Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management ed. by Christopher Preston (review)

In the preface to The Human Condition, Hanna Arendt describes the launch of the first satellite in 1957 as marking a “new and yet unknown age,” which she speculates will prompt humanity’s “fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living things.”³ Arendt worries that unreflective utilization of new technologies will inadvertently transform the human condition, which is embodied in our relationship to the Earth. Today, the likelihood that solar radiation management (SRM) will be deployed as a technological fix for climate change raises diverse normative and ontological questions and suggests a literal dénouement to Arendt’s speculation. Engineering the Climate is a significant collection of articles that unpacks many of these issues. Preston’s introduction, which offers an admirably balanced primer and careful overview of ethical concerns, seeks to establish the subject matter’s importance by claiming that deliberate geoengineering takes humanity into new “moral terrain,” as we will intentionally assume “responsibility for the very skies under which all life on earth lives, an endeavor with repercussions impacting everyone—and everything—on the planet” (p. 1).

SRM technologies aim to cool the planet by blocking the earth’s absorption of some solar energy. Although there are many potential forms of SRM, the most likely to be implemented—dispersal of sulfate particles into the stratosphere—is relatively simple. Studies of cooling following volcanic eruptions demonstrate that stratospheric sulfates can effectively negate anthropogenic warming. A world cooled through SRM, however, would also experience changed rainfall, temperature, and weather patterns, as well as continuing ocean acidification and potential damage to the ozone layer. While this scenario is dystopic, the continuing failure of mitigation efforts is generating increasing interest in SRM. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report will cover geoengineering.

This volume contains thirteen diverse chapters that Preston describes as offering a “generous sampling” of views (p. 10). This diversity, with many chapters arguing at cross-purposes, means that no reader will agree with every contribution. This discordance is valuable, as it forestalls premature closure of inquiry in a volume that is arguably the first major exploration of the ethics of SRM. The book is organized into five sections. The first builds an ethical case against SRM through chapters exploring the ethics of solidarity and moral risk, of imposing invidious dilemmatic choices on future persons, and of dominating future generations. While these chapters are solid and persuasive, they primarily seek to enumerate SRM’s ethical shortcomings. Clearly SRM would have no place in an ideal world, as rapid reductions in GHG emissions would be ethically preferable. Yet humanity is a stubbornly non-ideal species, so later chapters that interrogate questions of political feasibility and meaning, or that scrutinize the assessment methods and consultative arrangements that should guide SRM research, are more engaging.

The second section investigates the inclusion of indigenous people, vulnerable populations, and nonhuman species in decision-making. These chapters, together with Holly Jean Buck’s exploration later in the book of the potential for social development to be integrated into assessment of climate remediation, will be useful to anyone involved in SRM research or governance. If this volume has a simple take-home point, it is that that wide consultation and integrated analysis of potential social co-benefits should inform the development of any SRM research agenda.

On a critical note, some chapters seem to cut a few corners in order to consolidate critiques of SRM. For example, in an otherwise impressive chapter, Ronald Sandler seeks to dismiss the possibility, prior to any scientific assessment, that SRM might protect some species. He develops an entirely plausible argument that the “complexity and uncertainty” of “dynamic and integrated systems” mean that direct interventions will likely have unanticipated consequences (p. 106), but arguably overstates the practical implications of this insight. In contrast, the papers in the third section criticize dogmatic rejection of SRM. Ben Hale demonstrates that if moral hazard arguments are to...