A Climate Solution for Some, a Risk for Others? F. Rabitz on Solar Geoengineering

Could a technological solution to climate change create new political and environmental problems? As interest in solar geoengineering grows, so do concerns about who would control such technologies and who would bear the risks of deploying them.

Solar geoengineering is the business of cooling the planet by reflecting some of the Sun’s radiation back out into space. It was once a very fringe concept but is now increasingly finding its way into mainstream climate policy as governments grapple with the difficulty of meeting their emissions targets.

VU IIRPS Professor Florian Rabitz, along with Frank Biermann, Aarti Gupta and Rakhyun E. Kim, looks at the political and governance issues associated with these technologies in the paper “Governing Solar Geoengineering at Planetary Scale: Pipe Dream or Possibility?” which appears in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources.

Looking at the scientific literature published since 2020 the researchers are examining the various approaches to governance of solar geoengineering – from setting up international rules for research and potential deployment to negotiating agreements which would in effect ban its use.

As F. Rabitz points out, solar geoengineering is already becoming a very political issue. Part of the reason for that is that there are well-connected, well-funded groups who are pushing the issue.

“The more it becomes clear that governments are failing to achieve safe levels of global warming through emissions control, the more they will be likely to turn to experimental (and dangerous) alternatives such as solar geoengineering,” says F. Rabitz.

The researcher is also skeptical about the techno-optimism that underpins some of these discussions, particularly amongst certain entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who appear to see technological innovation as the simple solution to all of society’s problems. In his view this can lead to a complete disregard for the political ramifications of decisions that could have an impact on the whole planet.

One of the biggest issues is that the impacts of solar geoengineering may not be distributed equally. The research and development are overwhelmingly being done in the developed world and developing countries could be exposed to significant environmental and social risks without having any real say in the decisions about these technologies.

“If solar geoengineering would primarily be a harm to the developing world (which it very well might be), it’s very unlikely that the developed world would care in the least,” says F. Rabitz.

He draws the comparison with other technologies where the environmental cost is invariably passed on to the developing world (the mining of critical minerals for clean energy technologies, the e-waste issue etc.).

These concerns are very much in evidence in the international debate. There is clearly growing opposition to solar geoengineering in the Global South with governments from Africa and the Pacific calling for an international agreement to ban its use.

The fundamental issue is therefore not simply one of the technological possibility of cooling the planet. It’s about whether we can govern decisions of such global significance in a fair way, especially when those who are most at risk from the consequences of the various technologies may be the very people who have the least say in how those technologies are developed and deployed.