Deciding on Geoengineering Will Be Harder Than Doing It
A diplomatic breakdown exposes geopolitical fractures over a problematic fix for climate change
One reason early humans survived what the world threw at them is that the wiser of our ancestors listened to and acted on the advice of their elders. Now former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a member of a group of global leaders calling themselves the Elders, warns that a set of new speculative climate engineering technologies could risk “exacerbating wider threats to international peace and security” if not governed adequately.
Commonly known as geoengineering, the technologies are being developed to directly and intentionally intervene in the climate system. Concepts include spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere to reduce incoming sunlight to cool the earth and capturing huge amounts of carbon from the air and storing it underground to directly reduce greenhouse gas concentrations. Such geoengineering methods are attracting increasing interest in climate policy circles.
Proponents argue that cutting global emissions alone may not be sufficient to limit average global warming to 1.5 or two degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages — a rough red line for scientists — and that the world must therefore explore other ways to…
