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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Stabilizing the world's climates means cutting carbon dioxide pollution. There's no way around it. But what if that's not enough? What if it's too difficult to accomplish in the time allotted or, worse, what if it's so late in the game that even cutting carbon emissions to zero, tomorrow, wouldn't do? Enter solar Geoengineering. The principle is simple: attempt to cool Earth by reflecting more sunlight back into space. The primary mechanism, shooting particles into the upper atmosphere, implies more pollution, not less. If that doesn't sound scary, it should. There are lots of risks, unknowns, and unknowables. In Geoengineering: The Gamble, climate economist Gernot Wagner provides a balanced take on the possible benefits and all-too-real risks, especially the so-called "moral hazard" that researching or even just discussing (solar) Geoengineering would undermine the push to cut carbon emissions in the first place. Despite those risks, he argues, solar Geoengineering may only be a matter of time. Not if, but when. As the founding executive director of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program, Wagner explores scenarios of a geoengineered future, offering an inside-view of the research already under way and the actions the world must take to guide it in a productive direction.
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Contents
Title page
Copyright page
About the author
Introduction: Start here – But don’t start with geoengineering
Part I Incentives
1 Not
if
, but
when
2 What could possibly go wrong?
3 The drive to research
Part II Scenarios
“Rational” climate policy
5 A humanitarian cyclone crisis
6 Millions of geoengineers
Part III Governance
7 Green moral hazards
8 Research governance
Epilogue: The inevitable gamble
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
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The Gamble
Gernot Wagner
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Gernot Wagner 2021
The right of Gernot Wagner to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4305-2 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4306-9 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wagner, Gernot, author.
Title: Geoengineering : the gamble / Gernot Wagner.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A bestselling climate economist asks ‘is geoengineering worth the gamble to tackle climate change?’”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021011283 (print) | LCCN 2021011284 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509543052 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509543069 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509543076 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Environmental geotechnology. | Climate change mitigation. | Carbon dioxide mitigation. | Pollution--Economic aspects. | Environmental policy.
Classification: LCC TD171.9 .W34 2021 (print) | LCC TD171.9 (ebook) | DDC 628--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011283
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011284
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The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For more on the author, visit: gwagner.com
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
About the author
Gernot Wagner teaches climate economics at NYU, co-authored Climate Shock, and writes Bloomberg’s Risky Climate column. He was the founding executive director of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program and served as lead senior economist at Environmental Defense Fund. His writings appear frequently in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, TIME, among many others. Follow his work at gwagner.com
IntroductionStart here – But don’t start with geoengineering
The first time I heard about solar geoengineering, I considered the idea nuts. It is. Two decades later – after having worked on the topic at Environmental Defense Fund, helping launch Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, and doing quite a bit of research and writing on the topic myself – I still think it is a rather healthy attitude to have toward the topic. The entire enterprise seems like a gamble, and a planetary one at that.
Of course, anyone who’s been paying attention to what’s happening with the rapidly changing climate will recognize that the world is currently playing a different kind of gamble with the planet, and arguably an even larger one.
Geoengineering – in particular, solar geoengineering, attempting to cool the planet by sending a small fraction of sunlight back into space, or by increasing the amount of solar radiation that escapes back into space – is no solution to climate change. That much is clear. It does not address the root cause of too much carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, nor the continuing inflow of CO2 emissions. Geoengineering is a technofix, and a highly imperfect one at that.
Of course, sanitation, too, is a technofix. Without it, cities would not be possible. Modern life is replete with such technofixes. It’s often a fine balance between decrying something as a technofix that simply serves to cement the status quo and celebrating an invention as a clear step forward. It is this constant back-and-forth, this constant internal debate, which characterizes many a geoengineering conversation. There is simply no easy answer, no clear line. Even the very idea of working on the topic comes with a number of judgment calls.
A long history of healthy skepticism
All of us having worked on solar geoengineering have stories on how we got to work on the topic. Most came to it hesitantly – some after a lifetime of work on cutting CO2 emissions.
Geochemist Wally Broecker left an indelible imprint on the climate science community. In 1975, he introduced the term “global warming” into the literature, after the phenomenon had previously been known by the slightly cumbersome moniker “inadvertent climate modification.”1 In a video message, recorded from his hospital bed, for a 2018 “Planetary Management Symposium” at Arizona State University, Broecker said: “If we are going to prevent the planet from warming up another couple of degrees, we’re going to have to go to geoengineering.” Broecker did not arrive at this conclusion lightly, in what would turn out to be his final address to his scientific colleagues before his passing.
Broecker was, in fact, highly skeptical of solar geoengineering as a possible climate intervention. I remember him having a number of probing questions, when, in 2013, David Keith came to give a talk on the importance of solar geoengineering research at a climate policy seminar at Columbia University’s Faculty House. Broecker’s main worry, like that of most others, was that mere talk of geoengineering – especially, once again, the “solar” variety – might detract from the need to cut CO2 in the first place, a concept often called “moral hazard.”
It was precisely this worry that had led to a long-standing, self-imposed, unspoken near-moratorium on solar geoengineering research within the scientific community. Broecker had been a key member of the high-powered group that authored a section on CO2 as part of a 1965 report by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee on “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment.”2 The report did not mention cutting CO2 emissions as a possible option for addressing climate change. Doing so apparently seemed inconceivable at the time. Instead, it mentioned one possible method of addressing the problem: brightening ocean surfaces in an attempt to reflect more sunlight back into space and cool the planet.
In hindsight, this singular focus on solar geoengineering in the 1965 report was a clear mistake, and one the scientific community has overcorrected for over the course of the coming decades. In 1974, Russian scientist Mikhail Budyko first proposed what has since become the most prominent solar geoengineering method: stratospheric aerosols – introducing tiny reflective particles into the upper atmosphere.3 Budyko’s proposal was translated into English in 1977. It was briefly known as “Budyko’s blanket,” but mentions of it in the scientific literature and especially public climate discourse soon disappeared.
A 1992 National Academies report picks up on the possibility,4 but it was not until the 2000s that the technology reemerged in broader scientific and climate conversations. After hearing vague mentions of solar geoengineering in the early 2000s, followed by quick dismissals, I first encountered solar geoengineering in earnest shortly after the late Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen wrote his now famous essay presenting stratospheric sulfur injections as a possible way “to resolve a policy dilemma.”5
The dilemma: Air pollution in the form of sulfur dioxide (SO2) kills millions each year; it also helps cool the planet. For example, Europe having begun to clean up its air pollution in the 1980s was clearly beneficial. Medieval cathedrals were no longer melting under acid rain. Forests – and people – are healthier. However, the Arctic is now around 0.5°C warmer as a direct result of decreased SO2 emissions.6 These are clear tradeoffs.
Crutzen, in his essay, presented this moral quandary. His essay was published jointly with one written by the late Ralph Cicerone, himself a famed atmospheric scientist and then the President of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, who wrote in support of Crutzen’s controversial essay and of further research.7 While Crutzen and Cicerone’s essays did much to lift the self-imposed research moratorium, skepticism throughout the research and policy communities has remained to this day. I would hasten to add that much of that skepticism is, in fact, still healthy. Solar geoengineering is not a topic one should “embrace,” in any sense of the term. That goes for policymakers as much as for researchers “merely” trying to answer lingering scientific questions. To this day, much of the skepticism, in turn, can be explained by “moral hazard” worries, a topic we will discuss in depth in Chapter 7.
Narrowing down “geoengineering”
A quick definitional detour is in order here, as “geoengineering” means different things to different people. In fact, the term is so vague and all-encompassing as to have lost much meaning, despite still being in frequent use. The term “geoengineering” itself is largely an artefact and a result of the term’s frequent use in popular discourse. Experts are typically more precise, and for good reason.
Except for the book’s cover – mea culpa! – I do not use the term “geoengineering” in this book without further explanation, apart from in direct quotations. I instead use either “solar geoengineering” or “carbon removal.” The two are sometimes subsumed under the broad heading of “geoengineering,” but the two are, in fact, very different. Neither, in turn, is the only term used for either category of interventions.
Solar geoengineering is sometimes also called “solar radiation management” (SRM), “solar radiation modification” (conveniently, also abbreviated as SRM), or traditionally also “albedo modification.” It is a largescale, deliberate intervention to cool the planet by sending a small fraction of sunlight back into space, or by increasing the amount of solar radiation that escapes back into space. The plethora of terms here already indicates the problem. While those working on the topic would immediately recognize the abbreviation “SRM,” and I have used it myself in peer-reviewed papers and op-eds alike, I will eschew its use here in favor of “solar geoengineering.” The reason for this nomenclature is simple: the “solar” modifies the all-too-popular broader term. That doesn’t make “SRM” any less accurate. It’s just another term for the same idea.
Here it’s also useful to dissect the definition a bit further. One operative term is “largescale.” Wearing white in the summer does not count, nor does painting roofs or streets white in an attempt to cool cities – though they are all good illustrations of the broader point. Black absorbs heat, white reflects it.8 Even all of us in any one hemisphere wearing black winter coats or white summer shirts at once, however, does not alter the global climate. Aerosols in the stratosphere do. “Budyko’s blanket” – stratospheric aerosols – thus, is the most commonly discussed method, though by far not the only one. (See Part I for more in-depth discussions of different solar geoengineering methods.) More precisely then, I will often refer to stratospheric aerosols as the specific solar geoengineering method.
Sometimes I will also explicitly discuss another set of technologies that are often subsumed under the broader “geoengineering” heading but that are entirely different: a set of techniques typically called carbon removal, carbon dioxide removal (CDR), carbon geoengineering, or direct air capture. All of these technologies remove CO2 from the atmosphere directly. Their big advantage: they address the root cause of climate change – excess atmospheric CO2. Solar geoengineering does not. That makes carbon removal an important part of the world’s collective climate response, especially given where things stand today. Carbon removal also comes with its own set of important caveats. Many are entirely different from concerns about solar geoengineering. The one area where they do clearly overlap is vis-à-vis moral hazard considerations, their interaction with efforts to cut CO2 emissions in the first place (see Chapter 7).
One carbon removal technology is planting trees, in turn sometimes subsumed under a broader umbrella of “natural climate solutions.” That is surely part of the overall solution, but it can indeed only be one part of it. Planting trees might sound more innocuous than building large industrial facilities to take CO2 out of the atmosphere; however, it also comes with significant limitations. One of these is the time and space needed to plant the billions of trees needed to make a dent in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Another is permanence. Trees decay, releasing CO2 in the process. In technical terms, trees help take CO2 out of the atmosphere, but they keep the carbon in the biosphere instead of returning it to the geosphere. Other carbon removal techniques do, in fact, remove CO2 from the biosphere entirely.
Meanwhile, even planting trees has now been used as a delaying tactic to avoid doing what’s necessary. U.S. Republicans under President Donald Trump, for example, have used their “One Trillion Trees” initiative as a way to detract from the need to cut CO2 – moral hazard in action, or perhaps better: moral hazard inaction. None of this, of course, means that we should not be planting more trees. We should. However, we must not use it as an excuse to delay CO2 emissions cuts.
A possible role for carbon removal and solar geoengineering
Most importantly, we must stop burning fossil fuels and putting CO2 into the atmosphere. Nothing else will do. There are indeed other, even more potent, and thus important greenhouse gases. Methane (CH4), for example, might be more important than CO2 for the rate of global warming – something solar geoengineering, too, has a direct role in affecting (see Chapter 2).9 Nitrous oxide (N2O) is similarly more potent than CO2, around 300 times so on a 100-year timescale. And yes, technically water (H2O) is the most important greenhouse gas of them all. However, human CO2 emissions stand alone in their long-term influence on the changing climate.
Cutting CO2, even to zero, will only stop the further increase in climate impacts. It won’t stop them altogether. That immediately leads to another important step: coping with what’s already in store. Not unlike both carbon removal and especially solar geoengineering today, mentioning climate adaptation was once considered taboo among many committed environmentalists, and for similar reasons. “Let’s stop climate change first,” the refrain went in the 1990s, “only then can we start talking about adapting to warming already in store.” Even Vice President Al Gore believed as much at the time, considering adaptation a mere distraction. He has long since publicly changed his mind on the topic.10
Adaptation, of course, can only go so far. For one, there are the usual endemic inequalities. It’s the rich who adapt. The poor suffer. Then there are limits to adaptation. Building a seawall to protect against extreme storm surges is one thing; adapting to one or two meters of sea-level rise by century’s end by moving entire cities to higher land within decades is quite another. Parts of Miami are flooding today, on sunny days.11
Enter carbon removal, taking excess CO2 out of the atmosphere and, ideally, putting it back underground, into the geosphere. Carbon removal, meanwhile, comes with important caveats of its own, not least the same kind of moral hazard that beset earlier adaptation conversations. Equally important, much like cutting CO2 emissions in the first place, removing it from the atmosphere is both slow and, for the most part, relatively expensive.
Solar geoengineering, by contrast, is fast, cheap, and imperfect.12 These three characteristics make solar geoengineering unique among possible climate policy interventions. They also go to the heart of the solar geoengineering gamble. Little is fully known and, thus, certain. Lots depends on details yet to be worked out, and some may never be known for sure. Governance is key. Each of the three core characteristics figures in this assessment.
Fast, cheap, and imperfect
Fast means that solar geoengineering, fully deployed, could help lower global average temperatures within weeks and months – rather than the years and decades that it would take for CO2 reductions. For example, Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption in June 1992 in the Philippines lowered global average temperatures by around 0.5°C within a year. A year later, temperatures were back to normal and have been rising ever since (see Chapter 2).
Cheap is relative, but most estimates put the direct engineering costs for deploying stratospheric aerosols at a scale somewhere in the single-digit billions of dollars per year. Think of several dozen newly designed planes with large fuselages and enormous wingspans flying missions into the stratosphere around the clock.13 That’s not exactly free, but it might as well be. The direct deployment costs are in the single-digit billions of dollars, compared to cutting CO2 emissions or removing carbon ex post, both typically measured in trillions of dollars. It is cheap enough to ensure that the direct costs do not matter meaningfully in a deployment decision made by the world’s governments.
Imperfect is just that: solar geoengineering does not address the root cause of excess CO2 in the atmosphere. It comes with plenty of potential risks. It might be a really bad idea to contemplate, and worse to actually go through with. Equally important, none of that might matter in light of the first two characteristics, all but pushing the world toward deploying solar geoengineering sooner than most of us might deem possible – or desirable – today.
The combination of fast and cheap puts solar geoengineering at the exact opposite end of the spectrum from cutting CO2 emissions in the first place. Whereas cutting CO2 is all about motivating more people, companies, and countries to do more, solar geoengineering governance is largely about stopping premature deployment – doing it too fast, too much, stupidly.
A gamble worth exploring
One does not need to like solar geoengineering to take the idea seriously. I don’t like it. The mere thought of it is scary, as I believe it should be. Somebody somewhere will surely find a way to abuse it. Conceptually, as a foil for ambitious CO2 cuts, people already have. In 2008, at the height of the most significant U.S. federal climate policy push to that date, Newt Gingrich wrote an op-ed saying how solar geoengineering shows that we don’t need to cut CO2 emissions.14 If only.
I remember shaking hands with David Keith on Saturday, December 12, 2015 in my living room in Cambridge, MA, agreeing to work on what would turn into Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program. The day is significant for indeed a much more significant reason. It was the same day that the Paris Climate Agreement was gaveled into place across the Atlantic. The irony of the moment was not lost on either of us.
The Paris Agreement has been widely hailed for breathing new life into sluggish global climate negotiations. Nobody thought it would solve climate change. Nothing can, by itself. But the Agreement clearly did show some momentum in the right direction and, after a four-year hiatus here in the United States, the pendulum is once again swinging hard in the right direction, hopefully without avoiding the swing back. All of that momentum toward more ambitious emissions cuts is clearly good, and nothing should take away from it!
While somewhat ironic then, it is precisely against this backdrop of increased global ambition to cut CO2 emissions in the first place, and a broader understanding of the importance of serious climate action, that solar geoengineering should be discussed.
It must not be either–or. The best approach is a balanced portfolio, where solar geoengineering might have some, at most temporary, role in mitigating the worst effects of climate change, while the world cuts CO2 emissions rapidly – to zero, and then some.15
Such a balanced approach may well be wishful thinking. If history – and not just climate history – is any guide, it almost surely is. Fundamental forces hold the world back from doing enough to cut CO2 emissions. Those same forces push the world to do too much when it comes to solar geoengineering.
Notes
1
See Broecker (1975).
2
See Revelle et al. (1965). This report is often billed as the first ever report to a president on climate change. In fact, John F. Kennedy, too, received a (brief) climate change warning, and so has every president since (Hulac, 2018).
3
Budyko’s proposal first appeared in Russian (Budyko, 1974), subsequently translated into English (Budyko, 1977). See Caldeira and Bala (2017) for a brief history of the idea. Morton (2015) reviews the history in depth.
4
See National Research Council (1992).
5
See Crutzen (2006).
6
See Navarro et al. (2016).
7
See Cicerone (2006).
8
The clothing example is imperfect for another reason. The additional heat absorbed by black outerwear is typically lost before it reaches the skin. See Shkolnik et al.’s (1980) aptly named
Nature
study: “Why do Bedouins wear black robes in hot deserts?”
9
See e.g. Ocko et al. (2017).
10
See
The Economist
(2008).
11
See e.g. Goodell (2017).
12
Keith (2000) first mentions the three core characteristics. Keith, Parson, and Morgan (2010) first mentions the exact phrase: “fast, cheap, and imperfect.” Parson and Ernst (2013) explores its governance implications, Moreno-Cruz, Wagner, and Keith (2018) its formal economic implications, and Mahajan, Tingley, and Wagner (2019) U.S. public opinion of these characteristics.
13
See table 2 in Smith and Wagner (2018). Also see Smith (2020) as well as Lockley, MacMartin, and Hunt (2020).
14
See Gingrich (2008).
15
See Baker and Wagner (2016), and Moreno-Cruz, Wagner, and Keith (2018) for a formal exploration.
Part IIncentives
1Not if, but when
Solar geoengineering turns everything we think we know about climate change and climate policy on its head. For one, there is the link between CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and eventual global average temperatures, which itself is highly uncertain. The technical term for this link between concentrations and temperatures is “climate sensitivity.” A recent, comprehensive review has advanced our thinking there quite a bit and indeed narrowed the band of uncertainties; alas plenty of uncertainties remain.1 More on that topic, much more, in my prior book, Climate Shock, joint with the late, great Marty Weitzman.2
Most importantly for our purposes here, solar geoengineering breaks this link between concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere and global average temperatures. It is the only potential climate policy intervention to do so. It also does so highly imperfectly. Solar geoengineering does not tackle the root cause of climate change directly. It does, however, tackle global average temperatures – quickly and cheaply.3
That, in a nutshell, is why solar geoengineering is not a question of if but when. There are few ifs and buts about it.
From “Free Rider” to “Free Driver”
Economics 101 is clear about the cause of excess CO2 emissions in the atmosphere: the benefits of emitting CO2 are privatized, while the costs of one’s pollution are largely socialized. The solution is self-evident: price CO2 at the difference between the marginal private and social cost. Arthur Pigou suggested as much in 1920, in his case for rabbits overrunning a communal meadow.4 The diagnosis is the same.
The term for this Economics 101 principle: the free-rider effect. It is in nobody’s immediate self-interest to go first and bear the costs of mitigating CO2. That goes for individuals and companies as much as it does for countries. Why commit to something if others won’t?
Economists arguably make too much of a deal out of this one element of the analysis. Political Economics 101 immediately points to vast vested interests as the true hurdle for action. Even if politicians in one country are citing other countries’ lackadaisical climate policies as a reason for their own inaction, it typically comes down to domestic politics. In short, the free-rider effect may be overplayed. It clearly isn’t the full explanation of what is preventing steeper CO2 cuts.5 But it surely is one part of the fuller picture.
Much as the free-rider effect implies too much CO2 pollution, solar geoengineering is governed by the opposite fundamental forces. It’s not about motivating to act, it’s about stopping too much action. Call it the “free-driver” effect. Marty Weitzman and I coined the term in a Foreign Policy essay memorably titled “Playing God.” Weitzman later formalized the idea in a peer-reviewed economic paper.6 We were by far the first to recognize this fundamental property and to consider it important. As is so often the case with game-theoretic ideas, the first mention goes back to Nobel laureate Tom Schelling.7 Whatever its name, the fact that solar geoengineering is such a potentially powerful tool relative to its costs makes it a force to be reckoned with.
“Free” is relative
“Free,” of course, is a slight exaggeration. Deploying solar geoengineering does come with costs. There are potentially large risks, unknowns, and unknowables.8
There are also costs for monitoring and guiding any deliberate, largescale solar geoengineering deployment program. The cost in both money and time is potentially large. That, too, is important – and ought to be a crucial part of any sensible solar geoengineering deployment scenario. Chapter 4 will attempt to paint such a scenario.
Here, I’m simply referring to raw deployment costs – the narrow engineering costs of actually doing the solar geoengineering. Those costs are what the free-driver effect captures, and they are indeed cheap – too cheap. But solar geoengineering is not free.
In fact, some of the best estimates put the costs of stratospheric aerosols in the single-digit billions of dollars per year during the early stages of deployment. That’s not nothing. It isn’t tens, or hundreds, of billions of dollars per year either. In short, done “efficiently,” deploying solar geoengineering at scale is within the purview of dozens of countries. The military budgets alone of around 35 countries are at least $5 billion, and 24 have budgets greater than $10 billion.9 Those estimates entail designing an entirely new plane capable of flying missions – sorties, in aerospace speak – to at least around 20 kilometers up and somewhere within plus or minus 30° latitude around the equator. The origin behind this number is instructive by itself.
Common lore has always been that stratospheric aerosols would be cheap, and that deploying them could be done easily. In fact, word in the (small) solar geoengineering research community was that it could be as simple as modifying a dozen or so existing jets. High-flying business jets could do the trick, invoking images of the crazed billionaire business owner taking the seats out of his Gulfstream – and voila.
The origin of this belief is a bit murky, but among the first to explore the topic in earnest was a study conducted by Aurora Flight Sciences, funded by David Keith with money from the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER), which, in turn, had been provided by Bill Gates. (More on all this later, in Chapter 3.) The resulting report presented calculations for a New High Altitude Aircraft and also concluded that it might be as easy as modifying existing aircraft.10
