There’s serious concern in the scientific and environmental communities about the geoengineering moral hazard — the fear that studying or even just talking about geoengineering will cause people to give up on or at least lose focus on our primary mission: reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The issue came up several times at the MIT geoengineering workshop Friday.
It’s an important concern, especially given the entrenched interests who are opposed to reducing emissions and the difficulty of convincing the public to make sacrifices when faced with a long-term, difficult-to-perceive threats.
I don’t think researchers should avoid studying geoengineering. We might want to be careful about the name, however. It implies a greater degree of control and precision than we have or are likely to gain in the next generation or so. A misperception about precision could make it easier to persuade the public to accept geoengineering uncritically.
You can’t restrict a term to its teleological argument, said Jim Fleming, a science historian from Colby College. In other words, no matter how imprecise or unsuccessful the practice may be, it is still engineering.
It’s important to capture intentionality, said David Keith, an environmental sciences and chemical engineering professor at the University of Calgary. In other words, it’s engineering because engineers are attempting to achieve the degree of control and precision we associate with the term engineering.
Looking through the pessimism-brings-optimism lens, I see an inverse of the moral hazard. If these really smart people who understand climate as well as anyone say that geoengineering is fraught with peril and may not work but we should still consider it, then the threat from global warming must be truly scary and we should curb emissions now. I’m not counting on this idea to get much traction in Washington or with the public, however.
Better still, why not go on the offensive? MIT’s Kerry Emanuel, who moderated the panel discussion at the workshop, proposed threatening people with geoengineering: he cited British academic, environmentalist and risks expert John Adams’ rhetorical suggestion that if we want lower automobile accident rates, we should put spikes sticking out of every car’s steering wheel. “The [spike] is geoengineering, and it’s what we’re going to do if you don’t take your foot off the gas,” said Emanuel.
There are two unrelated categories of climate management, or geoengineering: solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal. Much of the MIT workshop focused on solar radiation management, which could be implemented cheaply and would take effect quickly.
Solar radiation management calls for blocking sunlight with mirrors in space, aerosols in the stratosphere or artificially produced clouds. It would lower the planet’s temperature relatively quickly. However, it wouldn’t directly reduce CO2 levels. It would also alter precipitation patterns. And it could cause a rapid rebound in temperatures if it failed or was otherwise stopped.
There are two types of carbon dioxide removal: ocean and terrestrial. They’re more expensive and longer-term.
Ocean carbon dioxide removal involves fertilizing the oceans to amplify the natural carbon cycle, which sequesters carbon in the deep ocean. A consensus is emerging that this is a bad idea. It’s not clear that any of the proposals would work, and it appears that many if not all of them would be carbon positive, meaning they would produce more carbon in emissions than the carbon they would remove from the atmosphere.
Terrestrial carbon dioxide removal schemes could reduce carbon dioxide levels. The schemes range from forest management to industrial-scale chemical processes. Many of the scientists at the workshop said that terrestrial carbon dioxide removal could be an important or even necessary complement to emissions reductions. The principal downside is local and regional impacts: social, economic and environmental impacts of industrial facilities, and resource and land-use trade-offs involved in biomass management.
I’m still extremely wary of geoengineering. I think the proper context is climate scientist Ken Caldiera’s analogy to a parachute. You only use it in the face of certain disaster. We also don’t know yet whether what we have in geoengineering is a functional parachute.