But critics of geoengineering research argue that whatever the stated goals, such efforts legitimize the development and eventual use of a climate intervention that they insist is too risky to even consider. Among other concerns, it can never be governed in a fair and equitable way given global power imbalances, says Jennie Stephens, a professor of sustainability science and policy at Northeastern University.
There’s been a “very strategic effort to get this mainstreamed, and it’s effective,” she says. “It’s become more and more legitimized as a potential option in the future, and building knowledge networks around this topic is expanding that lobbying effort as far as I can tell.”
A moral obligation
Climate change will exact the steepest toll on the hottest and poorest parts of the world, because higher temperatures in those areas threaten to push conditions beyond what’s sustainable for crops or safe for humans and animals. These regions also often lack the resources to counteract the dangers of extreme heat waves, rising ocean levels, droughts, flooding, and more through climate adaptation measures like desalination plants, seawalls, or even air conditioners.
For some proponents of geoengineering research, the fact that climate dangers driven predominantly by emissions in rich nations fall overwhelmingly on poor ones creates a “moral obligation” to at least explore the possibility.
Opponents, however, argue that studying such technologies eases pressure to address the biggest factor in climate change: extracting and burning fossil fuels. That, in turn, threatens to further concentrate global economic power and perpetuate inequalities, injustices, and exploitation between poor and rich nations, argued Stephens and Kevin Surprise, a lecturer at Mount Holyoke College, in a 2020 paper.
But either way, academics, activists, and environmentalists in the Global North are too often simply making pronouncements about the interests of huge, heterogeneous parts of the world and not meaningfully engaging with researchers, nonprofits, and citizens in those nations, says Sikina Jinnah, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“This is really the Global North speaking on behalf of the Global South,” she says. That’s yet another environmental justice violation, one “embedded in the discourse itself.”
Numerous modeling studies suggest that spraying particles into the stratosphere, brightening coastal clouds, or similar geoengineering techniques could reduce global temperatures.