Can Science Fix Climate Change by Mike Hulme

Author:Mike Hulme
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Given the deficiencies of the UNFCCC, it is difficult to envisage geopolitical circumstances in which conditions would be propitious for reaching agreement on these matters. The proponents of the idea of Earth system governance or of a world environmental organisation do not have empirical evidence on their side.

If governance of stratospheric aerosol injection technology is unattainable through the United Nations, then two options remain: a consortium-based regime; or unilateral implementation. The former runs along the same lines as the idealised outcome of the global thermostat game conducted by the scientists at Carnegie Mellon University that I looked at in the last chapter. These scientists concluded that a suitable governance regime might be induced simply by agreeing that anyone who wants to participate in a coalition of nations designed to operate the thermostat can do so. They suggested that this would ensure that ‘the global thermostat is not controlled by a few at the expense of others’. Political scientists are much more sceptical. Informal consortiums of nations such as this one would be too unstable to provide effective governance of a technology that, by definition, would extend over decades.

This leaves open only the third option – unilateral action by a single nation. Action of this kind might be undertaken by a ‘rogue state’ – such as North Korea – operating under a megalomaniac delusion of grandeur. Or perhaps it would be performed by a powerful nation that sought to further its own interests and framed the necessity for deployment in terms of national security; in this case stratospheric engineering would be implemented on account of a perceived national climate emergency rather than on account of an agreed global one. But unilateral implementation of stratospheric aerosol injection offers no satisfactory means for its governance. On the contrary, it simply recognises that certain political entities may act on their own, being motivated by self-interest – or possibly self-interest combined with a measure of altruism, if the state involved genuinely believed that the global benefits exceeded the risks.

So we are left with a set of undesirable governance scenarios, one of which is illustrated in the imaginary world around the years 2032 and 2033 (see Box 3.3). My argument remains that, given the likelihood of the slippery slope – one thing leads to another – those who promote research into stratospheric aerosol technology have a dual responsibility. It is not just principles for the global governance of research that are needed, but also a clear and plausible strategy for how the technology would be governed before and after deployment. Such a strategy would need to identify the ‘best possible’ – or at least the ‘best imaginable’ – governance regime for stratospheric aerosol injection. And if this best imaginable regime is not good enough to secure the assent of all interested parties (who these parties are I examine below), then the socio-technical imaginary of the thermostat should be dispensed with. Science will not be able to ‘fix’ climate change this way.

Box 3.3 A Scenario

It is February 2032.

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