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Climate cooperation with risky solar geoengineering

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Abstract

Given the lack of progress on climate change mitigation, some scientists have proposed solar geoengineering as a means to manage climate change at least temporarily. One main concern with such a risky technological solution, however, is that it may create a “moral hazard” problem by crowding out efforts to reduce emissions. We investigate the potential for a risky technological solution to crowd out mitigation with theory and experiments. In a collective-risk social dilemma, players strategically act to cooperate when there is an opportunity to deploy a risky technology to help protect themselves from impending damages. In contrast to the moral hazard conjecture, the empirical results suggest that the threat of solar geoengineering can lead to an increase in cooperative behavior.

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Data availability

Data and code are available via the Supplementary information.

Notes

  1. The environmental risks associated with solar geoengineering include the potential for harmful effects to the ozone layer (Keith et al. 2016), greater ocean acidification (Williamson and Turley 2012), changes in global precipitation patterns (Irvine et al. 2019), and the long-term oscillations of natural climate systems (Gabriel and Robock 2015). See also the recent report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM, 2021).

  2. In a recent article, David Keith (2021) summarizes the issue: “Perhaps the central concern about solar geoengineering is that deployment, or even the credible possibility of deployment, will slow emissions cuts. This concern—moral hazard, or mitigation inhibition—arises from political links between decisions about solar geoengineering and emissions cuts in the face of climate risks, […].” Lin (2013) is among the first papers that examine whether geoengineering presents a moral hazard and how to ameliorate this moral hazard.

  3. We follow the literature and use the term “cooperation” to denote cooperative behavior that contributes (i.e., mitigation) to solving the collective action problem (i.e., climate change). Cooperative behavior may result from different motives, such as spite, self-interest, and altruism.

  4. Note that another concern of geoengineering skeptics is that the risk of this technology is unevenly divided and falls mainly on poorer countries (Biermann et al. 2022). The focus of the current paper is on the impact of risk in general, so we assume homogeneity in downside risk. Related research (Cherry et al. 2022) considers that some countries are more (negatively) impacted by the deployment of solar geoengineering than others.

  5. All supplemental information (SI), including theoretical model and predictions, additional analysis, data and code, and experimental instructions, is available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/ve9kw/?view_only=3862b1e218a346939d9dc30cfbf73bfb.

  6. Potential losses decline proportionally as contributions approach the threshold, which corresponds to more mitigation leading to reduced potential damage from climate change.

  7. This reflects the often-cited concern by geoengineering skeptics that “[g]iven the anticipated low monetary costs of some of these technologies, such as stratospheric aerosols injection, a few countries could engage in solar geoengineering unilaterally or in small coalitions even when other countries oppose such deployment” (Biermann 2022).

  8. In our model and experiments, solar geoengineering is a binary choice and is either universally good or universally bad depending on the outcome from deploying the technology. This approach differs from other models and experiments that specify a distribution of “preferred” levels of solar geoengineering and continuous choices (e.g., Weitzman 2015; Abatayo et al. 2020; Cherry et al. 2022). Our simplified approach allows us to focus on the impact of potentially costly side effects on mitigation decisions. We vary risk by varying the probability of a bad outcome while holding the severity constant. Future research should consider varying the size of losses while holding the probability constant, as well as interacting probability and severity.

  9. Previous experimental studies consider homogeneous endowments while introducing heterogeneity in the desired levels of solar geoengineering without costly side effects (Cherry et al.,2022; Abatayo et al. 2020).

  10. Given the ongoing debate about the potentially high risk of deploying solar geoengineering technologies (e.g., Biermann et al. 2022), we parameterized the experiment to investigate both extremes (\(\pi =0.1\) and \(\pi =0.9\)), a central value (\(\pi =0.5\)), and we explored one additional relatively high-risk option (\(\pi =0.3\)).

  11. At the end of the experiment, we measured the level of risk aversion, using the Eckel and Grossman (2008) elicitation exercise (see Dave et al. 2010).

  12. Outcomes from the random draw were not announced until the end of the session because studies show the realization of a random outcome, good or bad, in one round may have an impact on behavior in following rounds, even though round-specific payoffs are independent (e.g., Kroll and Shafran 2018).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Mark Borsuk, Tyler Felgenhauer, Khara Grieger, Alex James, Jennifer Kuzma, Juan Moreno-Cruz, Billy Pizer, and Jonathan Wiener for valuable comments.

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2033855.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA

    Todd L. Cherry

  2. CICERO - Center for International Climate Research, Oslo, Norway

    Todd L. Cherry

  3. Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Stephan Kroll

  4. Department of Economics, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, USA

    David M. McEvoy

Authors
  1. Todd L. Cherry
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  2. Stephan Kroll
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  3. David M. McEvoy
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All authors contributed to the conception and design, data analysis, and writing first, subsequent, and final drafts. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Todd L. Cherry.

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Cherry, T.L., Kroll, S. & McEvoy, D.M. Climate cooperation with risky solar geoengineering. Climatic Change 176, 138 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03612-2

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