Solar Radiation Management (SRM): A Grave Ethical Error (13 June 2024; Horton & Kieth/Harvey/Gardiner)

In this essay, I will argue that the pursuit of Solar Radiation Management (SRM), a form of geoengineering proposed to combat climate change, is unethical and should be avoided. To support my argument, I’ll reference Gardiner’s “Geoengineering and Moral Schizophrenia,” Horton & Kieth’s “Solar Geoengineering and Obligations to the Global Poor,” and Chelsea Harvey’s “Geoengineering Is Not a Quick Fix for the Climate Crisis.” First, I’ll introduce Gardiner’s piece, particularly focusing on the concepts of “moral schizophrenia” and ethical shortsightedness. Her work will be foundational for the next part of my essay where I introduce Horton and Kieth’s essay; I’ll dismantle their arguments in favor of SRM and accept their challenge to “demonstrate that SRM would violate principles of global… justice.” Having introduced the philosophical texts, I’ll use Harvey’s piece to explain the hazards of SRM to aid in my discourse. By critically analyzing the arguments in favor of SRM, I’ll show that SRM is a poor option to pursue in the mitigation of near-term climate harms, making its proponents morally schizophrenic. 

Gardiner’s chapter “Geoengineering and Moral Schizophrenia,” claims that contemporary questions surrounding the implementation of SRM are not the most important questions we should be asking, the most prominent being that given the climate “emergency” and impending catastrophe, “do we not have a strong moral obligation to do ‘whatever it takes’ to prevent it, including encouraging the would-be geoengineers?” Despite the inherent unsustainable nature of SRM, scientists are convincing governments to begin considering and researching this as a near-future solution. Gardiner claims that the panicky catastrophe-driven emergency narrative in favor of SRM is “ethically shortsighted (in the sense of ‘missing the bigger picture’) insofar as it marginalizes central moral issues such as how we got into this predicament and why were are not seriously pursuing better ways out.” A concentration on SRM, she argues, ignores the history of the impending climate crisis, thus lacking spatiotemporal awareness. She implies that the causes of the climate crisis inherently point to other, potentially better ways of managing the issue.

The context of SRM, Gardiner argues, is a “‘perfect moral storm’” to which global, intergenerational, and theoretical problems contribute, making a correct course of action appear enigmatic at best. Those who currently benefit most from emitting greenhouse gasses create burdens that will fall on future generations as well as nonhuman nature. Gardiner calls this “buck-passing,” something that ultimately results in ethical shortsightedness. So, the challenge of the ethical storm is “to overcome the temptation of such buck-passing.” Slow responses to the climate crisis occur, she argues, because it is ethically discomforting for the buck-passing generation to acknowledge that what they’re doing is wrong; this ethical incentivization motivates the buck-passing generation to deny that anything is wrong with the climate. Eventually though, a would-be buck-passing generation is forced to do something as the climate crisis begins to impede on their own comforts, with the least inconvenient actions being“shadow solutions” that address only the concerns of that generation; Gardiner argues that SRM meets the criteria of a shadow solution. This is for two reasons: One, “once sulfate injection is masking a significant temperature effect, it may not be reversible in any meaningful sense, because withdrawing the intervention might then result in a rapid bounce-back at least as dangerous as the climate change it aimed to prevent,” and because “it is not clear that we have proof of the relevant concept… geoengineering would need to be in place for many decades and perhaps centuries.” This shadow solution hints at Gardiner’s next term, moral schizophrenia.

Moral schizophrenia is closely tied to ethical shortsightedness. It is the “split between an agent’s underlying reasons, values, or justifications for action, and what in fact moves her.” More specifically, Gardiner wants to look at the form of moral schizophrenia creative myopia: 

This arises when an agent invokes a set of strong moral reasons to justify a given course of action, but this course of action is supported by these reasons only because the agent has ruled out a number of alternative courses of action more strongly supported by the same reasons, and where this is due to motives she has that are less important, and are condemned by those reason.

Essentially, as it pertains to SRM, creative myopia occurs when an agent (the buck-passing generation) elects to choose SRM rather than any other course of action that might be not only more beneficial but might also provide a long lasting solution, because the agent has other, “less important” motives that drive them to pick the worse choice. If the agent were truly concerned about the root cause, rather than their own needs (whether that be alleviating moral guilt or actual near-term climate concern), then they would not be as interested in SRM as they would be in solving the problem rather than palliatively treating its symptoms. Yet, by choosing to do something, even if it is far down the list of preferable options, the buck-passer still feels like they’re doing the right thing and acting ethically. Appeals of the buck-passing generation to the emergency nature of climate change obfuscate the real issue, the ethical shortsightedness and moral schizophrenia that advocating for SRM inherently carries with it. This line of reasoning sets “aside a whole host of central issues, such as that his ethical problem is self-inflicted,” and also makes the buck-passing agent guilty “of a severe abdication of moral responsibility.” Our behavior, as agents that emit high levels of emissions, “impose risks of severe harm on innocent others,” and “violates morally important relationships.” We look even less like ethical actors when one realizes that we have a lot of options better than SRM, yet choose it anyways despite knowing what needs to be done to stop or decelerate the impending climate crisis. Despite better, more effective options that treat the root cause of climate change, we’re ethically short-sighted and morally schizophrenic because we opt instead for SRM, weakly arguing that this relatively fast-acting choice is due to the impending “catastrophe” and is therefore justified, and because to select any other route would be too significant (burdensome) a change to make. Governments and scientists are beginning to explore SRM as a viable option despite the fact that SRM “may not work, will not fix all the problems even if it does work, and raises serious issues of its own, including those of its negative side effects, legitimate governance and irreversibility.”

Horton & Kieth, in their “Solar Geoengineering and Obligations to the Global Poor,” take quite the opposite approach to SRM. They argue that, because climate change disproportionately impacts the poor, “there would seem to be an obligation, at a minimum, to take steps to reduce harms falling on the most vulnerable nations.” The authors’ moral base is that “Intuition tells us that the requirements of justice are violated when an activity benefits wealthy countries at the expense of poorer ones.” If the “global poor” need saving from the harms caused by wealthy nations for the sake of our justice intuition, then SRM is the next logical step, they argue. They, as with other authors, define SRM as “a set of technologies that would reflect a small fraction of incoming sunlight back to space, thereby cooling the planet,” on a global scale by emitting aerosols into the upper atmosphere.

The authors defend SRM by utilizing two temporal horizons: Near-term (present to fifty years out), and long-term (greater than fifty years out). They compare SRM with mitigation (emission reduction) and adaptation (localized technologies to reduce climate harms). SRM can be seen as a form of adaptation, but on a global rather than local scale. Horton and Kieth argue that due to the inertia of climate change and existing economic structures, mitigatory changes would do little in the near-term, and in fact moving to net-zero emissions in the next fifty years “would impose significant economic costs that may, for example, appear as increased energy prices.” This potential increase, they claim, is an injustice as poorer nations will feel the impact of increased energy expenditures more than wealthy nations, as it makes up a greater fraction of their expenses. Thus, “in the near term, mitigation has significant costs compared to only modest benefits, and a disproportionate share of the costs may fall on the poor.” They do, however, acknowledge that mitigation looks different in the long term, its benefits coming to fruition after fifty years have passed if it were implemented today. These long term benefits would come after a disproportionate near-term economic burden on the global poor, but would eventually be universally beneficial.

Horton & Kieth are quick to reject adaptation as a strategy, as it depends heavily upon localized wealth, privileging wealthier areas when it comes to quelling climate harms. The only way that adaptation could work, they claim, is “if global redistribution of wealth is perfect so that everyone can equally afford to adopt this response…this is theoretically possible… but the persistence of inequality over millenia argues that it is unlikely to obtain.” Since wealth redistribution is impossible based on the last ¹⁄₃₀₀th of human history, they claim the implied global character of SRM is sufficient to check the box of justly aiding the global poor. Again, they acknowledge that, compared to mitigation, “SRM would likely provide net benefits in the near term that would help the poor most of all, at the cost of emission cuts today that would otherwise benefit everyone in the future.” Because SRM can benefit the poor of today (an uncertain claim rooted in limited “available evidence”) more than mitigation or adaptation can, a moral obligation exists to investigate SRM on the behalf of the global poor. To prematurely dismiss SRM as a tool of climate policy, they would say, is “at worst immoral.” I disagree. I certainly agree that we have obligations to the “global poor,” or rather the Least Advantaged Group (given that they refer to Rawls as presenting a standard for justice) if we take a liberal-egalitarian perspective seriously. However, the moral schizophrenia and ethical shortsightedness of their arguments negate the well-meaning character of their essay. 

It is clear that Horton & Kieth exhibit a preference to the poor of today over the poor of the future. In this way, Horton & Kieth, can be characterized as buck-passers that leave the solution of climate change to future generations. They write, “compared to mitigation, SRM would likely provide net benefits in the near term that would help the poor most of all, at the cost of emission cuts today that would otherwise benefit everyone in the future.” Throughout their work, they go back and forth between agreeing that it is necessary that mitigation must begin now, and at other parts, arguing that mitigation is a worthy sacrifice for SRM because they assume “that global economic growth will continue into the future, and therefore tomorrow’s poor are likely to be better off than today’s poor… [they will be] more likely to be better situated than their contemporaries.” On the other hand, they mention the moral hazard argument, which states that actors (not specified whether individual or state) will be less motivated to reduce emissions if global temperatures fall following the implementation of SRM. After all, if the main problem with emitting greenhouse gasses (GHGs) was increasing global temperatures, what incentive do present actors have to not buck-pass to the next generation, growing the problem that future generations will face when SRM (universally agreed upon to be a temporary solution) dissipates? 

Horton & Kieth counter this proposition with a blatantly selective citation, stating that there is “little empirical evidence that people would behave this way in practice” (which one could expect, given that there is no empirical evidence of how people would act in a future that has yet to occur). The study they cite argued that there was no “‘evidence for risk compensation at an individual level as a reaction to information on SAI [stratospheric aerosol injection].’” The two scientists then exhibit a grave disjunction, following the reference to individual participation by saying “critics generally make no distinction between moral hazard for individual and for states, and to our knowledge have not presented any evidence that governments would be more susceptible than people.” This statement, rightly so, should raise a red flag; states frequently act in very different ways than the people they represent. It is widely known in sociology, particularly following Mancur Olson’s work on group incentive analysis, that group/state actors act much differently than the individual. Horton & Kieth based this faulty conjunction on the grounds of “to our knowledge;” lack of evidence does not mean evidence of lack. They do eventually concede that moral hazard, in some form, would occur, causing an increase in GHGs; so even if the poor of the future are more economically developed and well-equipped to deal with climate harms than they are at present, they’ll have a larger issue to deal with. While not explored by the authors, it is possible that the implementation of SRM and the short term temperature reductions could reverse the advances in mitigation we have made as a society due to this moral hazard. The consequences associated with the dissipation of SRM in a future with increased levels of greenhouse gasses is a worse scenario than continuing down the path we’re already on: “Once started, it would be dangerous to stop unless enough carbon had been sucked out of the atmosphere to lower the earth’s temperatures below a safe threshold. Otherwise, a sudden halt to geoengineering could cause temperatures to skyrocket, potentially faster than life could adapt, a concept known as ‘termination shock.’”

Another concern associated with SRM is the optimal implementation of it. Emerging SRM research points to the fact that SRM is not as short a term commitment as we had once theorized; rather than remain suspended in the atmosphere for a matter of decades, it is likely that “If world leaders decide to use solar geoengineering to meet international climate goals, they could be locked into it for a century or more, the study suggests.” An obvious risk associated with this would be “the need for long-term international cooperation.” Horton & Kieth’s arguments against adaptation center around its localized nature, inherently meaning that wealthy nations would have more access to it than the poor nations harmed by the wealthy nations in the first place. Unless global wealth redistribution occurs, they claim, adaptation seems impossible to be justly implemented; what they neglected to mention is that the same is true for SRM in some sense. SRM is costly, and not every nation can afford to inject aerosolized particles high into the atmosphere above their nation. Thus, wealthy state actors have more access to the technology, and every economic incentive to use it to their own advantage. In the same way a state would not simply build infrastructure in another country out of the goodness of their heart, they have equally little incentive to inject aerosols that might protect another country. This facet becomes dangerous when a nation begins to use SRM to only their advantage, potentially heavily altering weather patterns elsewhere (areas which cannot financially justify taking such climate action). This, too, would disproportionately impact the global poor at unprecedented magnitudes. Even in the idealized, hypothetical case in which a perfect moral actor is able to distribute SRM across the atmosphere, it is not well understood, and the delta between small-scale theoretical models and global implementation is massive, and admittedly will be fraught with errors if implemented. The long-term commitment to the technology “‘increases the possibility of something bad happening,’” as by the time a 200-year-long model of SRM studying its long-term risks would conclude, its status as a pertinent option will have well since passed. An implementation of SRM would also require a long period of unprecedented political stability, such that each nation state would continuously adhere to an agreed upon aerosolization protocol; as its unknown hazards unfold, political relations may deteriorate as countries begin to try to use SRM to their own advantage.

Horton & Kieth argue that SRM is the better option because it helps the global poor more in the near term than mitigation would. In their work, they mentioned a piece of research that argued against SRM, writing that it could disrupt Asian and African summer monsoons, as well as suggesting that “sub-Saharan Africa would have less cloud cover after geoengineering than with climate change alone.” They counter these claims by writing that the “assertion that SRM hurts the poor requires demonstrating that those regions where damages from SRM are largest correlate with poverty.” The areas in which sub-Saharan Africa and Africa/Asia converge are largely correlated with poverty. Would a country already enduring drought elect to further that drought in favor of slightly reduced global temperatures? To me, that doesn’t sound like a benefit to the least advantaged group as much as it sounds like a benefit to every actor. Not only are their arguments morally schizophrenic, but they’re also somewhat nonsensical. 

Horton & Kieth and other proponents of SRM know that it is not a viable long-term solution, carries potentially devastating risks, and will do nothing to fix climate change, potentially even making it worse through moral hazard. Its proponents choose the worse solution for climate justice when compared with mitigation which we know would work and carries less risk to future humans and non-humans while addressing the root cause of the issue. Whatever the motive for these proponents, their arguments are still morally schizophrenic and ethically wrong because it involves sparing themselves from sacrificing comforts in the near term at the expense of the lives of future generations, both rich and poor. 

SRM is a bad option today because it is a mode of procrastination, delaying serious addressing of the root cause driving the need for such technologies. It is bad because it alleviates the moral burden of would-be buck-passers, endangering the very existence of future generations so that people now may continue to exist in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed. It is bad because it is dangerous, admitted by even the most vocal SRM advocates. Because agents today choose the bad option over what they know is the good option, SRM advocacy is morally wrong. But to what end is it wrong? Gardiner argues in favor of asking the justificatory question and the contextual question to better define the catastrophic scenario in which SRM research may be justified. I don’t think that time will ever come; our society is not, and will not be in time for it to matter, be globalized enough for the collaborative demands and the long-term commitment required for the implementation of SRM. Mitigation must occur at any cost as soon as possible. If SRM were implemented, the issue would only grow as the can is kicked farther down the road. Mitigation would be extremely difficult to implement now; if we delay its implementation with SRM, we may eventually no longer have a choice. 

Works Cited

Gardiner, Stephen M. “Geoengineering and Moral Schizophrenia: What Is the Question.” Essay. In Climate Change Geoengineering: Philosophical Perspectives, Legal Issues, and Governance Frameworks, 11–38. Wil C. G. Burns and Andrew L. Strauss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 

Harvey, Chelsea, and E&E News. “Geoengineering Is Not a Quick Fix for the Climate Crisis, New Analysis Shows.” Scientific American, February 20, 2024. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/geoengineering-is-not-a-quick-fix-for-the-climate-crisis-new-analysis-shows/. 

Horton, Joshua, and David Kieth. “Solar Geoengineering and Obligations to the Global Poor.” Essay. In Climate Justice and Geoengineering: Ethics and Policy in the Atmospheric Anthropocene, 79–92. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.