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This article appears in the following Oxford Review of Economic Policy issue: CLIMATE CHANGE [View the issue table of contents]
On the regulation of geoengineering
* Stanford University and Council on Foreign Relations, e-mail: dgvictor{at}stanford.edu
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New evidence that the climate system may be especially sensitive to the build-up of greenhouse gases and that humans are doing a poor job of controlling their effluent has animated discussions around the possibility of offsetting the human impact on climate through ‘geoengineering’. Nearly all assessments of geoengineering have concluded that the option, while ridden with flaws and unknown side effects, is intriguing because of its low cost and the ability for one or a few nations to geoengineer the planet without cooperation from others. I argue that norms to govern deployment of geoengineering systems will be needed soon. The standard instruments for establishing such norms, such as treaties, are unlikely to be effective in constraining geoengineers because the interests of key players diverge and it is relatively easy for countries to avoid inconvenient international commitments and act unilaterally. Instead, efforts to craft new norms ‘bottom up’ will be more effective. Such an approach, which would change the underlying interests of key countries and thus make them more willing to adopt binding norms in the future, will require active, open research programmes and assessments of geoengineering. Meaningful research may also require actual trial deployment of geoengineering systems so that norms are informed by relevant experience and command respect through use. Standard methods for international assessment organized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are unlikely to yield useful evaluations of geoengineering options because the most important areas for assessment lie in the improbable, harmful, and unexpected side effects of geoengineering, not the ‘consensus science’ that IPCC does well. I also suggest that real-world geoengineering will be a lot more complex and expensive than currently thought because simple interventions—such as putting reflective particles in the stratosphere—will be combined with many other costlier interventions to offset nasty side effects.
Key Words: abrupt catastrophic climate change • climate policy strategy • research and development policy
I thank David Keith and Dan Schrag for the invitation to talk about the politics of geoengineering at their meeting on 8–9 November 2007, for which this paper is an exploration of the ideas, and to my colleagues in this issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, along with an anonymous reviewer, for discussions and comments. Thanks to Jay Apt, Michael Aziz, Martin Bunzl, Dieter Helm, Cameron Hepburn, Robert Keohane, Michael Levi, Gregg Marland, Granger Morgan, Burt Richter, Larry Summers, John Steinbruner, and Mark Thurber for comments on a draft; to Scott Barrett, Tom Schelling, and Marty Weitzman for sharing papers and to Tom for talking strategically about this issue long before anyone else took it seriously.
1 Keith (2000) provides a detailed survey of options and also explores the economics, politics, and ethics, and NAS (1992) provides a comprehensive (if now quite dated) look at the economics of climate-protection options including geoengineering. Bodansky (1996) points to many possible legal constraints; Barrett (2007a) examines the seemingly inexpensive economics of geoengineering and outlines a possible path for pursuing the option. Recent conference reports offer a useful catalogue of the complaints (Ames/Carnegie, 2006; Ricke et al., 2008; Victor et al., 2008), and Fleming's (2007) beautiful history of geoengineering is laden with warnings.
2 Some studies have suggested that emissions control could be relatively inexpensive and amount to perhaps 1 per cent of GDP or less (Stern, 2007; IPCC, 2007a). That might be true for an optimally implemented policy that gives firms plenty of time to innovate and apply new technologies. But the cost of real policy could be a lot higher because political systems do not seem prone to make the needed complementary investments in research and development (e.g. EPRI, 2007). Least-cost strategies also usually envision the extensive use of ‘offsets’, which can encourage inexpensive emission controls in developing countries, that are proving difficult to administer (e.g. Paltsev et al., 2007; EPA, 2008). As real costs inflate so will the political challenges in adopting real policies.
3 At first, perhaps just a dozen countries are needed and cooperation could emerge tacitly, which is less daunting than getting all nations on the planet to agree. However, even the core group of important countries—such as China, the United States, the EU, and Russia—assign radically different preferences for economic growth and environmental protection (Victor, 2006). Eventually, explicit obligations that cover all nations are probably needed, because an open world economy makes it unlikely that important countries will tolerate high costs for long if their trading partners pay a lot less.
4 That approach—binding treaties coupled to scientific assessments—has been successful in many other areas of international environmental cooperation, notably the depleting ozone layer (e.g. Benedick, 1998). In time, it might prove helpful in addressing global warming. The standard response of treaty-making is so ingrained in the international environmental community that it is hard to identify a single definitive source that outlines this strategy, but for a thoughtful argument about the centrality of treaty-making as a response to environmental (and other) problems see Chayes and Chayes (1998). On the role of integrated assessments in addressing international environmental problems see Mitchell et al. (2006).
5 This assessment is based on the first costing exercise in NAS (1992) and critical reviews of Keith (2000) and Ames/Carnegie (2006) which do not raise concerns that would alter the order of magnitude. With innovation and effort, total discounted present cost for a perpetual programme could be an order of magnitude smaller.
6 Most of the critical literature adopts this approach, though often with the caveat that the option should be explored in case climate changes are particularly severe. See, for example, Schneider (1996) who concludes uneasily that geoengineering merits some investigation but only if that does not become an excuse for sharply curtailing society's addiction to carbon fuels.
7 It might be useful to think of supply and demand for geoengineering in the context of a fuller climate strategy that includes mitigation and adaptation. If the y-axis is cost and the x-axis is climate protection, then the supply curve rises from the origin—the first flat segment is simple geoengineering, which costs little but has many side effects; as the curve rises to include additional patches it enters the much more costly realm of complex geoengineering cocktails. Similarly, it might be useful to think about the shape and location of the demand curve. Most discussion about geoengineering has imagined a dreamworld where geoengineering is interesting because it is cheap and because it is thought about largely in isolation from the economics of other policy options. In the real world, geoengineering is probably a price-taker that gets deployed at large scale when costly options to control emissions have failed. In that world, geoengineering is being weighed against still more costly options such as shutting down energy systems before the end of their useful lifetime or severe curtailment of demand. The former demand curve is nearly vertical and ‘clears’ only on the low-cost options; the latter demand curve is horizontal and clears deep in the territory of complex geoengineering.
8 Nor is it clear that nuclear weapons have not been ‘used’. Of course they were used against Japan in 1945, but even the investment in weapons since that date has been usable as a deterrent in some settings. Their mere existence altered outcomes—such as in Quemoy and Matsu (1950s), in Turkey and Cuba (1960s), probably in Israel (since the 1980s), and elsewhere. By contrast, geoengineering probably has no deterrent effect and may actually amplify the risks that give rise to its deployment. Gaia aside, the planet is geophysically unaware that it is being deterred from harmful climate outcomes when humans build geoengineering capabilities. But humans are aware of their own investments in geoengineering, and that awareness may make them less likely to invest mightily in controlling emissions and adapting to climate changes if they know geoengineering is available. The impact of such investments on human willingness to spend resources on controlling emissions is hard to assess; my impression, however, is that the option of geoengineering will not amplify the extent to which humans engage in reckless behaviour by not investing in emission controls. That's because careful assessments of geoengineering will show its many faults and side effects as well as unknown harms; indeed, identification of such harms has been the tenor of geoengineering research in recent years.
9 By ‘normal’ I mean science pursued within a given intellectual paradigm or research programme with agreed boundaries (Kuhn, 1962; Lakatos and Musgrave (eds), 1970). Where the boundaries of the paradigm are known and where the assessors can agree on core facts and theories (and on who qualifies as a ‘scientist’), comprehensive assessment by the community of scientists is possible.
10 The endless trials of IPCC's working group III supply many data points to support this hypothesis; some day, perhaps, the IPCC will wisely abandon its efforts in this area. The IPCC's nasty and inconclusive effort to evaluate trade-offs that involved assigning a value to lives lost in different economies is a warning of the hazards to researchers who attempt such work in a universal, comprehensive assessment.
11 The term ‘weak’ is not intended pejoratively—rather, it is a factual statement of the ability of the institution itself to make decisions and steer outcomes. Most international institutions are ‘weak’. Many governments are ‘weak’ by this same logic—including the US government, because, by design, it tends to gridlock and indecision. Most democracies, by design, have weak central institutions.
12 Making the assessment institution stronger will not fix the problem because strong assessment institutions are prone to becoming captured by their masters. For its core tasks, the IPCC has the right design—a weak institution, charged with assessment of agreed science and open to scrutiny by anyone.
13 My goal is not to disparage the IPCC, for these problems are intrinsic to global omnibus assessments. Witness the magisterial Global Biodiversity Assessment (GBA), which remains, along with the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the most useful reference source on biodiversity. Yet the GBA, although originally conceived as policy-relevant, was largely orthogonal to the policy debate in the biodiversity treaty because the latter became focused on issues such as genetic engineering of crops and revenue-sharing for germplasm that were largely removed from the scientific debate. On the real hazards and trade-offs involved in such highly charged issues, the conservative scientific process in the GBA had little to contribute. See Watson et al. (1995); Hassan et al. (2005).
14 Exactly how many nations could unilaterally geoengineer depends on the geoengineering system and on important practical considerations. Nations with space-lift capability, missiles, or other vehicles that could inject material into the stratosphere all have the capability, in principle, to geoengineer. That list could extend to a dozen today and perhaps two dozen with a decade or two of sustained investment. However, in practice, a large territory (or willingness to operate on the high seas in the face of acute disputes) and reliable lift systems would be needed for this to be done with global impact. That list of countries is much smaller and might include Australia, Brazil, China, India, the EU (if it could agree to act as one), Russia, and possibly Japan.
15 For more on the CBD and its outcomes, see Raustiala and Victor (2004) and for its harm on crop innovation see Victor and Runge (2002). Other environmental treaties have similar histories. For example, the ban on some forms of ocean dumping under the 1972 London Dumping Convention effectively halted all significant research on sub-sea disposal of nuclear waste, which could have been an environmentally superior to the land-based disposal options that have dominated nearly all investment since that time.
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