The Ethics of Climate Engineering: Solar Radiation Management and Non-Ideal Justice (Routledge, 2017)

This is a pre-print version of Toby Svoboda, The Ethics of Climate Engineering: Solar Radiation Management and Non-Ideal Justice (Routledge, 2017). If citing, please consult the published version, which contains minor changes. The Ethics of Climate Engineering: Solar Radiation Management and Non-Ideal Justice Toby Svoboda Table of Contents • Introduction • Chapter 1: Benefits • Chapter 2: Distributions • Chapter 3: Decisions • Chapter 4: Virtues • Chapter 5: Dilemmas • Chapter 6: Comparisons Acknowledgements Many individuals provided helpful feedback on draft chapters of this book. For that I thank Daniel Callies, Frank Jankunis, David Morrow, Christian Uhle, and two anonymous reviewers. I acknowledge permission from the White Horse Press and the Center for Environmental Philosophy to reuse some material from two articles previously published in Environmental Values and Environmental Ethics, respectively. Finally, I acknowledge a Summer Research Stipend from Fairfield University, which supported work on this project during the summer of 2016. Dedication To Kate and Arizona 1 Introduction This is a book about justice, anthropogenic climate change, and the prospect of climate engineering. More specifically, it is a book about the justice (or injustice) of using solar radiation management (SRM) in response to climate change. SRM is a category of climate engineering, which we may define as the large-scale, intentional, technological modification of the global environment in order to address climate change.1 A technique counts as SRM if it would seek to engineer the climate by increasing planetary albedo, such as by injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, thereby reducing the quantity of solar radiation absorbed by the planet. If they worked, SRM techniques could offset (to some degree) the planetary warming driven by the increasing concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases due to anthropogenic emissions. A second category of climate engineering, carbon dioxide removal (CDR), includes techniques that would reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, such as via direct air capture and subsequent sequestration in geological formations or in the deep ocean. My focus in this book is SRM, although I will have occasion to refer to CDR techniques at several points. I begin with the assumption that climate change is fundamentally a moral issue,2 largely in virtue of the injustice it could bring for some present and future parties. I also assume that we ought to take much more ambitious action regarding climate change than we currently are taking—for instance, in the form of more aggressive mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. The foregoing are not controversial views within the climate ethics literature. Unfortunately, it is clear that current commitments (e.g., those of the Paris Agreement) to address climate change are unlikely to be sufficient to avoid climatic change that is likely to carry injustice for some. It is also clear that some relevant parties have been unwilling to commit themselves to courses of action that are likely to be sufficient for this end. So far, it appears that (full) climate justice has been politically infeasible, and there is little reason to believe that this will change in the near future. Instead, we find ourselves accepting climate policies that, although presumably better 2 than nothing, fall far short of what we ought to do. As Posner puts it, “You can have justice or you can have a climate treaty. Not both.”3 The question is how to proceed when justice is politically infeasible. Two options immediately suggest themselves. First, we might work to change political conditions such that just policies become politically feasible, such as through various forms of activism. In effect, this is to adapt our social-political world to the demands of justice. Second, we might instead adapt justice to the demands of our social-political world, working to see what aspects of justice can survive (and to what extent) within the constraints of what is at present politically feasible. These two approaches roughly map onto what is called “ideal” and “non-ideal” justice, respectively. Now the second option might seem obviously worse than the first. After all, justice is inherently a normative concept, and so we might think that it should be immune to considerations of political feasibility. Indeed, most ethicists working on climate change have taking an ideal approach to climate justice, although recently more attention has been paid to non-ideal climate justice.4 But there are cases in which a non-ideal approach is called for, such as situations in which there is not sufficient time to achieve substantive change through activism, or situations in which the prospects of successful activism are very dim. In scenarios like that, we undeniably face the question of what we ought to do given the (perhaps deeply unjust) realities of our social-political world. Plausibly, this is the type of situation we find ourselves in with respect to climate change. I assume that many of us have obligations of ideal justice that require us (among other things) to accept climate policies designed to make substantial cuts in emissions, even if those policies carry significant costs to ourselves (e.g., in the form of a carbon tax). Yet it is difficult to deny that many of us are not complying with our obligations to do this. Whether like it or not, this puts us in the realm of non-ideal justice: given this fact of non-compliance on the part of some, well-intentioned parties must ask themselves what should be done. One danger of aiming for ideal justice under such circumstances is that we risk achieving little or nothing, 3 whereas we might have achieved some imperfect degree of justice had our targets been less than ideal. So perhaps the idea behind Posner’s dictum needs to be revised. It is not the case that we must choose to pursue either justice or a politically feasible climate policy. Instead, we might pursue some degree of justice within the constraints of political feasibility. In short, in some cases it may be that we can have both (non-ideal) justice and a politically feasible climate policy. An Overview This book is composed of six chapters. In the first, I address some ethical issues regarding the outcomes of various climate policies that we might adopt, including some involving SRM. We might be tempted to adopt a simple form of utilitarianism in assessing the ethics of climate policies, preferring that policy which delivers the best ratio of benefits to harms, aggregated across persons. Such an approach faces two important sets of problems. First, there is the issue of uncertainty. At best, our knowledge of the outcomes of some potential policy would be probabilistic in nature. There are, of course, methods for dealing with such uncertainty, but a greater problem is posed by the fact that we may be uncertain of the probabilities of certain outcomes, with different studies providing divergent probability density functions. That is, we may have cases of so-called “deep” uncertainty. Second, a simple utilitarian approach risks overlooking the importance of how harms and benefits are distributed across persons. Intuitively, it matters a great deal (and in an ethical sense) whether climatic harms are borne predominantly by rich or poor, low-emitters or high-emitters, present or future generations, and so on. The aim of this chapter is not to argue that consequentialist (or, more specifically, utilitarian) approaches to climate ethics must fail, but rather to motivate the importance of justice. Although justice-based approaches to climate ethics also face the problem of uncertainty, I will argue in chapter three that procedural justice can help us navigate this problem. Moreover, most justice-based approaches are inherently concerned with the 4 question of how harms and benefits are shared across persons, and they provide tools for assessing policy options in terms of their likely distributions. The next two chapters respectively address distributive and procedural justice, taking a non-ideal approach to each. In chapter two I lay out my approach to distributive justice and explain its relevance to SRM. We immediately face the problem that, as a matter of political and moral theory, there many theories of distributive justice upon which we might rely. I make the case for an ecumenical approach, arguing that the leading theories are likely to converge in identifying many cases as either just or unjust in the distributive sense. Using this approach, I acknowledge the many risks of distributive injustice that deployment of SRM might entail. Next, drawing from previous work with Morrow,5 I provide an account of non-ideal distributive justice. On this account, some climate policy must be politically feasible, likely to be effective, and morally permissible in order to count as non-ideally just. This third condition requires some careful consideration in particular. Drawing again from my work with Morrow, I rely on a notion of permissibility employing both proportionality and comparative criteria. Roughly, to be permissible in this sense requires a policy to secure moral goods that are proportionate to the moral ills it might carry, as well as to compare well to other (feasible and effective) policy options when it comes to this ratio of goods to ills. I also argue here that climate policy is best approached as a matter of non-ideal justice, because some parties are failing to comply with their (ideal) obligations of justice (e.g., to cut emissions). Although SRM would not be deployed in an ideally just world, it is reasonable to ask whether in our world it might satisfy the three conditions just mentioned. Indeed, there is some reason to think that SRM might reduce risks of distributive injustice, potentially reducing harms that (for example) low-emitters might otherwise experience. As it turns out, however, there is a tension between the political feasibility and moral permissibility of SRM.

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