Ethics of Geoengineering

Geoeengineering the climate by reflecting sunlight or extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has attracted increasing attention from natural scientists, social scientists, policy makers and the media. This article examines promotional discourse related to geoengineering from the 1980s to 2010. It asks in particular how this option for dealing with the problems posed by climate change were framed through the use of conceptual and discourse metaphors and whether one can argue that these are metaphors we ‘live by’ or metaphors we might ‘die by’. Findings show that an overarching argument from catastrophe was bolstered by three conceptual master-metaphors, namely The Planet is a body, The Planet is a machine and The planet is a patient/addict, linked to a variety of discourse metaphors, older conceptual metaphors and clichés. This metaphorical landscape began to shift while the article was being written and will have to be closely monitored in the future.

Geoengineering - die technische Manipulation des Klimas - muss mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit schon bald im grossen Stil Wirklichkeit werden. Denn zwei Drittel der wissenschaftlichen Analysen, die das Einhalten der 2-Grad-Leitplanke globaler Erwärmung des Klimasystems für möglich halten, gehen davon aus, dass unsere globale Wirtschaft noch in diesem Jahrhundert emissionsneutral funktioniert. Das scheint weder in der breiten Öffentlichkeit noch in der Politik hinlänglich bekannt zu sein.

Introductory Chapter of recently published monograph: 'Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the End of Nature'
https://www.amazon.com/Geoengineering-Anthropocene-Nature-Jeremy-Baskin/dp/3030173585

This book takes a critical look at solar geoengineering as an acceptable means for addressing climate change. It explores the assumptions and imaginaries which animate ‘engineering the climate’ and discusses why this climate solution is so controversial. The book explains geoengineering’s past, its revival in the mid-2000s, and its future prospects including its shadow presence in the Paris climate accord. The main focus however is on dissecting solar geoengineering today – its rationales, underpinning knowledge, relationship to power, and the stance towards nature which accompanies it. Baskin explores three competing imaginaries associated with geoengineering: an Imperial imaginary, an oppositional Un-Natural imaginary, and a conspiratorial Chemtrail imaginary. He seeks to explain why solar geoengineering has struggled to gain approval and why resistance to it persists, despite the support of several powerful actors. He provocatively suggests that reconceptualising our present as the Anthropocene might unwittingly facilitate the normalisation of geoengineering by providing a sustaining socio-technical imaginary.

Abstract The accelerating rate at which all climate variables are changing, and the expected further acceleration of these, combined with the failure to make deep cuts in CO2 emissions and to develop sufficiently effective carbon removal technologies means that solar radiation management techniques that directly cool the planet will increasingly be recognized as a necessary first line response to climate change. In this article, we discuss why the target for a deployment of solar radiation management technologies must be to cool the planet to within 0.5⁰C of the 1880-1910 baseline, which is less than the temperature rise that existed in the early 1980s. We use game theory, and the sub branch of interconnected games, to show that failure to deploy solar radiation management technologies that are capable of achieving these targets results in nations pursuing a free-for-all strategic position where protection of self-interest in the face of a crisis makes achieving significant and sustainable cuts in CO2 emissions impossible. We also show with game theory that there remains a high probability that a successful deployment of solar radiation management technologies will be overwhelmed by continued CO2 emissions unless there are fundamental changes to political structures that can integrate management of security with management of the climate change response. This has major implications for decisions on the governance of solar radiation management.

"A catastrophic draught event was reported across much of the north of South America during August - December 2005. This resulted in extensive and irreversible damage in parts of the
Amazon river network. The 2005 Amazon draught followed very unusual changes in the Atlantic Ocean’s circulatory system that altered typical wind and rain patterns. Many climatic models predict the future desiccation of the Amazon region. This paper discusses dangers of sudden swings in the Amazon’s climate and how these risks can be reduced and securing the future of the river system.

The Amazon river systems’ inability to adapt to the new seasonal climate patterns in 2005, which led to a complete destruction of some river ecosystems, suggested us to look at water engineering solutions to prevent the risks of more tributaries of such dying. We made a case study to oxygenate the Amazon river to raise its draught-stress threshold during the likely future draughts that may be even worse than today if the Atlantic weather system generates more storms as the world’s temperature rises.

We studied a 100 kilometre wide section near the Amazon’s mouth. We assumed temperature +30C (when 100% oxygenated water contains 7,6 mg O2 / litre). The addition of 2,5 mg O2 / l represents 1/3 of the total, i.e. raising from 70% to 100%. This large water body oxygenation project requires 4 million kg O2 / day. 2,000 MIXOX units consume 80 MW / 100 km of river. 1,000 km demand is at 800 MW (1 power station), costing ~500 million euros p.a." http://www.vesieko.fi/yhteystiedot

The IPCC tries to imagine scenarios to meet the objective of limiting global warming to +1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial period. One scenario places importance on negative emission technologies (NETs). NETs involve taking GHGs and storing them underground or in the oceans. CCS is complex in many ways: there are differing views on the feasibility of the technology, its sequestration capacity, its deployability, and its long-term safety and stability. It was therefore interesting to know if they are a miraculous solution or an aberrant blindness. This study aims to study the representations of NETs among academics and to see how representations of the economy and the environment are determinant in the representations of NETs. The research is based on semi-directive interviews with seven academics. The results show, through discourse analysis, that academics neither support nor totally reject NETs. These social representations vary on the place that academics give to NETs among solutions to address global warming. Support for NETs and CCS is conditional on the implementation of a range of other decarbonization solutions, particularly renewable energy and energy efficiency. Interviewees are quite critical of the environmental impacts of CCS, the economic cost and the carbon sequestration capacity.

As a response to climate change, geoengineering with solar radiation management (SRM) has the potential to result in unjust harm. Potentially, this injustice could be ameliorated by providing compensation to victims of SRM. However, establishing a just SRM compensation system faces severe challenges. First, there is scientific uncertainty in detecting particular harmful impacts and causally attributing them to SRM. Second, there is ethical uncertainty regarding what principles should be used to determine responsibility and eligibility for compensation, as well as determining how much compensation ought to be paid. Significant work remains in crafting a just SRM compensation system.

Les rapports du GIEC pointent l’urgence du réchauffement climatique. Conjointement, le GIEC essaie d’imaginer des scénarios, certains plus pessimistes que d’autres, et de proposer des solutions selon les tendances économiques mondiales, le progrès technologique et les politiques climatiques, pour respecter l’objectif de limiter ce réchauffement climatique à +1,5°C ou 2°C par rapport à la période préindustrielle. Un scénario parmi d’autres accorde une importance aux technologies d’émissions négatives (TEN) dans un avenir dans lequel les émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES) ne pourront baisser de manière importante. Les TEN consistent à prélever des GES et à les stocker dans le sous-sol ou dans les océans. Les TEN et les technologies de capture et séquestration de carbone (CSC) gagnent de plus en plus de place dans les débats académiques et dans les discours des plus grands hommes d’affaires du monde tels qu’Elon Musk. Les TEN sont complexes sur plusieurs points : les avis divergent sur la faisabilité de la technologie, sur sa capacité de séquestration, sur la possibilité de son déploiement, sur sa sécurité et sa stabilité sur le long terme. Il était donc intéressant de savoir si elles sont une solution miraculeuse ou un aveuglement aberrant.
S’appuyant sur la théorie des représentations sociales, ce mémoire a comme objectif d’étudier les représentations des TEN chez les universitaires et de voir en quoi les représentations de l’économie et de l’environnement sont déterminantes dans les représentations des TEN. Les représentations sociales peuvent éclairer la dynamique entre les personnes et l’environnement, le climat et la technologie. La méthodologie de recherche est essentiellement qualitative de type exploratoire. Elle s’appuie sur des entretiens semi-directifs avec des experts, ingénieurs, physiciens pour recueillir leurs représentations sur le thème étudié : les TEN. Six universitaires belges et français et un universitaire turc ont été choisis pour leur connaissance au sujet de la capture et séquestration du carbone. Les entretiens ont eu lieu par des réunions ZOOM. Divers aspects des TEN ont été abordés lors de ces entretiens comme leurs impacts environnementaux, la capacité technologique, leur place parmi les solutions pour faire face au réchauffement climatique.
Les résultats montrent, à travers l’analyse du discours, que les universitaires ne soutiennent ni ne rejettent totalement les TEN. Ces représentations sociales varient sur la place que les universitaires accordent aux TEN parmi les solutions pour faire face au réchauffement climatique. Le soutien aux TEN et CSC est conditionné par la mise en œuvre d’une série d’autres solutions de décarbonisation, en particulier les énergies renouvelables et l’efficacité énergétique. Les interviewés se montrent assez critiques quant aux impacts environnementaux des TEN, le coût économique et la capacité de séquestration du carbone.
Mots clés : TEN, représentations sociales, environnement, économie, réchauffement climatique, discours, perception, discours, capture et stockage du carbone.

This article views environmental literature through commonly-used narrative frames, and argues that widely-read and influential American climate fiction novels in the early twenty-first century tended to focus primarily if not exclusively on characters who are American, white, wealthy, and educated instead of highlighting the perspectives of poor people and people of color. They thereby minimized the critical framing of climate change as a matter of justice and equity -- climate justice -- missing an opportunity to cultivate transnational empathy and raise awareness of the tragically unequal human consequences of climate change. I explore the way that the Americanness, whiteness, and financial resources of cli-fi’s typical protagonists structure, in deeply problematic ways, the recommended responses to climate change in two widely read novels. For this reason, among many others, I argue that climate injustice ought to be a central element of every climate narrative, in fiction and other media.

Geoengineering has been broadly and helpfully defined as “the intentional manipulation of the earth's climate to counteract anthropogenic climate change or its warming effects” (Corner and Pidgeon 2010, 26). Although there exists a rapidly growing literature on the ethics of geoengineering, very little has been written about its gender dimensions. The authors consider four contexts in which geoengineering appears to have important gender dimensions: (1) the demographics of those pushing the current agenda, (2) the overall vision of control it involves, (3) the design of the particular technologies, and (4) whom geoengineering will most affect and benefit. After detailing these four gender dimensions, we consider three ways in which the geoengineering discourse could be enriched if it became more sensitive to issues of gender. These include increasing the focus on the concrete other, recognizing the socially transformative potential of geoengineering technologies, and engaging in value-sensitive design. Although ultimately remaining agnostic on the desirability of geoengineering, the paper brings gender considerations into a discussion from which they have been conspicuously absent.

Concurrent with growing academic and policy interest in ‘geoengineering’ the global climate in response to climate change, a more marginal discourse postulating the existence of a climate control conspiracy is also proliferating on the Internet.  Here, the term ‘chemtrails’ is used interchangeably with the term geoengineering to describe the belief that the persistent contrails left by aeroplanes provide evidence that a secret programme of large scale weather and climate modification is on-going.  Despite recent calls for greater appreciation of the diverse ways in which people conceive of and relate to ideas of climate control, and widespread acknowledgement of the importance of democratic public engagement in governance of geoengineering, the chemtrail conspiracy narrative has received very little attention in academic work to date.  This paper builds on work highlighting the instability of the distinction between ‘conspiratorial’ versus ‘normal’ views, and examines conspiracy narratives as discourses rather than as pathologies (either psychological or sociological). A discourse analysis allows an exploration of parallel logics and concerns animating both the chemtrail narrative and wider discourses around climate and climate control.  The analysis finds that while some elements of the chemtrail narrative do not lend themselves to democratic processes of deliberation, and potential for engagement with more mainstream discourse appears to be low, nevertheless, analysis of the chemtrail discourse offers some important insights for the politics of geoengineering.

Geoeengineering the climate by reflecting sunlight or extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has attracted increasing attention from natural scientists, social scientists, policy makers and the media. This article examines promotional discourse related to geoengineering from the 1980s to 2010. It asks in particular how this option for dealing with the problems posed by climate change were framed through the use of conceptual and discourse metaphors and whether one can argue that these are metaphors we ‘live by’ or metaphors we might ‘die by’. Findings show that an overarching argument from catastrophe was bolstered by three conceptual master-metaphors, namely The Planet is a body, The Planet is a machine and The planet is a patient/addict, linked to a variety of discourse metaphors, older conceptual metaphors and clichés. This metaphorical landscape began to shift while the article was being written and will have to be closely monitored in the future.

Recently NATURE published a discussion on construction of sills in attempt to prevent or slow melting glaciers that are discharging ice into the ice fjords. Several further papers promptly followed publication of this essentially erroneous article in a respected NATURE magazine. Here it is pointed out that there is a discrepancy of several magnitudes thus excluding a long-term viability to manage the edges of ice fjords or continental ice shelves/sheets due to a phenomenon known as the mega-erratics. These are blocks of hard rocks that are several kilometres in size that have been dislocated by a warmed and wet edges of glacier/ice sheet/ice shelf. This Parliament evidence points out the error that was not apparent to the peer-reviewers at the time and in subsequent papers that followed. The Parliament was shown evidence that large enough obstacles cannot be possibly made to prevent ice discharges due to a progression of melting, that softens and lubricates glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets. The forces unleashed by the ice front exceeds several magnitudes from the conceived objects that sills were proposed. The only, and very only effect is temporary and limited to prevention of warm water incursion where these methods will work for a while in a cold, dry, and relatively stable ice formations. A long-term projections suggested to prevent warmed and water-infested glaciers from discharging ice into the ocean cannot be made as the forces of ice exceed many magnitudes of the sills and levies that can be made of concrete blocks, aggregates or other materials. Thus the prevention of sea level rise by this method for centuries or millennia is not functional one and thus the mitigation and prevention of rubbish gyros in ocean, the supply of housing, nuclear and food production security must be looked at as solution by the ocean littoral states. Several examples of various types of risk to the sustainability of oceans have been presented in addition to the above exposed misconception. This comes with much regret as it appears that one 'hoped-for-solution' to manage the future climate change impacts has largely foundered on the issue that the sills cannot be made strong enough to contain most important, warmed glaciers or edges of unstable ice shelves. However, for a short-term this may offer small-scale solutions provided that costs remain sufficiently small. Aggressively melting ice formations with darkened surfaces, wide spread melt water ponds, or water filled crevasses it does not offer much, if any, prolonged ice stability. (The document is best viewed as a .pdf file due to the lay-out of graph and legends.)

This book analyzes major ethical issues surrounding the use of climate engineering, particularly solar radiation management (SRM) techniques, which have the potential to reduce some risks of anthropogenic climate change but also carry their own risks of harm and injustice. The book argues that we should approach the ethics of climate engineering via "non-ideal theory," which investigates what justice requires given the fact that many parties have failed to comply with their duty to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, it argues that climate justice should be approached comparatively, evaluating the relative justice or injustice of feasible policies under conditions that are likely to hold within relevant timeframes. Likely near-future conditions include "pessimistic scenarios," in which no available option avoids serious ethical problems. The book contends that certain uses of SRM can be ethically defensible in some pessimistic scenarios. This is the first book devoted to the many ethical issues surrounding climate engineering.

The idea that climate geoengineering could be used in conjunction to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change has gained credence in both scientific and policy circles. Because of the inherent uncertainty about the risks involved, debates on the topic abound. Scientists agree that more research is needed on both the potential impacts of geoengineering on humans and ecosystems, and the governance mechanisms that would be the most appropriate for conducting field research and for eventual deployment. Despite an explosion of publications in the last decade or so, properly sociological analysis is still lacking. In this paper, we develop an approach to geoengineering based on metabolic rift theory to consider the broad political economic context in which geoengineering technologies are being developed. We argue first that the eventual recourse to such last resort approaches is a consequence of the ever expanding carbon rift created by capitalism and the growth imperative it entails. Second, we discuss how geoengineering technologies would likely be deployed within the context of the neoliberal climate policy regime that is currently in place and that relies heavily on carbon markets. We outline some of the foreseeable consequences of tying geoengineering to carbon markets on greenhouse gas emissions reduction and on the possibility of exerting democratic control over the technologies themselves.

This paper draws on a recent global assessment of carbon dioxide removal (or negative emissions) technologies (NETs) undertaken by the author for Friends of the Earth in the UK. This paper presents a summary of results of the assessment, and the appraisal process. Alongside criteria such as cost and technical readiness, the review considered controllability, accountability and side effects.

It identified several justice implications arising from: the potential moral hazard in the development of NETs, the distribution (and potential limits to the overall availability) of geological storage for carbon dioxide, and the implications of competition for biological productivity for negative emissions.

The paper also reflects on the justice implications raised by the appraisal process and criteria, with reference to issues in justice theory, including capabilities, recognition, participation and deliberation. It concludes that a more explicit consideration of justice issues is essential for effective appraisal and governance of geoengineering.

It is commonly suggested that lack of progress on the curbing of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emission is the driving factor behind the increasing scientific interest in geoengineering.  Acknowledging that responses to physical events do not follow inevitably from states of affairs, but are culturally mediated and this article gives an account of why this came to be the case.  Using the anthropological paradigm of Cultural Theory, it is argued that the rise of apocalyptic rhetoric in climate discourse helped facilitate the emergence of geoengineering into the mainstream.  Tipping point rhetoric was invoked by those sympathetic to an egalitarian cosmology and gained resonance by appeal two of egalitarianism’s long-standing tropes -  millenarianism and the delicate balance of nature, to galvanise action on mitigation.  However, this rhetorical strategy precipitated developments quite contrary to the aims of those who first introduced the rhetoric.  One group of political rivals, holders of a hierarchist cosmology used elements of the egalitarian apocalyptic narrative to promote a different strategy to climate change: that of geoengineering.  The use of apocalyptic discourses appears at this stage to have been a so far successful example of “borrowed rhetoric”.  Holders of a hierarchist cosmology can also draw on a variety of rhetorical resources, including, but not limited to those from an individualist cosmology as well, thus broadening political support for their preferred solution.  Therefore, we can postulate that “climate emergency” justifications of geoengineering will be on the wane as geoengineering increasingly becomes part of the scientific and climate policy mainstream.

"We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old one." —Norbert Wiener (1950) [46]

Wiener's prophetic vision of things to come succinctly captures the pressing concerns of our historical moment.  While we live in an age of tremendous scientific and technological progress, albeit unevenly distributed, the threat of catastrophic climate change, which is certainly the result of said progress, has become a debt for which humanity might not have recompense.  Decades before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring gave birth to the modern environmental movement, Wiener's contention still charts a novel path for thinking about our collective ecological debts.  As he notes, the world is now a man-made artifact—one that comes at a great cost, perhaps even the human itself.  In suggesting that humanity must adapt itself to the world, Wiener was one of the first to conceptualize the tremendous costs of the Anthropocene. 
In response to the nearly absolute scientific consensus that human activity is the primary driver of global warming and, by extension, climate change, a 2008 petition was put forth by the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London to have the Anthropocene listed as the most recent epoch of the geological time scale.  Although the term remains unofficial, Crutzen and Stoermer's neologism has become ubiquitous among scholars, scientists, and futurists.  While the Anthropocene is “widely accepted in the global change research community,” the term's rising omnipresence within popular culture, especially media outlets, speaks to the neologism's actual and perceived power to raise public awareness of the enduring human impact on the planet [p. 843].  Consequently, the Anthropocene has assumed “a focal point in the culture wars over the recognition and interpretation of environmental process,” specifically the decidedly human role in affecting the global climate system [p. 61].
The challenges of the Anthropocene provide a valuable and necessary opportunity to re-examine what it means to be human, especially if various technological endeavors thrust humans into novel roles, bodies, and spaces.  This paper situates the ethico-political implications of seemingly unthinkable countermeasures to global weirding through engagements and provocations with the work of Norbert Wiener, Bernard Stiegler, and Bruno Latour—all of whom presence the vital role of technology in thinking the human albeit from divergent perspectives. In 2011, the Geological Society of America selected a conference thematic reflective of the increasing academic accord that the planet has indeed entered a new age—the gathering was entitled: Archean to Anthropocene: The past is the key to the future. 
While many use the term wistfully, scientists, including the Anthropocene Working Group from the International Union of Geological Sciences, continue to debate the Anthropocene's official start date, which may have a dramatic effect on mitigation strategies and tactics.  On one hand, there is a strong argument for the Industrial Revolution, specifically the advent of the steam engine (1784), which is when “polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane."  On the other hand, Ruddiman posits a minor reading of the data in arguing, “the Anthropocene actually began thousands of years ago as a result of the discovery of agriculture and subsequent technological innovations in the practice of farming,” which situates major societal disruptions, such as plagues in Europe during the Middle Ages, and the correlative “anomalous gas trends” found in ice-core records [p. 261].  In many ways, this divide centers on questions of scale versus scope, or the relative degree to which human action on the global climate system has been impactful.  The fact that there is any debate concerning the interpretation of ice-core data is itself part of the debate as the political comportment of the Anthropocene as an intended and presumed driver of change is clearly evident, even if the term remains “informal” and somewhat contentious [p. 843].
What is at stake in this debate underlies one of the central questions of geoengineering: if humans have been altering the environment since the advent of agriculture, then why would we not actively and purposefully continue to do so to avert crisis, especially if human activity is “driving the sixth major extinction event in Earth history?” [61, p. 843]  Ultimately, this query centers on command—the perceived and actual capacity for geoengineering actants to assume responsibility for the global climate system.  Clearly, one of the biggest assumptions of this line of thinking centers on the contention that we have always-already been geoengineering, albeit poorly, which portends grave consequences for the future(s).  Reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast an increase in both the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events that can and likely will severely impact the projected “1.8 to 5.2 billion” people living in low-lying coastal regions “by the 2080s” [p. 317]. Understanding command as capacity is key as it frames both perceived and actual matters of fact—objects that are taken for reality—and matters of concern—things that are given presence within reality.1  The IPCC's forecasts actually have more weight as matters of concern than matters of fact as the former are more useful for understanding how the latter's relational ecologies emerge.  In light of such radical possibilities, approaches to command vary widely from organic gardening (unilateral strategies and tactics that support and enhance actual and perceived natural processes, such as ocean fertilization) to rocket science (strategies and tactics that account for the workings of complex systems and posit dynamically responsive, if not daring, solutions, such as a solar shield).  In either case, it is clear that the debate over the origin of the Anthropocene has implications for the design, development, and diffusion of possible geoengineering remedies as the issue turns from a question of when to start geoengineering? to how can we do a better job? 
If part of the intent of the Anthropocene is to enliven a sense of responsibility toward the human impact on the global climate system, then Berthon and Donnellan's notion of the Technopocene serves as a useful concept, especially as it was coined to engender “a new level of mindfulness on the part of humans for themselves and their technological offspring” [p. 5].  By affirming the primacy of command inherent to human activities, which has never limited itself to natural processes although it remains intimately interconnected and intertwined to the workings of the world, the Technopocene provides a more acute diagnosis of global weirding.  The concept, however, should not be situated as an extreme version of the Anthropocene but rather its antecedent, as it extends both the scale and scope of global weirding beyond the confines of our historical moment.  In sum, so long as humans, broadly defined, are present, one will encounter the Technopocene, which aligns with Ruddiman's observation that the Anthropocene has deep roots.  As it relates to the “rocket science” pole on the spectrum of command for charting alternative futures of geoengineering, the Technopocene beckons an Earth Systems Engineering and Management (ESEM) perspective, which expresses at its core “a basic, if disconcerting, truth: the Earth, as it now exists, is a product of human design” [p. 16].  Resonating with Anderson's charge that humanity must learn “to govern evolution” and Dator's call to assume “responsibility for our rose," an ESEM capacity draws on “a number of principles from fields such as industrial ecology, adaptive management, and systems engineering that can be relied on to enable rapid progress in developing such an approach” [p. 186].
While many might find this approach preferable given the realities of global weirding, ESEM is not without detractors.  As Hamilton contends, “there is something deeply perverse in the demand that we construct an immense industrial infrastructure in order to deal with the carbon emissions from another immense industrial infrastructure, when we could just stop burning fossil fuels."  While many, most notably a highly influential 2009 Royal Society of London report in favor of geoengineering “as part of a wider package of options for addressing climate change," concede that even if the world capped and/or stopped all carbon emissions at present levels, global warming would continue for years to come, Hamilton's weariness of what he deems to be the “utopian techno-enthusiasm” of Allenby and others offers a clear counter-point, even if the critique may underestimate the severity of what might lie ahead and the political realities of the present.
Extending the enthusiasm of George's metaphor, Donnell cheerfully opines, “Geoengineering may well turn out to be yet another tool of dominance, a newfangled way for human beings to screw things up even faster.  But it doesn't have to by that way.  As David Keith said to me as we were riding up a ski lift one day, 'We're in the gardening business now, damn it!' [p. 220]  If command is tantamount to capacity, particularly the perceptual and actual willingness and means to enact change, either as gardeners or rocket scientists, then the Technopocene/Anthropocene distinction is useful for reifying the poles of the X-axis, which must presence structural and systemic challenges and opportunities.  At both ends of the spectrum, change is inevitable, and the question becomes how much further down the rabbit hole, so to speak, one is willing to venture, since, as Wiener coolly notes, there is no going back.

‘From Pleistocene to Anthropocene: When Rain Dancing and Fire of Agni are Just Not Enough’ The Exhaustive Research Proposal Draft for the 2020 Grant Application for  the VU Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Ethics of the Anthropocene; Religion, Ethics, and Global Environmental Change –‘Geoengineering of Human Death in Asia’: Explorations from the Ancient Human Desire for the Control of Nature to the Present Threat of a Monsoon Breakdown in Asia and the Risk of a Near Future Nuclear Apocalypse No One had Wanted but May Now Have to Face. Includes the Cover Letter Submission from Veli Albert Kallio to Detail Research Interests and Plans for the Fellowship. (The detailed draft of my research proposal [Section 2] has finally uploaded to the Academia.edu web site. Further sections for the proposed research will follow in due course. Overall, the research is still largely a work in progress -  seeking for grants to its various elements - but there are already some important insights that may offer valuable avenues for further investigations from the sections available on this study of Ethnoclimatology, ethics from the past to the present.)

Geoengineering is the deliberate modification of planetary systems to counteract climate change. Such techniques carry the risk of deleterious side effects, and are theologically and morally questionable. This paper examines geoengineering through a reading of the creation text of Genesis 1, and the Elijah cycle of 1 Kings 16-18. Geoengineering can be seen as the application of a Baconian reading of Genesis 1, as opposed to John Walton’s creation as temple, and Graham Paulson’s Aboriginal theology of divine presence in the land. Geoengineering can also be understood as a form of Baalism. In the Australian context, the most moral geoengineering option is shown to be ceasing the use of coal.

Abstract. Some authors have called for increased research on various forms of geoengineering as a means to address global climate change. This paper focuses on the question of whether a particular form of geoengineering, namely deploying sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere to counteract some of the effects of increased greenhouse gas concentrations, would be a just response to climate change. In particular, we examine problems sulfate aerosol geoengineering (SAG) faces in meeting the requirements of ...

The strongest arguments for the permissibility of geoengineering (also known as climate engineering) rely implicitly on non-ideal theory—roughly, the theory of justice as applied to situations of partial compliance with principles of ideal justice. In an ideally just world, such arguments acknowledge, humanity should not deploy geoengineering; but in our imperfect world, society may need to complement mitigation and adaptation with geoengineering to reduce injustices associated with anthropogenic climate change. We interpret research proponents' arguments as an application of a particular branch of non-ideal theory known as " clinical theory. " Clinical theory aims to identify politically feasible institutions or policies that would address existing (or impending) injustice without violating certain kinds of moral permissibility constraints. We argue for three implications of clinical theory: First, conditional on falling costs and feasibility, clinical theory provides strong support for some geoengineering techniques that aim to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Second, if some kinds of carbon dioxide removal technologies are supported by clinical theory, then clinical theory further supports using those technologies to enable " overshoot " scenarios in which developing countries exceed the cumulative emissions caps that would apply in ideal circumstances. Third, because of tensions between political feasibility and moral permissibility, clinical theory provides only weak support for geoengineering techniques that aim to manage incoming solar radiation.

In recent years there has been growing academic and policy interest in geoengineering – the large scale, intentional manipulation of climate system in order to attempt to counteract the effects of climate change (Belter & Seidel 2013). Alongside a number of other important policy issues, concerns have been raised over the potential for geoengineering technologies to contribute to so-called ‘carbon lock-in’ (Unruh 2000), or to become ‘locked-in’ themselves (CBD, 2012; Shepherd et al., 2009; Rayner et al., 2013). In particular, the scale of infrastructures that geoengineering interventions would require, and the issue of the so-called ‘termination effect’ (Jones et al. 2013) (whereby the termination of a programme of stratospheric aerosol injection would result inrapid heating of the planet) have been discussed in these terms. Dynamics of ‘lock-in’ have been raised even in relation to the more purely discursive aspects of these challenges, where (despite the emergent and somewhat ill-defined nature of the field), it has been suggested that the extant framings of geoengineering in academic and policy literatures may already demonstrate features recognisable as forms of cognitive lock-in, likely to have profound implications for future developments in this area (Bellamy et al. 2012). This review paper, prepared in advance of an academic and policy workshop on the topic, is intended to give participants a brief overview of the theoretical literature on lock-in and path-dependence, to summarise the ways in which these concepts have been invoked in the existing literature on geoengineering, to highlight some on-going theoretical debates around these concepts, and to examine the generic, and more geoengineering-specific challenges of assessment of these processes.

According to a 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, an expected increase in both the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events could severely impact the projected 1.8 to 5.2 billion people living in low-lying coastal regions by the 2080s. From Bangladesh to Boca Raton, the potential displacement of billions relative to the possible, if not probable, effects of global warming has prompted debate concerning the cultivation of an ethics and policies for climate refugees. As the U.N. ordered a moratorium on geoengineering in 2010, however, there has been little, if any, serious discussion regarding an array of radical technological remedies, particularly as some, especially at the U.N., feel that the cure could be worse than the disease. In July 2012, geoengineering reemerged as a topic of concern when Russ George, an American entrepreneur, orchestrated the dumping of 100 tons of iron sulfate into the Pacific Ocean creating an artificial algae bloom. Carrying out the largest “rogue” geoengineering experiment to date, George's project was commenced as a test to procure carbon credits, although it clearly violated U.N. regulations. For some, George is a “geo-vigilante” and embodies the dangerous potentialities for life in an age of global weirding while others have lauded his actions as heroic. Using the Manoa School scenario modeling method, this project sketches alternative futures for geoengineering with an emphasis on the ethico-political considerations of nongovernmental actants and the necessity of an Earth Systems Engineering and Management (ESEM) approach to command and control complex systems.

Solar Radiation Management (SRM) has been suggested as a technique to counteract some of the changes expected as a result of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).1 It has been suggested2 that SRM could be carried out by commercially motivated actors. This process has been envisaged as using the Voluntary Carbon Offset (VCO) market as a mechanism for monetising the SRM process, due to the secondary effects of SRM on the carbon cycle.3 Current VCO customers are typically businesses: those looking to be ‘carbon neutral’ or reselling offsets alongside high-carbon goods and services (for example, airlines). Other potential VCO customers include states, or philanthropists. In this short scoping paper we provide a broad overview the issues of regulation and legitimacy, as may be applicable to the activities of future commercial SRM actors. We discuss the need for a two-pronged regulatory approach, encompassing first legal and corporate regulation and second, scientific and technical regulation. In conclusion, we identify differing regulatory requirements, according to whether the intended effect on the climate system of the SRM industry, or of individual firms, can be regarded as de minimis. We additionally suggest the use of a two-tier marketplace structure in order to ensure regulatory demands can be efficiently and transparently enacted.

The book aims at investigating the who, what, why, where and when of deliberate, large-scale intervention designed to counter global warming or offset some of its effects.
Hamilton's conclusions might be summarized in the motto ‘Degrowth or Geoengineering’ as he offers arguments in favor of abandoning the path on endless economic growth and

The development of climate engineering research has historically depended on mostly western, holistic perceptions of climate and climate change. Determinations of climate and climate change as a global system have played a defining role in the development of climate engineering. As a result, climate engineering research in general, and solar radiation management (SRM) in particular, is primarily engaged in research of quantified, whole-Earth solutions. I argue that in the potential act of solar radiation management, a view of climate change that relies on the holistic western science of the climatic system is enshrined. This view, dependent on a deliberative intentionality that seems connected to anthropocenic notions of responsibility and control, profoundly influences the assumptions and research methods connected to climate engineering. While this may not necessarily be to the detriment of climate engineering proposals-in fact, it may be the only workable conception of SRM-it is a conceptual limit to the enterprise that has to be acknowledged. Additionally, in terms of governance, reliability, and cultural acceptance, this limit could be a fundamental objection to future experimentation (or implementation).

Chapter 5 (“Governing BECCS: “Slippery Slope” or “Uphill Struggle”?”) highlights how BECCS and other large-scale interventions in the Earth’s climate system, proposed to moderate anthropogenic global warming, are commonly portrayed as threatening to initiate a “slippery slope” from research to deployment. The argument suggests that governance should constrain or even proscribe research into BECCS on the grounds that allowing it to proceed unchecked could lead to a chain of events resulting in deployment and the undesirable consequences that this might bring. This chapter begins by critically examining the slippery slope argument as articulated in relation to BECCS. It then draws on the empirical findings of an expert scenario method designed to explore how far BECCS might develop in the future and under what governance arrangements. Rather than a slippery slope, the scenarios instead illustrate what might best be described as an “uphill struggle,” in which BECCS innovators confront manifold technical, political, and societal challenges to deployment. The chapter concludes by seeking to reframe the governance task as one of responsible incentivization, rather than one of constraint or proscription.

This article reviews the COP 21 agreement on climate mitigation, explains why it is doomed to fail without systemic transformation, and proposes a method for accelerating the evolution of a sustainable global system.
Despite the achievements of the Paris Agreement, the world is still racing towards disaster. This is because it will not be possible to preserve critical ecosystems without placing internationally enforceable limits on both pollution and consumption—tasks that are not possible within current economic and political frameworks.
This dichotomy—between the need to work within existing institutions and the reality that they are structurally incapable of preventing catastrophic outcomes—may be resolved by using a holistic, three-track approach.  The first track will reframe and intensify climate mitigation efforts. The second track will challenge the ideological opposition to climate mitigation. The third track will help catalyse the global movement needed to empower structural transformation and the emergence of a sustainable global system.

Geoengineering options  such as negative  emissions technologies  (NETs)  or greenhouse gas removal (GGR)  may need  to  contribute  towards  decarbonization,  by  removing  CO₂  from  the  atmosphere  and  storing  it  safely  in biological  or  geological  sinks,  or  reflecting 
sunlight  back  into  space  via  solar  radiation  management  (SRM). Despite  concerns  about  them,  GGR  and  SRM  are  increasingly  discussed  as  crucial  complements  to  traditional climate change mitigation. Others routinely dismiss both SRM and GGR methods as a distraction from mitigation, or even as a potential moral hazard that induces complacency in reducing emissions. Yet, if climate impacts turn out  to  be  more  sudden  and  severe  than  currently  known,  such 
strategies  could  provide  a  rapid  backstop  to implement  deeper  emissions  reductions,  especially  with  techniques  that  require  time  to  scale-up.  Despite  their importance and controversial status, most research on GGR and SRM remains technical, rather than social, and that 
knowledge  of  their  technical  characteristics  remains  limited,  even  within  the  physical  and  engineering sciences. Moreover, existing GGR and SRM options are changing rapidly in terms of their technical design, cost, and  performance,  and  therefore  scalability  and  deployment 
potential.  To  contribute  to  the  debate,  this  study reviews  and  summarizes  a  large  number  of  geoengineering  assessments  published  over  the  past  decade  to document prospective benefits, but also reveal potential risks. It aims to provide a comprehensive evidence
base on  GGR  and  SRM  technologies  that  is  rigorous,  timely,  and  interdisciplinary.  This  article  begins  by  briefly defining geoengineering and associated technologies, describing how various techniques work, and summarizing recent  market  trends  up  until  early  2021.  Then,  it  discusses  a  series  of  advantages  and  disadvantages  to  these
ng tensions, research gaps, and a critical research agenda. It concludes with implications for research,  policy,  and  governance.

Geoengineering is the deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system in an attempt to mitigate the adverse effects of global warming. Now that climate emergency is upon us, claims that geoengineering is inevitable are rapidly proliferating. How did we get into this situation where the most extreme path now seems a plausible development? Is it an accurate representation of where we are at? Who is this “we” who is talking? What options make it onto the table? Which are left out? Whom does geoengineering serve? Why is the ensemble of projects that goes by that name so salient, even though the community of researchers and advocates is remarkably small? These are some of the questions that the thinkers contributing to this volume are exploring from perspectives ranging from sociology and geography to ethics and Indigenous studies. The editors set out this diverse collection of voices not as a monolithic, unified take on geoengineering, but as a place where creative thinkers, students, and interested environmental and social justice advocates can explore nuanced ideas in more than 240 characters.

Three essential, interacting components of geoengineering are explored in some detail -- (1) superheated water vapor from power plant cooling towers; (2) chemtrails consisting of heavy metals, endocrine disrupters, nanotechnology, as well as  bioengineered materials; and, (3) nexrad Doppler radar facilities.

Climate change is undeniably a global problem, but the situation is especially dire for countries whose territory is comprised entirely or primarily of low-lying land. While geoengineering might offer an opportunity to protect these states, international consensus on the particulars of any geoengineering proposal seems unlikely. To consider the moral complexities created by unilateral deployment of geoengineering technologies, we turn to a moral convention with a rich history of assessing interference in the sovereign affairs of foreign states: the just war tradition. We argue that the just war framework demonstrates that, for these nations, geoengineering offers a justified form of self-defense from an unwarranted, albeit unintentional, aggression. This startling result places our own carbon-emitting activities in a stark new light: in perpetrating climate change, we are, in fact, waging war on the most vulnerable.