Solar geoengineering is a potential range of techniques to increase the planet’s albedo, reflecting sunlight away from the planet and resulting in a cooling effect. (Photo by Bryan Goff on Unsplash)
What good are governments if they keep fumbling the global climate response?
This month, the Trump administration repealed the US EPA’s Endangerment Finding, which designated carbon dioxide as a threat to human wellbeing. The latest UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties gathered 194 countries together to accomplish approximately nothing, and the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization which reports data on carbon emissions, has recently been threatened with the loss of its funds for daring to offer a pathway to net zero greenhouse gas emissions.
This lack of governance has opened the door to private actors. Recently, a tech startup company called Stardust Solutions raised over $60 million to fund the development of proprietary tools for a climate intervention technology known as solar radiation modification, or solar geoengineering. Solar geoengineering is a potential range of techniques to increase the planet’s albedo, reflecting sunlight away from the planet and resulting in a cooling effect. As world governments fail to get a grip on climate change, this type of intervention might appear to be a prudent investment.
Universities, non-profits, private firms, and militaries are investing research time and money into whether and how solar geoengineering might work and at what scale, exploring the physics, engineering, and chemistry combinations required to slow or halt global temperature rise, or even cool the planet. The appeal of a techno-fix to a complicated problem is obvious, particularly in industrialized societies, but solar geoengineering only masks the effects of climate change without reducing greenhouse gas emissions. What it can do (in theory) is provide an opportunity for governments to implement necessary mitigation and adaptation measures and stave off some of the worst effects of warming—possibly averting climate tipping points and protecting ecosystems from collapse.
Global solar geoengineering would not reverse climate change, but instead alter the climate in new directions, with potential effects that are not yet fully understood. Scientists can conduct research, create models and test them, and perhaps even do small-scale experiments to understand some of these effects.
What the research has not done so far is solve the human problem.
Currently, solar radiation modification is almost completely ungoverned by domestic or international law. The very real climatic, biophysical, and societal risks necessitate some sort of governance, but instead of thoughtful deliberations, a myriad of state and non-state actors are running headlong towards a developing technology with real security implications. The use of solar geoengineering at scale could give any country with the ability to deploy it the power to materially affect the environmental conditions of other countries. While some research currently suggests that use of solar radiation modification may result in net benefits writ large, depending upon that state’s economic and geographical position in the world, they and their allies could benefit and their rivals could suffer.
A full solar geoengineering deployment could very well be militarized, both because climate change and geoengineering present national security concerns, and because militaries typically have the existing logistical and technological capacities to engage in deployment.
The current climate context. The levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to increase, and the resulting global climatic changes—from stronger hurricanes to longer droughts to more persistent heat waves to sea level rise—are causing significant harm to humanity and the natural environment. The only way out of the climate crisis rests on the concept of planetary security: focusing on security as a condition involving the entire planet and not as contest between states. In practical terms, until humans recognize that a stable environment sits under every other political and economic system, no state will be truly secure against long-term existential threats.
However, despite decades of scientific consensus pointing toward human causation of climate change, the world’s countries cannot agree on any combination of political, technological, or economic solutions. Three major international agreements deal directly with climate change (1992 UNFCCC, 1997 Kyoto Protocol, 2015 Paris Agreement), and scores of others address climate change tangentially, yet the climate crisis continues as states repeatedly fall short of their mitigation and finance commitments. Solar geoengineering promises to halt this global temperature rise or even lower those temperatures in a short and meaningful time frame at a cost of tens of billions of dollars per year. Supporters claim this is cheap compared to the cost of decarbonizing the global economy—cue the trumpets!
But any potentially successful use of solar geoengineering would have to be based on public trust in science, industry, and government to pursue the common good, three things humanity is currently lacking.
For-profit geoengineering ventures. Stardust Solutions is reportedly developing a proprietary aerosol that it claims is “safe, measurable, adjustable, and fully reversible” and “made of components which are abundant in nature, chemically inert in the stratosphere, and safe for humans and ecosystems.” Make Sunsets sells “cooling credits” in exchange for releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere via balloons. Sunscreen, another company whose website is light on details, claims it can provide regional cooling under the tagline: “Save the Burning Cows, Crops, and Cities.” Even some of the loudest proponents of solar geoengineering research and possible intervention have expressed skepticism and concern about these for-profit endeavors.
Because of solar geoengineering’s unknown and potentially significant unintended side effects, governments have been fearful of developing governance for these emerging techniques, especially since politically-motivated parties are using partisanship to trash climate science. The private sector is moving into this governance vacuum, changing the dynamics of the geoengineering debate away from the public good and global/regional benefits and into profit incentive, private control, and securitization of the global climate.
The notion of planetary security rests on a view of the global ecosystem as one entity. In that perspective, the best climate change solutions will stem from humanity’s willingness to modify the extractive economy, respect ecological diversity, and value the future more than most policies currently do. But too much of the ongoing research around geoengineering does not take these security concerns seriously, if at all. Too much of the modeling and engineering supporting the development of solar geoengineering does not consider geopolitics, governance, and public trust. A hard lesson clearly not learned well enough from the beginnings of the Atomic Age is that science, no matter how abstract, has real world impacts, and many geoengineering researchers treat solar geoengineering as a physics problem only and not also a geopolitical problem.
Some scholars have called for a moratorium on solar geoengineering research, a ban on public funding for such research, and support for governance of solar engineering from international institutions. Others have argued that well-governed research is necessary given the growing risks of climate change. But the emergence of private enterprise into the authority gap is a signal that stopping the geoengineering train through a non-use agreement is now impossible; good governance is our only option.
When private companies develop and sell solar geoengineering technologies, they draw a proprietary curtain over a planetary matter. If countries want to pursue the public good, international geopolitical stability, and ecological preservation in the face of the global climate crisis, they must ensure that any solar geoengineering research is interdisciplinary, open, and internationally transparent. Any attempt to geoengineer the Earth must consider all its implications, not just scientific veracity or private profit. It’s a long road to planetary security and solar geoengineering is not a shortcut.