solar radiation management
• intergenerational justice
• precaution
• lock-in
• geoengineering
• climate justice

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions were presented at a workshop on ‘Geoengineering, Political Legitimacy and Justice’ at the Program on Values in Society at the University of Washington, and at the Nuffield Political Theory Workshop at the University of Oxford. I thank participants at these events for their useful questions and comments. I also thank Josh Wells, Sikina Jinnah, Simon Nicholson and two anonymous referees for written comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Despite the fact that only 8% of the lay public were able to correctly define the term ‘geoengineering’ in a 2010 survey (Corner et al. 2012). More recent work suggests greater levels of public awareness (Wibeck et al. 2017).

2. There are exceptions (Hamilton 2013, Morrow et al. 2013).

3. The experiment will be run through Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program. See https://geoengineering.environment.harvard.edu/.

4. See Geoengineering Research Governance Project (GRGP) Oxford Workshop on a Code of Conduct for Responsible Geoengineering Research – Anna-Maria Hubert | FCEA 2017).

5. Thus, I address at least two of the ‘key unresolved questions’ of SRM governance identified by David Morrow (Morrow 2017), related to the objectives of climate engineering governance, and the role of precaution in that governance.

6. Factoring in the ratcheting up of emissions reductions as per the Paris Agreement could affect this range, but it would not be unduly pessimistic (given the record of history) to be sceptical about the prospects for effective ratcheting up.

7. For a sceptical take on these claims see Barrett et al. (2014).

8. For many, Henry Shue’s conception of ‘basic rights’ captures this basket of social, political, and environmental preconditions for human life with dignity (Shue 1996 2015).

9. I do not think that wide-eyed optimism about the prospects for this opportunity being grasped is supported by the history of climate politics, nor its current state. Nevertheless, hope for this outcome can be consistent with, and justified at the same time, as pessimism about it (McKinnon 2014).

10. For a more general statement of the precautionary approach to climate change see Gardiner (2006), McKinnon (2009). For general criticism of precautionary approaches see (Sunstein 2005)(Sunstein 2007)(Sunstein 2007). It worth noting that even Sunstein accepts that a precautionary principle is justified in the face of possibly catastrophic climate change (Sunstein 2007). Excellent recent treatments of the precautionary principle are (Steel 2014, Hartzell-Nichols 2017).

11. Shue identifies an additional third feature not listed here, as follows: ‘(3) non-excessive costs: the costs of prevention are not excessive (a) in light of the magnitude of the possible losses and (b) even considering other important demands on our resources’. (2010, p. 148). I shall take it to be straightforward that prevention costs are non-excessive in both the case of warming above 2°C and the case of governance stimulating SRM research. In the climate case, the costs are those created by mitigation. In the SRM case, the costs are those created by not doing the research. Given the early-days state of research into SRM, these costs are almost entirely opportunity costs. Some SRM researchers make the case that this research could enable us to learn important things that would also benefit mitigation efforts, e.g. with respect to clouds. Granting this, if massive loss and threshold likelihood are satisfied in the case of governance stimulating SRM research, these opportunity costs are far from excessive, especially given that we may be able to learn these important things about clouds by other means.

12. This discussion is not exhaustive. For example, if concerns about moral hazard turn out to be empirically well grounded, shutdown provisions in research governance should be activated because a failure to curb emissions as a result of moral hazard would make climate impacts far worse than they would have been otherwise.

13. It should also be noted in this context that the range of scenarios in which SRM deployment is imagined are all framed in ways that have significant consequences for assessment of the acceptability of deployment in those scenarios. In their review of the literature assessing geoengineering proposals, Bellamy et al. provide evidence that a number of frames that could support far less favourable assessments of deployment are routinely excluded from scenarios (Bellamy et al. 2012, p. 605, Fragniere and Gardiner 2016).

14. The meaning of ‘better’ in this context depends on the nature of the locked in feature. For example, ‘better’ for technologies could mean more effective and cheaper; for frames for social issues, it could mean ‘fairer’.

15. These four sites of positive feedback causing lock-in of SRM are adapted from Foxon (2007).

16. Some existing governance reports have highlighted flexibility as a desirable feature of research governance regimes, but they defend this in the name of enabling research that changes over time with changing circumstances, whereas my case is for flexibility as a way of transforming stimulating governance into shackling governance (Morrow 2017).

17. There may be additional mechanisms we should consider. In particular, the form of moral hazard involving mitigation deferral is worth considering because of how the operation of this mechanism could make the massive losses of climate change, and/or a termination effect, so much worse at some point in the future (Baatz 2016).

18. Things could be otherwise, without the world becoming a utopia (González-Ricoy and Gosseries 2016).