by James Temple
“This is an innocuous write-up of an innocuous experiment, in the direct sense,” says Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia University and the author of Geoengineering: The Gamble.
Moral hazards and slippery slopes
There are a variety of concerns about deploying solar geoengineering, including the danger that carrying it out on large scales could have negative environmental side effects as well as uneven impacts across various regions. Some fear that even discussing it creates a moral hazard, undermining the urgency to address the root causes of climate change, or that researching it sets up a slippery slope that increases the chances we’ll one day put it to use.
Columbia’s Wagner says the field should err on the side of transparency. But he also says it’s important to strike the right balance between how much researchers must reveal in advance, how easily carefully designed projects can be blocked, and how much support major research institutions provide for an important area of inquiry.
“This sort of thing is a direct response to other institutions’ reluctance to proceed with even seemingly innocuous research,” he says.
Quoted in: “Researchers launched a solar geoengineering test flight in the UK last fall” by James Temple, MIT Technology Review (1 March 2023).