Geoengineering fails, exacerbates other environmental crises, causes global war and temperature snap-back from lapses

The strategy of growing the economy first and then wait for people who have developed green preferences to build government capacity for stricter environmental regulations is not effective: the process is too slow, it happens at the expenses of other countries (Moran, Lenzen, Kanemoto, & Geschke, 2013), and, presently, it cannot be squared with the continuous pursuit of economic growth (Jackson, 2009; Ward et al., 2016). For these reasons, the kind of policy strategy compatible with continuous economic growth has to rely on technological solutions to expand humanity’s ecological boundaries. From today’s vantage point, geoengineering is poised to quickly become the preferred technological solution for market actors with a stake in pollution and technocratic elites profiting from the status quo. This alliance around geoengineering has started to become visible during COP21 and is reflected in the Paris Agreement, which formally left the door open to the deployment of geoengineering technologies to achieve the goal of staying below 2 C of global warming compared to pre-industrial level (Anderson, 2015). Before problems. One of the major problems of the geoengineering strategy is the difficulty of reaching an international agreement on geoengineering research and deployment before ecological circumstances make geoengineering necessary. According to a standard categorization (Royal Society (Great Britain), 2009), there are two types of geoengineering: Negative Emissions Technologies (NET) remove carbon emissions from the atmosphere, Solar Radiation Management (SRM) alter the reflectivity of the Earth to cool the planet. Both options, to be effective, require a planetary-scale implementation and involve huge risks. If this is the road humanity thinks it should pursue, then an adequate global agreement which settles issues of ethics and governance must be reached. Without an agreed blueprint for action at the international level, early unilateral action by states, corporations, or, even, wealthy individuals, will likely lead to conflict and social tensions to the point of compromising future collective efforts and plunging humanity further into chaos. Speaking specifically of SRM, Szerszynski, Kearnes, Macnaghten, Owen, and Stilgoe (2013) find that it is an “inherently political technology” (Winner, 1980), which is incompatible with liberal democracy. After problems. The unlikelihood of a global agreement on geoengineering is also underscored by the different perceptions of the states – informed, in turn, by different values, beliefs, and rationally formed priorities – of the consequences which might occur once geoengineering has been implemented on a planetary scale. In particular, the large deployment of BECCS, quite popular because it appears in 184 out of the 204 scenarios assessed by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2014) which meet the 2 C target, is not fully understood in theory, much less tested in practice (only a handful of small facilities around the world currently exist). According to Williamson (2016) and Burns and Nicholson (2017), BECCS is likely to negatively impact food security, freshwater availability, biodiversity, and disrupt the nitrogen cycle. Social stress, competition for scarce resources, and migrations could then all plausibly ensue. As per SRM, the consequences of misuse of this technology are even more dire than NET’s as, without an ambitious planetary commitment to mitigate and capture carbon, SRM would lock humanity into this sort of geoengineering for centuries to come and would also expose us to rapid and calamitous temperature increases if it were to be suddenly stopped (Burns & Nicholson, 2017; Niemeier & Tilmes, 2017). Temperatures would skyrocket well above the 2 C goal somewhat arbitrarily established by the scientific and policy community (Titley, 2017). And temperature increases of 4 C – argues Anderson – are “incompatible with any reasonable characterization of an organized, equitable, and civilized global community” (Anderson, 2012, p. 29).