Abstract
This concluding Chapter draws the key strands of the book’s argument together and reflects on what’s different about solar geoengineering’s (SGE) past and present, what’s constraining its normalisation, and what’s at stake in any decision to embrace it? Also explored are a number of the implications of the book’s analysis for thinking about climate policy post-Paris and about environmentalism more generally, before considering whether SGE will ever come into being as a deployed technology and a third leg of climate policy.
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Notes
- 1.
I do not mean to suggest that such narratives are developed cynically, although they may be, nor that they are not sincerely believed to be true.
- 2.
‘More research is needed’ is a regularly repeated trope in the institutional reports on SGE. In practice it is hard to disentangle researching SGE from ‘doing’ or deploying it and calls for ‘more research’ can easily mask experimental deployment. There is widespread agreement that effective governance should precede research. But what if SGE is essentially ungovernable other than autocratically, as Hulme (2014) has argued—plausibly, in my view? Why research something when, if the research generates a working technology, it cannot conceivably be governed democratically? Not surprisingly, engaging with where (field or laboratory) and how to legitimately and ethically progress research into SGE, when there is insufficient agreement as to whether SGE is a legitimate intervention into the climate, means that the research governance questions rarely end up being about research governance. Instead they become a proxy battleground for the ‘whether’ question, and mask the fact that the ‘whether to solar geoengineer’ question remains unresolved.
- 3.
In an earlier Chapter I address the geo-political reasons why unilateral deployment by countries other than the USA, and possibly China, is unlikely, absent a turn to competitive SGE which would not deliver desirable climate results for anyone.
- 4.
Although by then it may be too late for SGE to be effective.
- 5.
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Baskin, J. (2019). Conclusion. In: Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the End of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17359-3_7
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