Where’s the justice in geoengineering?
As geoengineering researchers gather for a conference in Cambridge, Duncan McLaren draws lessons from ethics and science fiction to make a case for caution.
(This post is based on a lecture given earlier today at the SRM Science conference in Cambridge)
Geoengineering is a technology that promises great power. But, as Spiderman was reminded by his Uncle, with great power comes great responsibility. This isn’t a new insight. It reflects long established political understanding. Voltaire apparently said it first, while Lincoln commented “if you want to test a man’s character, give him power”.
Why? Because power brings capability and choice to affect many lives (for good or for ill). Yet the idea that ‘power corrupts’ is not just a cliché. So we develop ethics programs, and accountability mechanisms as counter-balances.
In the case of climate change the world’s elites hold power over the poor and vulnerable, now and into the future. Yet societies have done little to build mechanisms of ethics and accountability for such collective power, especially at international and intergenerational scales. In the global North we still struggle to understand our complicity arising from the benefits we obtain from unjust global systems. Rather than changing our behaviours – and reducing our consumption, we seek novel abatement technologies and adaptation measures as substitutes for mitigation.
In this light all discussion of geoengineering is a sign of our collective ethical failure to achieve adequate progress on climate mitigation. Yet the power that shapes the system remains concentrated.
Solar Radiation Management (SRM) geoengineering appears to offer the potential of more rapid, perhaps more targeted control over future climates. But because of its great leverage, it threatens to concentrate power even further. In this SRM resembles nuclear weapons – and it is no coincidence that radionuclides from weapons tests could demarcate the Age of Humans. But SRM is arguably the archetypical Anthropocene technology: its signature would be visible globally and it offers both destructive potential and the prospect of management or control, perhaps even the capacity to restore the planet’s climate to something more hospitable to human civilisation.
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Deployed to such ends, SRM would effectively determine the living conditions of all humanity. This ‘great’ power brings difficult ethical questions. The movie Snowpiercer portrays an analogy of such an Anthropocene – a failed geoengineering experiment has plunged the earth into an ice age, reducing the human race to a few passengers on one train, their living conditions entirely determined by a tiny elite (“the driver”) in a ‘global cockpit’.
The movie foresees curtailed freedoms, steepened hierarchies and exploitation of people simply as means to an end (quite literally so in the case of children of a certain size needed to keep the aging engine running). Yet the ‘ordinary’ passengers rebel, wreck the train, and choose instead to take their chances adapting to the changed climate of the new earth.
Snowpiercer illustrates how environmental and technological change can reshape our ethical landscapes, changing the choices we might face. In real life too, technologies of planetary control would change our relationship with the Earth and redefine what it means to be human. Historically, even the wealthiest and most powerful individuals have remained vulnerable to natural disasters like hurricanes. If such forces become controllable and controlled, our roles – and our potential responsibilities - are transformed, raising many ethical questions:
If humanity has the capability to prevent the extremes of climate change, by what authority might scientists or governments choose to deploy it – or not? How can democratic institutions engage with these questions? If human interventions cause harm, how will the perpetrators be held responsible? If a preventable event does harm, who is liable? We have already seen fore-shocks, with court battles in Italy over the potential liability of seismologists for earthquake forecasting.
How much sharper would such battles become if the topic were not just advice or forecasts, but deliberate and active interventions in the climate? In this context ethics and science cannot be disentangled.
The public understand that just because scientists work on SRM as a response to climate change, that doesn’t mean it will therefore necessarily be deployed in ways that help deliver an ethical and just response. They are acutely aware of the cultural, economic and commercial interests at play in the climate debate. They resist the prospect that geo-engineering technologies might be developed and deployed in the interests of the same corporate interests that have driven fossil fuel use, and worry that such interests could distort genuine scientific endeavour.
So, both fiction and reality reveal technologies interacting with our values to change behaviours and ethical landscapes. Geoengineering is not exceptional in this respect.
All technologies – from guns to seatbelts - form part of socio-technical systems. They affect people psychologically and culturally in ways that can produce perverse results. Notably they can reshape how we perceive and react to risk. For example, people buy guns to protect themselves: yet controlled epidemiological studies show that those who carry firearms are more than four times more likely to be shot than those who do not. One reason is the psychological over-confidence that comes with carrying a weapon. Believing themselves somehow ‘insured’, gun users take much greater risks, and get into dangerous situations that they would have avoided if unarmed.
SRM shares some interesting characteristics with guns: we appear to need it because we have collectively failed to prevent the emergence of a major risk to society. Actors who have it might well argue against risk prevention, as they both feel personally safer, and see the technology as protecting important lifestyle, social or market freedoms and rights.
Moreover, its use may both become locked in, and lock in other choices which increase risk: in a society with widespread gun ownership the gun lobby becomes a powerful actor against gun control, and the police must be routinely armed with fatal consequences for certain minorities. With a climate policy reliant on SRM, the termination problem makes stopping extremely challenging in the absence of effective decarbonisation, while the technology enables the fossil fuel lobby to encourage continued extraction and use of fossil fuel – exploiting the benefits of sunk investments - despite this also having unfairly distributed impacts. In other words, there are forms of ‘moral hazard’ associated with the technology.
The term moral hazard originated where insurers were concerned that people of weak moral character would take advantage of insurance by being careless, or even defrauding insurers through acts like arson. More recent definitions focus more narrowly on the tendency of people to adjust their behaviour to a certain level of risk – so, in one classic example, the introduction of compulsory seat-belt wearing led to otherwise more risky driving and an increase in other types of car-related accidental injury.
Geoengineering researchers who suggest we needn’t worry about moral hazard typically define it narrowly, and argue that such risk adjustment – resulting in less mitigation – would be reasonable because geoengineering reduces the social risk of climate change in a different way. Reflecting such assumptions, economic modelling studies often suggest reduced or delayed mitigation when geoengineering is included in the model.
Philosopher David Morrow identifies two reasons why mitigation may be deterred by a greater than ‘rational’ amount – informational asymmetry and cognitive biases. He also notes that even ‘rational’ risk adjustment is not necessarily morally neutral. In the case of seatbelts, for example, much of the new risk was borne by back seat passengers and other road users including pedestrians.
Economic definitions recognise the possible injustice of risk transfer. Paul Krugman defines moral hazard as “any situation in which one person makes the decision about how much risk to take, while someone else bears the cost if things go badly.” This applies to geoengineering: those who might decide to deploy it and - ‘rationally’ - reduce mitigation, are most likely to be in a different country and indeed a different generation than those bearing the brunt of the impacts if geoengineering proves either defective or ineffective.
In practice, the broader socio-economic-technical system will determine whether moral hazard is greasing a slippery slope to SRM deployment – or if SRM can instead be researched – as the US National Academies hope - in ways that help us better understand the climate system, potential interventions in it, and the limits to our understanding; at the same time as humanity adopts and deploys more precautionary approaches to mitigation in the hope of never needing SRM.
Understanding the limits to understanding is critical. We face a “control dilemma”. Discourses of the ‘Anthropocene’ give a misplaced confidence in the controllability of earth systems. If we place greater reliance on geoengineering, but it fails to deliver, humanity is unlikely to be able to compensate by then accelerating mitigation and adaptation. Yet if geoengineering does deliver, our technological hubris is fuelled, potentially exposing us to new, greater environmental challenges, and increasing our reluctance to tackle injustice and unsustainability by political and cultural routes.
Indeed, as Andy Stirling (pdf) has highlighted, Anthropocene discourses not only suggest controllability, but in framing the alternative as catastrophe, they encourage an authoritarian depoliticisation of climate policy. In this geoengineering exemplifies the contemporary ‘post-political’ trend of ‘technological solutionism’. Arguments that – because of its high leverage and low cost – SRM could somehow sideline politics and provide a silver bullet – reach an extreme in which it is postulated that SRM might even be deployed by a single actor: a rogue geoengineer, or a ‘climate vigilante’ – a Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne figure with money and a singular view of justice. But superhero culture also emphasises the ethical dilemmas in vigilantism: the tension between justice and the rule of law.
Stories of the Dark Knight illuminate the need for oversight, accountability and civil liberties - even, or perhaps especially, in times of crisis. They also remind us that while public sympathy for vigilantism signals that something is wrong with the system: this does not mean that what the vigilante does is right or ethical.
Put bluntly, just because climate policy and governance does not work presently, this alone does not make geoengineering – even with democratic oversight - the right answer. In Gotham the need is to eliminate the corruption that enables criminality to flourish, not to give policemen licence to emulate Batman and terrorise criminals.
In practice unilateral geoengineering – whether by states or philanthropists – seems implausible. Yet claims that SRM is a high leverage, low cost, apolitical technology persist, and could yet encourage the prospect of covert geoengineering. As others (pdf) have suggested, the fears of chemtrailers may not be wrong, merely premature. If SRM becomes bogged down in global negotiations, powerful actors might be tempted by ‘emergency’ rhetoric to avoid due process.
However, in practice the more dangerous temptation remains that of treating SRM as a possible saviour and an excuse to further delay even cost-effective mitigation. Some researchers have been quick to dismiss the effects of poor character on moral hazard. But as expenses and lobbying scandals repeatedly reveal, political and corporate elites are susceptible to temptation, and - according to psychological research - more likely to cheat and act unethically than poorer groups in society. And in other experiments, people with ‘self-enhancing’ values - those that relate to the accrual of wealth, power or status to oneself - were found to be more vulnerable to the moral hazard in geoengineering. So we should be concerned about whether the relevant decision makers have the necessary moral character to take tough decisions on mitigation and adaptation, rather than adopting the prospect of geoengineering as an excuse for not upsetting political allies, campaign funders or swing voters. Such a ‘political’ moral hazard seems a bigger reason to worry than the idea that ordinary individuals might relax their efforts to cut emissions.
Indeed, it is possible that many ordinary people might see geoengineering as so wacky and unpalatable that they increase their support for mitigation – the so-called ‘negative moral hazard’. Could the ‘threat’ of SRM then help win public and political support for rapid and adequate action on mitigation and adaptation – rather than offering a further excuse for sustaining economic structures that maintain elite power?
We might consider a parallel in nuclear power. In Germany - where reduced energy consumption is central to the Energiewende - fears of nuclear’s dark side seem to have done as much to drive coherent and ethical climate policy as narratives of ecological modernisation and green jobs.
Yet elsewhere we see this policy actively misrepresented: in certain countries failing to act effectively on climate, nuclear power – tightly linked to existing elite power structures - is still presented as the next essential step, and Germany’s choice to reject it is presented as a climate failure. It’s hard to see why SRM might be treated differently.
Yet moral hazard does not mean we should avoid discussing and researching geoengineering – rather that we should do so with openness and anticipation of the potential implications. David Morrow suggests broadening the alternative scenarios researched; mindful messaging and framing; and active public and political engagement. To deter possible abuses of SRM science we should also openly discuss its politics and ethics in the context of climate complicity. And it is critical to build trust between researchers and stakeholders, enabling a meaningful form of prior consent for experimentation.
Trust cannot be demanded, it needs to be earned through opening ourselves up and making ourselves vulnerable to those we want to trust us. Openness and early engagement could also enhance research substantively, helping scientists anticipate ethical challenges and put in place mechanisms to mitigate them – such as research breakpoints and stagegates; using stakeholder and public involvement to inform research choices; red-team/blue-team models; linking ethical and political research to technical work – all of which could curtail moral hazard and effectively spread grit on the slippery slopes.
But there are no simple decision rules or assessment processes. Ethical questions always involve contextual judgements and require moral wisdom. The crux is to be aware, reflective and reflexive in practice, considering the ethics of each proposal from a range of perspectives. Responsible Innovation means improving anticipation, inclusion, reflexiveness and responsiveness.
For example, researchers need to anticipate the risks of pathways and analyses that frame SRM as an alternative rather than complement to mitigation: these are particularly vulnerable to moral hazard, technological hubris and domination.
Effective inclusion implies engaging publics early and openly about the technologies and the anticipated pathways of deployment (enabling meaningful deliberation on ‘why’ and ‘whether’, not just ‘how’). Researchers should be open to the different perspectives publics bring to such deliberations, and avoid dismissing public views as ill-informed.
Researchers must also be transparent and reflective over potential vested interests; and supportive of procedural rights for transparency, public participation and access to justice with respect to experimental and pilot projects.
Such continued ‘opening up’ of the geoengineering debate needs to show recognition and respect for diverse cultural values.
You might think from all this that I would like to hinder further SRM research. But I do not. In fact I want to suggest two reasons why humanity should now engage with geoengineering as well as climate change: capability and complicity.
By capability I mean that ethical duties can arise directly from our capacity to act to prevent or mitigate harm or injustice. Climate change is already causing widespread harm and injustice, and the problems are set to get worse. Justice demands that those with the knowledge, power and resources to act should do so – to avert dangerous climate change or to restore a more hospitable climate.
Complicity means that our ability to act is reinforced by arguments from responsibility: we who have benefited materially from the actions that have caused climate change bear duties to act (as far as our individual and collective capabilities stretch).
But what actions should we take?
In ethics duties can come in negative and positive forms. A negative duty is one to withhold from doing harm: for example, by actively cutting our excessive consumption of fossil fuels. Positive duties to ‘do good’ are, oddly, trickier to justify: these are often seen as voluntary or charitable. Yet they might be justified by responsibility or complicity: in which case they may become compulsory, such as the forms of restorative justice which demand criminals apologise to their victims or undertake community service. CDR might be best interpreted as such a restorative or reparative duty. Could this apply to SRM too?
Consider circumstances in which SRM might appear ethically desirable or preferable. For this thought experiment, we start by treating SRM deployment as ethically impermissible (because of the moral hazards, and risks of harms involved), and ask whether it could become obligatory or at least permissible as a ‘lesser evil’. The answer depends on our understanding of capability: if we can, acting collectively, avert dangerous climate change by accelerated mitigation, CDR and adaptation, this is clearly a more ethical approach. It is only when we judge that economic and climate inertia makes this implausible, that SRM should be considered. I suspect many geoengineering researchers think we are already past this point. My aim is not to argue one way or the other, but to demonstrate that our understanding of the ethics of SRM, and of our duties and aims in researching it, might change dramatically depending on a relatively small change in context. Indeed, in the face of climate unknowns and uncertainties, exactly the same physical and economic parameters could mean that non-SRM routes to climate safety are simultaneously both plausible and implausible. In other words we may live in a state of ethical indeterminacy. If so we cannot establish the ethically right path simply on the basis of consequences.
But ethically, means matter as much as ends: so we also need to consider due process and virtue (in which moral excellence is primarily a function of character, rather than behaviours or outcomes).
A virtue approach to climate restoration would emphasise humility – focussing on re-establishing conditions in which the system can rebalance and heal itself (absent excessive anthropogenic forcings). In practice this suggests an ethical preference for mitigation and carbon dioxide removal over adaptation or SRM.
It may help here to unpack ‘restoration and repair’ a little. Ideas of ‘climate repair’ or ‘climate restoration’ are complex. Besides the framing effects of implied control and capability, there are ethical distinctions between repairing an artefact, such as a building and restoring a natural system, such as a human body or an ecosystem. In the latter we recognise our inability to return the system to a prior state, still less to restore it to some ‘original design’, and instead seek to establish conditions in which the system can re-establish (relative) autonomy and health for itself. And even in the former case we recognise that seeking the ‘perfect restoration’ of a historic artefact is a misleading and inappropriate goal: instead we understand (as Richard Sennett highlights) that changing materials and purposes imply a process of reconfiguration, and thus we demand transparency in repair work. For instance the Japanese art of Kintsugi involves repairing broken pottery with golden cement or lacquer which highlights the experience of breakage and repair. This makes a virtue of repair, makes the process legible, and leaves a durable reminder of the fragility of the subject.
But arguably the thing most in need of restoration or reconfiguration is not the climate itself, but humanity’s relationship with our environment. Our exploitative, instrumental relationship with the Earth has led us into grave problems. To re-establish the conditions in which a healthy relationship can flourish we need to lose our technocratic hubris and be reconciled with the Earth.
Put crudely therefore, ‘climate restoration’ might imply, on one hand, domination via geoengineering, in which a technocratic elite determines the outcomes and targets of ‘climate reconfiguration’, most likely disregarding past culpability. Here SRM may be a central tool in the climate ‘intervention’ tool box. At the other extreme we can instead conceive of restoration, by resetting conditions in which systems can heal themselves; as a form of reconciliation (with the earth and its people), offered as reparations for past injustices; with new humility.
An instrumentalist approach to climate repair in the Anthropocene – majoring on SRM – risks exacerbating the problems of the discourse: enhancing authoritarian approaches; widening power disparities; and inflating hubris. If we are to live well in an Age of Humans, we need ethics to match – ethics which are cosmopolitan, environmental and global – and which include an understanding of collective complicity and capability, and a contemporary virtue of repair.
In general approaches to justice that draw on ideas of recognition and capabilities appear better suited to address climate change and geoengineering responses’ implications for both people’s functioning and freedoms, now and in the future.
The capabilities approach to justice allows us to think more procedurally about the outcomes that would be ethical and fair. It focuses attention not only on material outcomes and the (re)distribution of wealth, but also and critically on the development of human capabilities to live lives in ways we value (as argued by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum). A stable environment might even be seen as a meta-capability underpinning all others. But even if we don’t wish to privilege it in that way, it’s hard to argue that a stable climate is less important than access to education, or good health, for example.
Following David Schlosberg I argue that it is also critical to include recognition in a capabilities approach: we need to properly recognise the various groups that are vulnerable to climate and geoengineering impacts, and the ways in which institutions and systems may impede their full participation through misrecognition – whether indigenous peoples, women (look around!) or future generations.
Both Sen and Schlosberg emphasise that capabilities can best be founded on and defined through collective public deliberation. This helps us understand them as a foundation for ethical duties: in particular a duty to act politically, collectively to promote and protect capabilities for others – including the maintenance of a supportive, healthy environment in which people are not dependent on the good-will of a technical or political elite for their flourishing. In the same way that we can understand economic dependence on central bankers and captains of industry as a failure to enable individual and community capabilities, so would dependence on a climate maintenance committee of SRM engineers be such a failure. Justice and sustainability imply democratising the economy, not technocratising the environment!
In ethics, both ends and means matter, but ‘a hospitable climate’ is best considered not an end in itself, but as a means towards a just and sustainable society. So how we deliver climate hospitality matters intensely.
As a paradigmatic ‘Anthropocene’ technology SRM promises power to change not only the world, but also our very conceptions of what it is to be human.
We therefore need SRM science which can inform and be informed by an open, deliberative and reflexive politics of reconciliation in our engagement with the climate and other environmental systems.
We also – even more urgently than we need to fill technical knowledge gaps about SRM – desperately need to better understand the politics of climate change and geoengineering in an age of humans. We must explore the ways in which our responses to climate change are socially embedded and ethically loaded. And we need to understand and practice ways of doing research which don’t stimulate moral hazard or authoritarian depoliticisation of climate action.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/...5/mar/14/wheres-the-justice-in-geoengineering
As geoengineering researchers gather for a conference in Cambridge, Duncan McLaren draws lessons from ethics and science fiction to make a case for caution.
(This post is based on a lecture given earlier today at the SRM Science conference in Cambridge)
Geoengineering is a technology that promises great power. But, as Spiderman was reminded by his Uncle, with great power comes great responsibility. This isn’t a new insight. It reflects long established political understanding. Voltaire apparently said it first, while Lincoln commented “if you want to test a man’s character, give him power”.
Why? Because power brings capability and choice to affect many lives (for good or for ill). Yet the idea that ‘power corrupts’ is not just a cliché. So we develop ethics programs, and accountability mechanisms as counter-balances.
In the case of climate change the world’s elites hold power over the poor and vulnerable, now and into the future. Yet societies have done little to build mechanisms of ethics and accountability for such collective power, especially at international and intergenerational scales. In the global North we still struggle to understand our complicity arising from the benefits we obtain from unjust global systems. Rather than changing our behaviours – and reducing our consumption, we seek novel abatement technologies and adaptation measures as substitutes for mitigation.
In this light all discussion of geoengineering is a sign of our collective ethical failure to achieve adequate progress on climate mitigation. Yet the power that shapes the system remains concentrated.
Solar Radiation Management (SRM) geoengineering appears to offer the potential of more rapid, perhaps more targeted control over future climates. But because of its great leverage, it threatens to concentrate power even further. In this SRM resembles nuclear weapons – and it is no coincidence that radionuclides from weapons tests could demarcate the Age of Humans. But SRM is arguably the archetypical Anthropocene technology: its signature would be visible globally and it offers both destructive potential and the prospect of management or control, perhaps even the capacity to restore the planet’s climate to something more hospitable to human civilisation.
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Deployed to such ends, SRM would effectively determine the living conditions of all humanity. This ‘great’ power brings difficult ethical questions. The movie Snowpiercer portrays an analogy of such an Anthropocene – a failed geoengineering experiment has plunged the earth into an ice age, reducing the human race to a few passengers on one train, their living conditions entirely determined by a tiny elite (“the driver”) in a ‘global cockpit’.
The movie foresees curtailed freedoms, steepened hierarchies and exploitation of people simply as means to an end (quite literally so in the case of children of a certain size needed to keep the aging engine running). Yet the ‘ordinary’ passengers rebel, wreck the train, and choose instead to take their chances adapting to the changed climate of the new earth.
Snowpiercer illustrates how environmental and technological change can reshape our ethical landscapes, changing the choices we might face. In real life too, technologies of planetary control would change our relationship with the Earth and redefine what it means to be human. Historically, even the wealthiest and most powerful individuals have remained vulnerable to natural disasters like hurricanes. If such forces become controllable and controlled, our roles – and our potential responsibilities - are transformed, raising many ethical questions:
If humanity has the capability to prevent the extremes of climate change, by what authority might scientists or governments choose to deploy it – or not? How can democratic institutions engage with these questions? If human interventions cause harm, how will the perpetrators be held responsible? If a preventable event does harm, who is liable? We have already seen fore-shocks, with court battles in Italy over the potential liability of seismologists for earthquake forecasting.
How much sharper would such battles become if the topic were not just advice or forecasts, but deliberate and active interventions in the climate? In this context ethics and science cannot be disentangled.
The public understand that just because scientists work on SRM as a response to climate change, that doesn’t mean it will therefore necessarily be deployed in ways that help deliver an ethical and just response. They are acutely aware of the cultural, economic and commercial interests at play in the climate debate. They resist the prospect that geo-engineering technologies might be developed and deployed in the interests of the same corporate interests that have driven fossil fuel use, and worry that such interests could distort genuine scientific endeavour.
So, both fiction and reality reveal technologies interacting with our values to change behaviours and ethical landscapes. Geoengineering is not exceptional in this respect.
All technologies – from guns to seatbelts - form part of socio-technical systems. They affect people psychologically and culturally in ways that can produce perverse results. Notably they can reshape how we perceive and react to risk. For example, people buy guns to protect themselves: yet controlled epidemiological studies show that those who carry firearms are more than four times more likely to be shot than those who do not. One reason is the psychological over-confidence that comes with carrying a weapon. Believing themselves somehow ‘insured’, gun users take much greater risks, and get into dangerous situations that they would have avoided if unarmed.
SRM shares some interesting characteristics with guns: we appear to need it because we have collectively failed to prevent the emergence of a major risk to society. Actors who have it might well argue against risk prevention, as they both feel personally safer, and see the technology as protecting important lifestyle, social or market freedoms and rights.
Moreover, its use may both become locked in, and lock in other choices which increase risk: in a society with widespread gun ownership the gun lobby becomes a powerful actor against gun control, and the police must be routinely armed with fatal consequences for certain minorities. With a climate policy reliant on SRM, the termination problem makes stopping extremely challenging in the absence of effective decarbonisation, while the technology enables the fossil fuel lobby to encourage continued extraction and use of fossil fuel – exploiting the benefits of sunk investments - despite this also having unfairly distributed impacts. In other words, there are forms of ‘moral hazard’ associated with the technology.
The term moral hazard originated where insurers were concerned that people of weak moral character would take advantage of insurance by being careless, or even defrauding insurers through acts like arson. More recent definitions focus more narrowly on the tendency of people to adjust their behaviour to a certain level of risk – so, in one classic example, the introduction of compulsory seat-belt wearing led to otherwise more risky driving and an increase in other types of car-related accidental injury.
Geoengineering researchers who suggest we needn’t worry about moral hazard typically define it narrowly, and argue that such risk adjustment – resulting in less mitigation – would be reasonable because geoengineering reduces the social risk of climate change in a different way. Reflecting such assumptions, economic modelling studies often suggest reduced or delayed mitigation when geoengineering is included in the model.
Philosopher David Morrow identifies two reasons why mitigation may be deterred by a greater than ‘rational’ amount – informational asymmetry and cognitive biases. He also notes that even ‘rational’ risk adjustment is not necessarily morally neutral. In the case of seatbelts, for example, much of the new risk was borne by back seat passengers and other road users including pedestrians.
Economic definitions recognise the possible injustice of risk transfer. Paul Krugman defines moral hazard as “any situation in which one person makes the decision about how much risk to take, while someone else bears the cost if things go badly.” This applies to geoengineering: those who might decide to deploy it and - ‘rationally’ - reduce mitigation, are most likely to be in a different country and indeed a different generation than those bearing the brunt of the impacts if geoengineering proves either defective or ineffective.
In practice, the broader socio-economic-technical system will determine whether moral hazard is greasing a slippery slope to SRM deployment – or if SRM can instead be researched – as the US National Academies hope - in ways that help us better understand the climate system, potential interventions in it, and the limits to our understanding; at the same time as humanity adopts and deploys more precautionary approaches to mitigation in the hope of never needing SRM.
Understanding the limits to understanding is critical. We face a “control dilemma”. Discourses of the ‘Anthropocene’ give a misplaced confidence in the controllability of earth systems. If we place greater reliance on geoengineering, but it fails to deliver, humanity is unlikely to be able to compensate by then accelerating mitigation and adaptation. Yet if geoengineering does deliver, our technological hubris is fuelled, potentially exposing us to new, greater environmental challenges, and increasing our reluctance to tackle injustice and unsustainability by political and cultural routes.
Indeed, as Andy Stirling (pdf) has highlighted, Anthropocene discourses not only suggest controllability, but in framing the alternative as catastrophe, they encourage an authoritarian depoliticisation of climate policy. In this geoengineering exemplifies the contemporary ‘post-political’ trend of ‘technological solutionism’. Arguments that – because of its high leverage and low cost – SRM could somehow sideline politics and provide a silver bullet – reach an extreme in which it is postulated that SRM might even be deployed by a single actor: a rogue geoengineer, or a ‘climate vigilante’ – a Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne figure with money and a singular view of justice. But superhero culture also emphasises the ethical dilemmas in vigilantism: the tension between justice and the rule of law.
Stories of the Dark Knight illuminate the need for oversight, accountability and civil liberties - even, or perhaps especially, in times of crisis. They also remind us that while public sympathy for vigilantism signals that something is wrong with the system: this does not mean that what the vigilante does is right or ethical.
Put bluntly, just because climate policy and governance does not work presently, this alone does not make geoengineering – even with democratic oversight - the right answer. In Gotham the need is to eliminate the corruption that enables criminality to flourish, not to give policemen licence to emulate Batman and terrorise criminals.
In practice unilateral geoengineering – whether by states or philanthropists – seems implausible. Yet claims that SRM is a high leverage, low cost, apolitical technology persist, and could yet encourage the prospect of covert geoengineering. As others (pdf) have suggested, the fears of chemtrailers may not be wrong, merely premature. If SRM becomes bogged down in global negotiations, powerful actors might be tempted by ‘emergency’ rhetoric to avoid due process.
However, in practice the more dangerous temptation remains that of treating SRM as a possible saviour and an excuse to further delay even cost-effective mitigation. Some researchers have been quick to dismiss the effects of poor character on moral hazard. But as expenses and lobbying scandals repeatedly reveal, political and corporate elites are susceptible to temptation, and - according to psychological research - more likely to cheat and act unethically than poorer groups in society. And in other experiments, people with ‘self-enhancing’ values - those that relate to the accrual of wealth, power or status to oneself - were found to be more vulnerable to the moral hazard in geoengineering. So we should be concerned about whether the relevant decision makers have the necessary moral character to take tough decisions on mitigation and adaptation, rather than adopting the prospect of geoengineering as an excuse for not upsetting political allies, campaign funders or swing voters. Such a ‘political’ moral hazard seems a bigger reason to worry than the idea that ordinary individuals might relax their efforts to cut emissions.
Indeed, it is possible that many ordinary people might see geoengineering as so wacky and unpalatable that they increase their support for mitigation – the so-called ‘negative moral hazard’. Could the ‘threat’ of SRM then help win public and political support for rapid and adequate action on mitigation and adaptation – rather than offering a further excuse for sustaining economic structures that maintain elite power?
We might consider a parallel in nuclear power. In Germany - where reduced energy consumption is central to the Energiewende - fears of nuclear’s dark side seem to have done as much to drive coherent and ethical climate policy as narratives of ecological modernisation and green jobs.
Yet elsewhere we see this policy actively misrepresented: in certain countries failing to act effectively on climate, nuclear power – tightly linked to existing elite power structures - is still presented as the next essential step, and Germany’s choice to reject it is presented as a climate failure. It’s hard to see why SRM might be treated differently.
Yet moral hazard does not mean we should avoid discussing and researching geoengineering – rather that we should do so with openness and anticipation of the potential implications. David Morrow suggests broadening the alternative scenarios researched; mindful messaging and framing; and active public and political engagement. To deter possible abuses of SRM science we should also openly discuss its politics and ethics in the context of climate complicity. And it is critical to build trust between researchers and stakeholders, enabling a meaningful form of prior consent for experimentation.
Trust cannot be demanded, it needs to be earned through opening ourselves up and making ourselves vulnerable to those we want to trust us. Openness and early engagement could also enhance research substantively, helping scientists anticipate ethical challenges and put in place mechanisms to mitigate them – such as research breakpoints and stagegates; using stakeholder and public involvement to inform research choices; red-team/blue-team models; linking ethical and political research to technical work – all of which could curtail moral hazard and effectively spread grit on the slippery slopes.
But there are no simple decision rules or assessment processes. Ethical questions always involve contextual judgements and require moral wisdom. The crux is to be aware, reflective and reflexive in practice, considering the ethics of each proposal from a range of perspectives. Responsible Innovation means improving anticipation, inclusion, reflexiveness and responsiveness.
For example, researchers need to anticipate the risks of pathways and analyses that frame SRM as an alternative rather than complement to mitigation: these are particularly vulnerable to moral hazard, technological hubris and domination.
Effective inclusion implies engaging publics early and openly about the technologies and the anticipated pathways of deployment (enabling meaningful deliberation on ‘why’ and ‘whether’, not just ‘how’). Researchers should be open to the different perspectives publics bring to such deliberations, and avoid dismissing public views as ill-informed.
Researchers must also be transparent and reflective over potential vested interests; and supportive of procedural rights for transparency, public participation and access to justice with respect to experimental and pilot projects.
Such continued ‘opening up’ of the geoengineering debate needs to show recognition and respect for diverse cultural values.
You might think from all this that I would like to hinder further SRM research. But I do not. In fact I want to suggest two reasons why humanity should now engage with geoengineering as well as climate change: capability and complicity.
By capability I mean that ethical duties can arise directly from our capacity to act to prevent or mitigate harm or injustice. Climate change is already causing widespread harm and injustice, and the problems are set to get worse. Justice demands that those with the knowledge, power and resources to act should do so – to avert dangerous climate change or to restore a more hospitable climate.
Complicity means that our ability to act is reinforced by arguments from responsibility: we who have benefited materially from the actions that have caused climate change bear duties to act (as far as our individual and collective capabilities stretch).
But what actions should we take?
In ethics duties can come in negative and positive forms. A negative duty is one to withhold from doing harm: for example, by actively cutting our excessive consumption of fossil fuels. Positive duties to ‘do good’ are, oddly, trickier to justify: these are often seen as voluntary or charitable. Yet they might be justified by responsibility or complicity: in which case they may become compulsory, such as the forms of restorative justice which demand criminals apologise to their victims or undertake community service. CDR might be best interpreted as such a restorative or reparative duty. Could this apply to SRM too?
Consider circumstances in which SRM might appear ethically desirable or preferable. For this thought experiment, we start by treating SRM deployment as ethically impermissible (because of the moral hazards, and risks of harms involved), and ask whether it could become obligatory or at least permissible as a ‘lesser evil’. The answer depends on our understanding of capability: if we can, acting collectively, avert dangerous climate change by accelerated mitigation, CDR and adaptation, this is clearly a more ethical approach. It is only when we judge that economic and climate inertia makes this implausible, that SRM should be considered. I suspect many geoengineering researchers think we are already past this point. My aim is not to argue one way or the other, but to demonstrate that our understanding of the ethics of SRM, and of our duties and aims in researching it, might change dramatically depending on a relatively small change in context. Indeed, in the face of climate unknowns and uncertainties, exactly the same physical and economic parameters could mean that non-SRM routes to climate safety are simultaneously both plausible and implausible. In other words we may live in a state of ethical indeterminacy. If so we cannot establish the ethically right path simply on the basis of consequences.
But ethically, means matter as much as ends: so we also need to consider due process and virtue (in which moral excellence is primarily a function of character, rather than behaviours or outcomes).
A virtue approach to climate restoration would emphasise humility – focussing on re-establishing conditions in which the system can rebalance and heal itself (absent excessive anthropogenic forcings). In practice this suggests an ethical preference for mitigation and carbon dioxide removal over adaptation or SRM.
It may help here to unpack ‘restoration and repair’ a little. Ideas of ‘climate repair’ or ‘climate restoration’ are complex. Besides the framing effects of implied control and capability, there are ethical distinctions between repairing an artefact, such as a building and restoring a natural system, such as a human body or an ecosystem. In the latter we recognise our inability to return the system to a prior state, still less to restore it to some ‘original design’, and instead seek to establish conditions in which the system can re-establish (relative) autonomy and health for itself. And even in the former case we recognise that seeking the ‘perfect restoration’ of a historic artefact is a misleading and inappropriate goal: instead we understand (as Richard Sennett highlights) that changing materials and purposes imply a process of reconfiguration, and thus we demand transparency in repair work. For instance the Japanese art of Kintsugi involves repairing broken pottery with golden cement or lacquer which highlights the experience of breakage and repair. This makes a virtue of repair, makes the process legible, and leaves a durable reminder of the fragility of the subject.
But arguably the thing most in need of restoration or reconfiguration is not the climate itself, but humanity’s relationship with our environment. Our exploitative, instrumental relationship with the Earth has led us into grave problems. To re-establish the conditions in which a healthy relationship can flourish we need to lose our technocratic hubris and be reconciled with the Earth.
Put crudely therefore, ‘climate restoration’ might imply, on one hand, domination via geoengineering, in which a technocratic elite determines the outcomes and targets of ‘climate reconfiguration’, most likely disregarding past culpability. Here SRM may be a central tool in the climate ‘intervention’ tool box. At the other extreme we can instead conceive of restoration, by resetting conditions in which systems can heal themselves; as a form of reconciliation (with the earth and its people), offered as reparations for past injustices; with new humility.
An instrumentalist approach to climate repair in the Anthropocene – majoring on SRM – risks exacerbating the problems of the discourse: enhancing authoritarian approaches; widening power disparities; and inflating hubris. If we are to live well in an Age of Humans, we need ethics to match – ethics which are cosmopolitan, environmental and global – and which include an understanding of collective complicity and capability, and a contemporary virtue of repair.
In general approaches to justice that draw on ideas of recognition and capabilities appear better suited to address climate change and geoengineering responses’ implications for both people’s functioning and freedoms, now and in the future.
The capabilities approach to justice allows us to think more procedurally about the outcomes that would be ethical and fair. It focuses attention not only on material outcomes and the (re)distribution of wealth, but also and critically on the development of human capabilities to live lives in ways we value (as argued by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum). A stable environment might even be seen as a meta-capability underpinning all others. But even if we don’t wish to privilege it in that way, it’s hard to argue that a stable climate is less important than access to education, or good health, for example.
Following David Schlosberg I argue that it is also critical to include recognition in a capabilities approach: we need to properly recognise the various groups that are vulnerable to climate and geoengineering impacts, and the ways in which institutions and systems may impede their full participation through misrecognition – whether indigenous peoples, women (look around!) or future generations.
Both Sen and Schlosberg emphasise that capabilities can best be founded on and defined through collective public deliberation. This helps us understand them as a foundation for ethical duties: in particular a duty to act politically, collectively to promote and protect capabilities for others – including the maintenance of a supportive, healthy environment in which people are not dependent on the good-will of a technical or political elite for their flourishing. In the same way that we can understand economic dependence on central bankers and captains of industry as a failure to enable individual and community capabilities, so would dependence on a climate maintenance committee of SRM engineers be such a failure. Justice and sustainability imply democratising the economy, not technocratising the environment!
In ethics, both ends and means matter, but ‘a hospitable climate’ is best considered not an end in itself, but as a means towards a just and sustainable society. So how we deliver climate hospitality matters intensely.
As a paradigmatic ‘Anthropocene’ technology SRM promises power to change not only the world, but also our very conceptions of what it is to be human.
We therefore need SRM science which can inform and be informed by an open, deliberative and reflexive politics of reconciliation in our engagement with the climate and other environmental systems.
We also – even more urgently than we need to fill technical knowledge gaps about SRM – desperately need to better understand the politics of climate change and geoengineering in an age of humans. We must explore the ways in which our responses to climate change are socially embedded and ethically loaded. And we need to understand and practice ways of doing research which don’t stimulate moral hazard or authoritarian depoliticisation of climate action.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/...5/mar/14/wheres-the-justice-in-geoengineering
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