Abstract
This Chapter is future focussed and therefore more speculative. It looks in particular at three dimensions expected to be relevant in shaping whether solar geoengineering (SGE) is embraced and deployed, or spurned and discarded. These are: the relevance of actual changes in climate and weather; the extent to which elites see SGE as essential to stabilising the dominant geo-political and socioeconomic order; and the degree to which SGE’s proponents are able to replace the predominantly dystopian vision which currently accompanies it. In relation to the last of these, the Chapter explores how paradigms of ‘development’ and the Anthropocene have begun to be mobilised by SGE’s advocates in the reframing of SGE as a positive project of modernity.
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- 1.
Experimental, relatively limited deployment of SGE, as recommended by SGE’s chief proponents, has to date failed to win ‘official’ endorsement (NRC 2015)—although this has not stopped preparations for such experiments from proceeding.
- 2.
Of course, the ideational does not exist as ‘pure idea’ or free-floating concept and cannot be understood only in the abstract. Rather, the ideational and the material are intertwined, as the term ‘sociotechnical’ implies.
- 3.
Some scientific studies have attempted to model how SGE might be used to re-freeze the Arctic and expand the extent of sea-ice (Jackson et al. 2015). But at the same time there are powerful interests in favour of using declining sea-ice cover to open cheaper shipping routes and conduct oil drilling.
- 4.
I am arguing that SGE is ‘inimical’ rather than ‘incompatible’ with broad consent for its deployment. As this book was going to press, in a critique of the democratic incompatibility argument, Horton et al. (2018) argue that SGE could be governed in either a democratic or authoritarian manner and that there is nothing in the technology that precludes democratic governance. Proponents of the argument that SGE is incompatible with democracy are charged with technological determinism, and of relying on a particular (deliberative) notion of what democracy is. It is suggested these proponents have a naïve and utopian view of what constitutes democracy, and that democracy does not preclude centralised control, nor does it mean citizens can opt out of decisions once made. My own argument does not rely on a naïve or deliberative view of what democracy is. Nor do I accept that the inability of individual citizens to opt-out of democratic decisions can be extended to the international sphere: indeed, in the multilateral sphere opt-out remains the norm (the US opting-out of the UNFCCC is a case in point). Further, whilst the theoretical point about technological determinism is taken, it may be that SGE has some inherent features which make it an exceptional case—flowing from the time horizons, the difficulty of termination, and the non-containable weather effects which determinedly flow from it.
Horton et al. also assert that existing global politics and its institutions, norms and expectations are “more or less democratic” (2018: 10). This is a view many from the global South would find hard to agree with, even if the observation is only confined to inter-state relations, since it ignores the substantial power imbalances in the international domain.
The future is inevitably speculative. It may, in theory, be the case that SGE will be deployed and governed multilaterally in a sufficiently consensual way to be accepted as legitimate and democratic. But it is hard to see much evidence for this becoming the case. Indeed, the United States today is not only the major locus for SGE work and the likely driver of any deployment. It also currently displays a willingness to disrupt any semblance of rules-based ‘more or less democratic’ order and predictability, in relation to climate change and much else, which is deemed to be against its interests. With all the caveats that should accompany prediction and notwithstanding the arguments made by Horton et al., it seems most likely that SGE will either be imposed on the world by a few or it will not happen at all.
- 5.
SGE’s opponents would, of course, need to challenge each of these strategies and develop a counter-narrative, which already exists in bare-bones form in the ‘Un-Natural’ imaginary.
- 6.
- 7.
How might one calculate the increased plant production associated with more carbon dioxide and the decreased production associated with less rain? How might human societies adapt: perhaps different crops would be grown or agricultural techniques adapted? At the most fundamental level it is notoriously unreliable to read social effects off environmental changes.
- 8.
Not surprisingly, given their Red Cross/Crescent affiliations, they use medical metaphors to ponder how to obtain the “informed consent” of seven billion subjects “before they participate in clinical trials of a geoengineering intervention?” (Suarez et al. 2010: 3–4).
- 9.
Suarez and Van Aalst have since argued the need to engage with SGE to ensure “humanitarian considerations are integrated into policy decisions” (2017: 183). They note that “global power dynamics are not set up to ensure that the interests of the most vulnerable are elicited, considered, and addressed” (2017: 193). They appear to favour prior agreement, since there will be many vulnerable ‘losers’, on appropriate loss and damage compensation ahead of any deployment. The authors, and indeed anyone familiar with the Loss and Damage talks which accompany ongoing UNFCCC negotiations, will surely know this is a highly optimistic expectation.
- 10.
Development can be understood as a product of the dominant political-economic order in the post-colonial era (Pahuja 2011; Escobar 1995). Rist defines development as “a set of practices requiring the transformation and destruction of the natural environment and of social relations with the aim of increasing the production of commodities, goods and services” (1997: 13). There is an extensive literature challenging as simplistic the notion that the pursuit of economic growth is the key mechanism through which improvements in living conditions and well-being can be achieved (Easterly 2006). And there is extensive evidence of a symbiotic relationship between the dominant political-economic order of ‘market globalism’ in an unequal world, and discourses and practices of both development and institutionalised human rights, on the other (Pahuja 2011).
- 11.
The decision to do this is somewhat surprising given that the Anthropocene concept is not a scientifically endorsed one and given the extent to which the IPCC has been attacked previously and its legitimacy questioned when it has made even the smallest scientific error in its reports.
- 12.
For critics of geoengineering, this may be a cautionary tale about embracing the Anthropocene concept.
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Baskin, J. (2019). Future Imaginings. In: Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the End of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17359-3_6
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