Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Contesting the climate

Security implications of geoengineering

  • Published:
Climatic Change Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Scientists predict higher global temperatures over this century. While this may benefit some countries, most will face varying degrees of damage. This has motivated research on solar geoengineering, a technology that allows countries to unilaterally and temporarily lower global temperatures. To better understand the security implications of this technology, we develop a simple theory that incorporates solar geoengineering, countergeoengineering to reverse its effects, and the use of military force to prevent others from modifying temperatures. We find that when countries’ temperature preferences diverge, applications of geoengineering and countergeoengineering can be highly wasteful due to deployment in opposite directions. Under certain conditions, countries may prefer military interventions over peaceful ones. Cooperation that avoids costs or waste of resources can emerge in repeated settings, but difficulties in monitoring or attributing interventions make such arrangements less attractive.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Solar geoengineering actually encompasses a class of technologies, including stratospheric aerosol scattering, seeking to break links between GHG concentrations and temperatures (Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program 2020). In keeping with related social science research, we refer to stratospheric aerosol scattering using the metonym “solar geoengineering” in the remainder of the paper.

  2. We do not discuss normative issues about the deployment of solar geoengineering or countergeoengineering or about the use of conflict to restrict deployment. See Parker (2014) for ongoing ethical debates on the topic.

  3. In the remainder of the paper, we will use deployment as a general term for geoengineering or countergeoengineering applications.

  4. What differentiates geoengineering is that superior military or economic power is not required for deployment. Unilateral application by one of the many actors can have global or regional implications. As we discuss later in the paper, monitoring deployment is also likely to pose additional challenges.

  5. See Vaughan and Lenton (2011) for a review of different proposed methods of deployment.

  6. See Online Supplementary Materials for further description of the properties and their implications.

  7. Further discussion about the relationship between the technology’s properties and challenges in governing it can be found in Online Supplementary Materials. For a more extensive review, see Reynolds (2019).

  8. The “Inquisitive Effect” encourages high deployment levels to distinguish the effects of solar geoengineering from stochastic noise, while “Flexibility Effect” encourages low deployment that can be scaled up if solar geoengineering is effective and produces few side effects.

  9. In decreasing the marginal cost of emissions, solar geoengineering also decreases the credibility of future carbon taxes, prompting firms to under-invest in clean energy technology.

  10. Urpelainen (2012) builds on Millard-Ball (2012)—which considers non-strategic countries making a binary decision about whether to engage in a mitigation treaty—to a pair of strategic countries choosing how much to geoengineer and mitigate.

  11. Both Moreno-Cruz (2010) and Weitzman (2015) refer to countergeoengineering in passing, but neither considers how countergeoengineering would alter countries’ strategic decision-making with respect to solar geoengineering.

  12. These parameters make the model amenable to incorporating differences in actors’ marginal costs and benefits and marginal rates of substitution.

  13. For presentational purposes, we assume that implementation of geoengineering and countergeoengineering are symmetrical, both in terms of deployment costs and overall side effects. Allowing for differential costs and effects (through ki and si) for each technology would not change the substantive conclusions as long as the remaining functional form assumptions are maintained.

  14. The proofs of the propositions are given in the Online Supplementary Materials.

  15. For instance, when \(\tau _A = \tau _B =\bar {\tau } > 0\), and \(k_A = k_B = \bar {k}\), both countries deploy \(g_i = \frac {\bar {\tau }}{k+2}\), resulting in a net temperature that is less than \(\bar {\tau }\).

  16. The choice of conflict to obtain unilateral control over deployment could be interpreted more broadly to include targeted strikes on deployment facilities, the imposition of sanctions on equipment needed to geoengineer, and information campaigns to mobilize domestic opposition to the deployment.

  17. Modeling conflict in this manner as a costly lottery is standard in the international relations literature on bargaining and war. In line with this work, expected outcomes are a function of countries’ balance of power and resolve, which are reflected in their probability of winning and costs of conflict. For examples, see Fearon (1995) and Bas and Coe (2012).

  18. We model conflict only as it pertains to the issue of controlling the climate, so its winner only obtains unilateral control over deployment, nothing else. While we assume that the winner permanently prevents interventions by the opponent, our results extend to temporary controls. Finally, for simplicity of exposition, we do not model crisis bargaining, which can be captured by various cooperative equilibria we analyze in the next section.

  19. One may also argue that states would always seek to resolve Pareto-inferior deployments using peaceful alternatives to conflict, such as imposing economic sanctions or maintaining armament levels for deterrence. While such alternatives may seem less costly than conflict over comparable time-frames, research in international relations suggests that their costs may accumulate when they need to be adopted for long periods of time to maintain peace. See Coe (2019) for an analysis comparing the costs of containment and war prior to the Iraq War in 2003.

  20. According to MacMartin et al. (2019), currently available technology limits the temperature effects of feasible deployment, making them indistinguishable from natural temperature fluctuations in the short run. Temperature changes attributable to deployment may thus require a window of multiple years before they are confidently detected. In our model, this would correspond to a situation with high levels of noise in temperatures, meaning that the variance of \(T \sim F(t | g_A, g_B)\) is high.

  21. In this section, we only consider equilibria in which states condition their behavior on temperatures from the previous period when there is no direct evidence of deployment. That being said, more complicated equilibria in which states make longer term observations of temperature trends over time to dynamically assess past defections from cooperation can also exist.

  22. Such conditional strategies based on simple cutpoints can trivially be a part of an equilibrium as the punishment itself is an equilibrium of the game.

References

  • Acemoglu D, Rafey W (2018) Mirage on the horizon: geoengineering and carbon taxation without commitment, Working Paper

  • Ahlvik L, Iho A (2018) Optimal geoengineering experiments. Journal of Environmental and Economic Management 92:148–168

    Google Scholar 

  • Barrett S (2014) Solar geoengineering’s brave new world: thoughts on the governance of an unprecedented technology. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 8(2):249–269

    Google Scholar 

  • Bas MA, Coe AJ (2012) Arms diffusion and war. Journal of Conflict Resolution 56(4):651–674

    Google Scholar 

  • Bas MA, Coe AJ (2016) A dynamic theory of nuclear proliferation and preventive war. International Organization 70(4):655–685

    Google Scholar 

  • Bollfrass A, Shaver A (2015) The effects of temperature on political violence: global evidence at the subnational level. PLOS One 10(5):e0123505

    Google Scholar 

  • Broecker WS (1985) How to build a habitable planet. Eldigio Press New York

  • Buhaug H, Nordkvelle J, Bernauer T, Böhmelt T, Brzoska M, Busby JW, Ciccone A, Fjelde H, Gartzke E, Gleditsch NP, et al. (2014) One effect to rule them all? a comment on climate and conflict. Climatic Change 127 (3-4):391–397

    Google Scholar 

  • Burke M, Hsiang SM, Miguel E (2015a) Climate and conflict. Annual Review of Economics 7(1):577–617

  • Burke M, Hsiang SM, Miguel E (2015b) Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production. Nature 527(7577):235–239

  • Caldeira K, Bala G, Cao L (2013) The science of geoengineering. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 41:231–256

    Google Scholar 

  • Coe AJ (2019) Costly peace: A new rationalist explanation for war, Working paper available at https://eafdab1c-1639-49a6-b387-40b17853bd79.filesusr.com/ugd/c8f493_50287f9e40c843b7abcd24388f9f0c6a.pdf

  • Crutzen PJ (2006) Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulfur injections: a contribution to resolve a policy dilemma? Climatic Change 77(3):211–220

    Google Scholar 

  • Ding D, Maibach EW, Zhao X, Roser-Renouf C, Leiserowitz A (2011) Support for climate policy and societal action are linked to perceptions about scientific agreement. Nat Climatic Change 1(9):462

    Google Scholar 

  • Egan PJ, Mullin M (2016) Recent improvement and projected worsening of weather in the United States. Nature 532(7599):357–360

    Google Scholar 

  • Fearon JD (1995) Rationalist explanations for war. Int Organ 49 (3):379–414

    Google Scholar 

  • Gautier DL, Bird KJ, Charpentier RR, Grantz A, Houseknecht DW, Klett TR, Moore TE, Pitman JK, Schenk CJ, Schuenemeyer JH, et al. (2009) Assessment of undiscovered oil and gas in the Arctic. Science 324 (5931):1175–1179

    Google Scholar 

  • Gertner J (2017) Is it O.K. to tinker with the environment to fight climate change? The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/magazine/is-it-ok-to-engineer-the-environment-to-fight-climate-change.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/magazine/is-it-ok-to-engineer-the-environment-to-fight-climate-change.html

  • Harding A, Moreno-Cruz JB (2016) Solar geoengineering economics: from incredible to inevitable and half-way back. Earth’s Future 4(12):569–577

    Google Scholar 

  • Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program (2020) Geoengineering. https://geoengineering.environment.harvard.edu/geoengineering

  • Heyen D, Horton J, Moreno-Cruz J (2019) Strategic implications of counter-geoengineering: clash or cooperation? Journal of Environmental and Economic Management 95:153–177

    Google Scholar 

  • Hornsey MJ, Harris EA, Bain PG, Fielding KS (2016) Meta-analyses of the determinants and outcomes of belief in climate change. Nat Climatic Change 6(6):622

    Google Scholar 

  • Hsiang S, Kopp R, Jina A, Rising J, Delgado M, Mohan S, Rasmussen D, Muir-Wood R, Wilson P, Oppenheimer M, et al. (2017) Estimating economic damage from climate change in the united states. Science 356 (6345):1362–1369

    Google Scholar 

  • Keith DW (2000) Geoengineering the climate: history and prospects. Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 25(1):245–284

    Google Scholar 

  • Keith DW, Weisenstein DK, Dykema JA, Keutsch FN (2016) Stratospheric solar geoengineering without ozone loss. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(52):14910–14914

    Google Scholar 

  • Lloyd ID, Oppenheimer M (2014) On the design of an international governance framework for geoengineering. Global Environmental Politics 14(2):45–63

    Google Scholar 

  • MacMartin DG, Irvine PJ, Kravitz B, Horton JB (2019) Technical characteristics of a solar geoengineering deployment and implications for governance. Climate Policy 19(10):1325–1339

    Google Scholar 

  • Mahajan A, Tingley D, Wagner G (2019) Fast, cheap, and imperfect? us public opinion about solar geoengineering. Environmental Politics 28(3):523–543

    Google Scholar 

  • Manoussi V, Xepapadeas A (2017) Cooperation and competition in climate change policies: mitigation and climate engineering when countries are asymmetric. Environmental and Resource Economics 66(4):605–627

    Google Scholar 

  • McClellan J, Sisco J, Suarez B, Keogh G (2010) Geoengineering cost analysis, final report Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  • Meirowitz A, Morelli M, Ramsay KW, Squintani F (2019) Dispute resolution institutions and strategic militarization. Journal of Political Economy 127 (1):378–418

    Google Scholar 

  • Millard-Ball A (2012) The Tuvalu syndrome. Climatic Change 110 (3):1047–1066

    Google Scholar 

  • Morelli M (2009) Institutional design and conflict: an introduction. Rev Econ Des 13(3):167

    Google Scholar 

  • Moreno-Cruz JB (2010) Essays on the economics of geoengineering, PhD Dissertation

  • Moreno-Cruz JB (2015) Mitigation and the geoengineering threat. Resource Energy Economics 41:248–263

    Google Scholar 

  • National Research Council (2015) Climate intervention: reflecting sunlight to cool Earth. National Academies Press

  • Parker A (2014) Governing solar geoengineering research as it leaves the laboratory. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 372(2031):20140173

    Google Scholar 

  • Parker A, Keith DW (2015) What’s the right temperature for the earth. Washington Post

  • Parker A, Horton JB, Keith DW (2018) Stopping solar geoengineering through technical means: a preliminary assessment of counter-geoengineering. Earth’s Future https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2018EF000864

  • Powell R (1999) In the shadow of power: states and strategies in international politics. Princeton University Press

  • Powell R (2002) Bargaining theory and international conflict. Annual Review of Political Science 5(1):1–30

    Google Scholar 

  • Reynolds JL (2019) Solar geoengineering to reduce climate change: a review of governance proposals. Proceedings of the Royal Society A 475 (2229):20190255

    Google Scholar 

  • Ricke KL, Moreno-Cruz JB, Caldeira K (2013) Strategic incentives for climate geoengineering coalitions to exclude broad participation. Environmental Research Letters 8(1):014021

    Google Scholar 

  • Robock A (2012) Will geoengineering with solar radiation management ever be used? Ethics. Policy and Environment 15(2):202–205

    Google Scholar 

  • Schelling TC (1983) Climatic change: implications for welfare and policy, National Research Council, Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee. In: Changing climate: Report of the carbon dioxide assessment committee, National Academies, pp 449–497

  • Schelling TC (1996) The economic diplomacy of geoengineering. Climatic Change 33(3):303–307

    Google Scholar 

  • Shepherd JG (2009) Geoengineering the climate: science, governance and uncertainty. The Royal Society

  • Svoboda T, Irvine P (2014) Ethical and technical challenges in compensating for harm due to solar radiation management geoengineering. Ethics, Policy and Environment 17(2):157–174

    Google Scholar 

  • Teller E, Wood L, Hyde R (1997) Global warming and ice ages: prospects for physics based modulation of global change. Tech rep. Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA United States

    Google Scholar 

  • Tol RS (2018) The economic impacts of climate change. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 12(1):4–25

    Google Scholar 

  • Urpelainen J (2012) Geoengineering and global warming: a strategic perspective. International Environmental agreements: Politics. Law and Economics 12 (4):375–389

    Google Scholar 

  • Vaughan NE, Lenton TM (2011) A review of climate geoengineering proposals. Climatic Change 109(3-4):745–790

    Google Scholar 

  • Victor DG, Morgan MG, Apt J, Steinbruner J, Ricke K (2009) The geoengineering option: a last resort against global warming? Foreign Affairs 88:64–76

    Google Scholar 

  • Waltz K (1959) Man, the state and war: a theoretical analysis. Columbia University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Weitzman ML (2015) A voting architecture for the governance of free-driving externalities with application to geoengineering. The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 117(4):1049–1068

    Google Scholar 

  • Williamson P, Turley C (2012) Ocean acidification in a geoengineering context. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 370(1974):4317–4342

    Google Scholar 

  • Yumashev D, van Hussen K, Gille J, Whiteman G (2017) Towards a balanced view of Arctic shipping: estimating economic impacts of emissions from increased traffic on the Northern Sea Route. Climatic Change, vol 143

Download references

Acknowledgments

We thank the Weatherhead Initiative on Climate Engineering and the Solar Geoengineering Research Program of Harvard University for support. We also thank Elena McLean, Torben Mideksa, Dustin Tingley, and Gernot Wagner and the participants in Harvard University’s Political Economy workshop for comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Associate Professor of Political Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, PO Box 129188, Abu Dhabi, UAE

    Muhammet A. Bas

  2. Dept. of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Aseem Mahajan

Authors
  1. Muhammet A. Bas
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Aseem Mahajan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

Both authors contributed equally to the writing of this manuscript and associated analysis. Authors’ names are listed in alphabetical order.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aseem Mahajan.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interests

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

(PDF 156 KB)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Bas, M.A., Mahajan, A. Contesting the climate. Climatic Change 162, 1985–2002 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02758-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02758-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation