Harvard Medical School
“The Ethics of Solar Geoengineering”
Solar geoengineering refers to large-scale interventions that attempt to cool the Earth by reflecting a small portion of sunlight back into space. While these proposed interventions seem promising to some concerned about climate change, others see technofixes, such as solar geoengineering and carbon removal, as morally fraught because they seem to absolve actors from taking more difficult steps toward systemic solutions.
Join speaker Dr. Gernot Wagner and moderator Dr. Insoo Hyun to learn more about the science and ethics of solar geoengineering. In this interactive session, Dr. Wagner will urge participants to consider that “moral hazards” are ubiquitous and that especially those opposed to solar geoengineering technology should use it as an opportunity to expand the attention paid to the underlying climate problem in the first place, actively invoking its opposite: “inverse moral hazards.”
Friday, February 18, 2022
12:30 – 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Online event, register here.
Related: Geoengineering: the Gamble (Polity, 2021); “Green Moral Hazards,” Ethics, Policy & Environment (15 July 2021, with Daniel Zizzamia); “Fear of Geoengineering Is Really Anxiety About Cutting Carbon,” Bloomberg Green Risky Climate column (25 June 2021); “Green Moral Hazards,” C2G blog (9 January 2020, with Daniel Zizzamia); “The Hazard of Environmental Morality,” Foreign Policy (24 December 2018, with Christine Merk).