Environment

Engineering the Climate: Who Gets to Decide?

Audio: Play | Download

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3
With countries largely stalemated over cuts in greenhouse gas pollution, many are looking to massive technological interventions to help cool the planet. But as The World’s Alex Gallafent reports, that raises a huge ethical question: Who gets to decide whether and when to use these?

The World’s Science Forum

What’s your take on geoengineering? Should we try a technological fix to climate change? Bring your thoughts and questions to one of the people in this story – Scott Barrett of Columbia University. Join the discussion!

Web resources:
The Royal Society–Geoengineering the climate: science, governance and uncertainty
Eli Kintisch’s book on geoengineering, Hack the Planet
Flash-based Hack the Planet Safety cards.
Background on geoengineering in Scientific American
Asilomar conference on geoengineering.
March Geoengineering Confab Draws Praise, Criticism

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  An environmental problem of a whole different order has got scientists and policy makers around the world contemplating drastic measures.  They fear that governments aren’t doing enough to cut the pollution that’s contributing to climate change.  So they’re considering something they call geo-engineering.  They’re exploring technologies that could cool the planet and avoid the catastrophes that a warmer earth might suffer.  But the possibility of massive climate interventions is raising big ethical and geo-political concerns.  Here’s The World’s Alex Gallafent.

ALEX GALLEFENT:  It sounds like an evil plot; deliberately changing the global climate.  And at first glance, you’d think geo-engineering would be the domain of evil cranks and megalomaniacs.  But Eli Kintisch actually met a few would-be geo-engineers while writing his book “Hack the Planet”.

ELI KINTISCH:  And unfortunately they were clear thinking, responsible, highly cited scientists; some of the giants in the field.  And that’s really scary.

GALLAFENT: Then again, many considered these scary times.  We’re already conducting a massive unintentional geo-engineering experiment by injecting millions of tons of heat-trapping pollution into the atmosphere.

DIANNE DUMANOWSKI:  We’d departed on a trip to some unknown future.

GALLAFENT: Journalist Dianne Dumanowski wrote about climate change and geo-engineering in her book, “The End of the Long Summer”.  She doesn’t see any easy way back from the climate crisis humanity has created for itself.

DUMANOWSKI: A lot of scientists think that we’ve entered the time of desperate measures, which is why geo-engineering has basically come out of the closet.

GALLAFENT: Indeed, geo-engineering was recently the subject of a report published by perhaps the most august science academy in the world, Britain’s Royal Society.  Climate scientist John Shepherd led the study.  He says the geo-engineering closet holds two main choices.

JOHN SHEPHERD:  One which attempts to cool the planet slightly by reflecting a small percentage of sunlight back into space.

GALLAFENT: That could mean building arrays of mirrors in space or injecting reflective particles into the stratosphere.

SHEPHERD:  And the others which approach from the other end and try and actually remove the greenhouse gases that are causing the problem.

GALLAFENT: Think massive forests of artificial trees, rocks that suck up CO2, or devices that scrub the air.

SCOTT BARRETT:  This is the world we’re moving towards, where we can make choices about the planet, about the most large scale and fundamentally important things that you can imagine.

GALLAFENT: That’s Scott Barrett of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.  He’s an economist, so he thinks about action on climate change in terms of incentives.  Barrett says one of the reasons it’s been so hard for countries to reduce their climate pollution so far is that the incentives are all wrong.

BARRETT: When one country reduces emissions, all countries benefit.  The country that pays the cost gets a tiny fraction of the benefit.

GALLAFENT: But the incentives to use geo-engineering might be different.

BARRETT: This can be done by a single country on its own.

GALLAFENT: Let’s say temperatures are going up in one discrete part of the world, India for example.  And agriculture there is suffering.  And now let’s say there’s a geo-engineering technique that might bring temperatures down again.

BARRETT: Then the pressure on the government of India to act would be, I think, very powerful.

GALLAFENT: But a positive for one country, India in this case, might well be a negative for another.  You make it rain here, you might cause drought there.  You cool it down in one place, you might heat it up in another.  So India’s action might not be okay with other countries and that kind of disagreement could lead to a geo-engineering arms race.

BARRETT: They might be able to take measures to counteract the geo-engineering that India might contemplate, for example.  Or they might even contemplate military action.

GALLAFENT: That’s why Scott Barrett invokes the idea of mutual restraint when talking about geo-engineering, much like arms negotiators talk about mutual restraint in the use of nuclear weapons.

BARRETT: You actually want countries not to do something they’re inclined to want to do.  So a big part of the problem is not at all technical, it is institutional.  How can we control ourselves?

GALLAFENT: Right now there are no international institutions or rules specifically tailored to geo-engineering.  But even if the world does agree to use geo-engineering only when it’s in the interest of many countries, that still wouldn’t solve the dilemma.  Who gets to decide whether to use it at all?

BARRETT: Who gets to not only decide whether to use it, but what the temperature ought to be.  The global mean temperature.  Who gets to decide that?

GALLAFENT: Global institutions tend to move pretty slowly.  So for the moment scientists are setting their own rules and along with some governments and even for-profit companies, they’re now talking about testing various technologies.  And that’s the immediate challenge; what limits should there be on even tests of geo-engineering techniques?  After all, we won’t know if they work unless we test them.  But we also can’t be certain what the results will look like.

DUMANOWSKI: It’s a game of poker.

GALLAFENT: That’s why author Dianne Dumanowski cautions against expecting geo-engineering to fix things.

DUMANOWSKI: Because we don’t know if it’s going to really be a card that we can play.  We better hope that we’ve got a lot of different cards to play, because we’re going to need to play them all.

GALLAFENT: Most of the world has so far avoided playing the highest value card; reducing greenhouse emissions.  At last winter’s Climate Summit in Copenhagen many countries pledged to do that and to help other countries do the same.  But there were no firm commitments, no new cards were actually played.  Now, look into the future, and assume one of those other countries has the ability to geo-engineer the climate.  That would be a powerful bargaining chip.  And Copenhagen-style negotiations would suddenly look a whole lot more interesting.  For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.

WERMAN: So, what’s your take on geo-engineering?  Should we try a technological fix to climate change?  You can find out more about the possible techniques and you can join a conversation with one of the people you just heard in Alex’s story, Scott Barrett of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.  He’s our guest in this week’s World Science Forum.  Just click on the world dot org slash science.  The conversation is live now.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.