Moral hazard of geoengineering is not to consider it

Today I enjoyed listening to a presentation on geoengineering at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. Steven Smith, a scientist at the Joint Global Change Research, briefed a classroom filled with students and faculty on the subject.

Geoengineering encompasses engineered solutions to manipulate the radiation balance of the Earth, in order to keep the planet from warming too much. These measures include wild things like putting mirrors in orbit to reflect sunlight back into space, fabricating artificial trees that suck up CO2 from the atmosphere and spraying particles into the atmosphere to create clouds that increase reflection of sun rays.

Geoengineering scares many people. Not knowing what to do with it, a de facto taboo has kept the options off the table. Environmentalists feared that geoengineering would be regarded as a ‘quick fix’ to the climate problem and cause politicians to get lax on mitigation (i.e., reducing greenhouse gas emissions). Smith called this the “moral hazard” and suggested we make geoengineering subject to the condition that we get serious on mitigation first.

I wonder if that is at all necessary and a mistake.

It’s understandable that people have concerns about science fiction style measures like fertilizing the ocean to increase CO2 uptake by algae or putting mirrors in space, but geoengineering includes using olivine to sequester CO2 in rock and painting roofs white, too, which hardly anyone would object to. Should they all be grouped together?

In the Q&A after the talk, the notion emerged that ‘geoengineering’ is not a clear category of measures. In fact it’s a mixed bag of techniques, which employ different principles, are in different stages of maturity and have different risks and effectiveness. At this point, the options are neither ‘quick’ nor do they ‘fix’ anything really. What many of the geoengineering options have in common is that they don’t address the root cause of the problem they’re addressing: greenhouse gas emissions. As long as the CO2 faucet stays open, geoengineering measures will need to be applied indefinitely and at increasing scales. 

That’s true, but not a reason to disregard them. With atmospheric CO2 concentrations at over 390 ppm and rising, and with certain climate change already in the pipeline, it seems to me that the moral hazard here is to neglect any options that could alleviate the problem. The fact that without reduction of emissions geoengineering measures will cost us increasing money, forever, should automatically lead economists and politicians to at some point conclude that geoengineering makes little sense without mitigation.

Geoengineering options should not be judged by their label, but deserve to be evaluated individually on their risks and benefits like all other options. To regard them as potential additions to our toolbox is to be preferred over dismissing them from the get-go. Some may never work out, but maybe there are some that can become lifesavers when emission reductions are too little too late.