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Symposium: Climate Change Justice
"Frankly, the Maldives could say, 'F--- you all--we want to stay alive'. Would you blame them? Wouldn't any reasonable country do the same?1
Geoengineering has been roughly defined as "the intentional manipulation of planetary systems at a global scale" (Keith 2000; Schelling 1996). This definition is neither as precise nor as informative as some would like. Nevertheless, we can fix ideas by focusing on the most prominent current proposal, which is to inject sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to deflect incoming radiation and so cool the Earth's surface. This is a paradigm case: if anything counts as geoengineering, stratospheric sulfate injection (hereafter SSI) does.
At the time of writing, many in the scientific community are urgently advocating for research and some even for deployment of SSI (Artic Methane Emergency Group 2012; Blackstock et al. 2009; Caldeira and Keith 2010). The dominant argument claims that humanity faces an ethical emergency in which pursuit of a geoengineering strategy constitutes "a lesser evil" than the threat of climate catastrophe. Many proponents of this argument acknowledge that geoengineering raises serious ethical and political issues. Nevertheless, in practice these are often swept aside by the mesmerizing force of the emergency rhetoric.2In particular, SSI raises serious concerns about justice and the plight of the most vulnerable, but these are commonly dismissed on the basis of a challenge: "What if, in the face of catastrophic impacts, the most vulnerable countries initiate geoengineering themselves, or beg the richer, more technically sophisticated countries to do it? Wouldn't geoengineering then be ethically permissible? Who could refuse them?"
Such questions are intended to be rhetorical: it is assumed to be obvious that the appeals of the desperate would justify geoengineering. Moreover, the framing suggests that other nations would have strong moral reasons either to respect intervention by the desperate, or even to aid them by deploying themselves. Sometimes such arguments are also used to justify accelerating research on geoengineering now. If the desperate might attempt geoengineering, it is said, we should work out how best to do it, so as to assist them through advice. In general, the overriding thought is that the threat of catastrophe coupled with the plight of vulnerable populations...