Navigating the Geopolitical Risks of Solar Geoengineering

Solar geoengineering, the deliberate modification of Earth’s atmosphere to curb global warming, still seems like science fiction. However, research is progressing rapidly, and geoengineering’s potential implementation has drawn the attention of the United States Congress, which has mandated a research plan to explore its human and societal impacts.

On the podcast, two experts explore one of the least understood but potentially weighty societal issues surrounding solar geoengineering, namely the potential for the technology to be the source of geopolitical tension and even war.

Scott Moore, a Practice Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and Craig Martin, a specialist in public international law at Washburn University, discuss their forthcoming research that considers the uneven distribution of benefits and risks that would result from geoengineering and how this might lead to conflict between countries.  They also explore governance frameworks to help manage geopolitical tensions if and when solar geoengineering is implemented.

Full Transcript

Andy Stone: Welcome to the Energy Policy Now podcast from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. I’m Andy Stone. Solar geoengineering, or the deliberate modification of Earth’s atmosphere to halt the rise in global temperatures, remains the stuff of science fiction. Yet, research into the technology is advancing, and the prospects for its implementation are real enough to have captured the attention of the United States Congress, which has mandated the development of a research plan to explore geoengineering’s human and societal consequences.

On today’s podcast, we’re going to explore one of the least understood but potentially weighty social questions surrounding solar geoengineering. Namely, the potential for the technology to be the source of geopolitical tension and even war. Today’s two guests have written a paper to be published later this year in the Harvard Journal of International Law that explores precisely this unwanted outcome and why global governance frameworks must be developed to prevent such conflict.

Scott Moore is Practice Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Craig Martin is a Professor of Law at Washburn University who specializes in public international law, in particular, law pertaining to armed conflict and climate change. In the podcast, the two will explain why solar geoengineering’s benefits and risks are likely to be unevenly distributed, and how this might lead to conflict between countries. And they’ll explore governance frameworks to help achieve global consensus on geoengineering if and when it’s implemented. Scott and Craig, welcome to the podcast.

Scott Moore: Thanks so much, Andy. Great to be here.

Craig Martin: Yeah, thank you very much for having us.

Stone: So Scott, could you start us out by introducing solar geoengineering and its potential benefits and risks?

Moore: Absolutely. And geoengineering is a term and a concept that’s kind of slowly seeping into both the policy discussion and even pop culture, and some folks listening to this podcast may even recognize treatments, fictional treatments of geoengineering, like Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Several kind of works of science fiction also deal with this issue. There are lots of different forms or approaches to geoengineering.

Our particular focus in the paper, and I think the focus of our conversation here today, is going to be on a type of geoengineering called solar geoengineering. A little bit more technically, people tend to refer to it as solar radiation modification, or management SRM. And basically what that refers to are different techniques or methods for affecting the amount of incoming solar radiation from the sun that reaches the Earth’s surface and contributes to the warming of the planet.

But it’s worth just sort of mentioning at the outset that, in general, that’s great. We owe life on this planet in part to that incoming solar radiation. Without it, we would have a very cold, probably very barren planet. The problem is, of course, that we have been warming the planet over the last several hundred years through several forms of human activity, especially burning lots of fossil fuels, which produce carbon dioxide that accumulates in the atmosphere and results in more of that incoming solar radiation being trapped by the atmosphere and kept close to the Earth’s surface, where it contributes to warming.

So the basic idea behind solar geoengineering and solar radiation management is the idea of trying to reduce or modulate that amount of incoming solar radiation so that you can produce a cooling effect. There are, again, several different ways of going about this solar radiation management, all the way, at the most sort of sci-fi level, basically creating giant solar sunshades in space. But the more kind of practical forms of doing that, and what we’re going to focus on in our discussion here today, and Craig and I focus on in the paper, is essentially recreating the effect of a volcanic eruption by releasing small particles into the upper atmosphere, where they help to form clouds.

That is an approach known as stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI. And again, that’s essentially doing something that we’ve seen in the historical record, most famously in the aftermath of a 1992 volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo, where, as a result of that eruption, a lot of ash gets injected into the upper atmosphere, where again, it acts as nuclei for clouds to form. that then reflect some of that incoming solar radiation back out into space and produce a cooling effect. So that’s, broadly speaking, what we’re talking about here.

A couple of things that are worth just sort of additional points on that. This is an approach that we have been able, because of these volcanic eruptions, to kind of see in action. So we do have an idea of what effect in doing that seeding the upper atmosphere might have. But there are several risks that could follow from that, and there are some uncertainties. And some of those risks include reduced rainfall and drying in some mid-latitude regions, areas like the Sahel that are already quite dry, negative effects on ozone, a couple of other atmospheric issues.

So there are lots of risks that attach to the idea of SAI, but it is something that, from these recent volcanic eruptions, we can say pretty reliably would produce a cooling effect. And of course, that is noteworthy in relation to the accelerating climate crisis that we’re experiencing. The last thing I would just flag, and I’d certainly invite Craig to add as well, but this is an idea or a concept, so geo engineering in general, but very particularly these forms of solar geoengineering, SRM, and most particularly, stratospheric aerosol injection. It’s been getting more attention as the scale of our climate crisis intensifies, and that’s both from science fiction writers, from scientists and researchers, and from the policy community. And organizations like the White House, US intelligence community, and others have released recent reports that look at effects, both potentially good and bad when it comes to climate change.

Stone: In terms of those benefits and risks, one thing I want to bring up, and I also want to, I guess, direct this to Scott, is there’s a generational burden that comes out of this, right? Once you’ve started this process of geoengineering, you can’t just stop it on a dime, you’ve got to keep it going. Wonder if you could address that risk as well?

Moore: Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for that, Andy, because it is a critical point. So if we think about solar geoengineering as a response to climate change, it does not actually do anything about the underlying issue, which is the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the Earth’s atmosphere. What it does do is to counteract some of the warming effect of that accumulation. You’re sort of blunting the effect of climate change, if you want to think about that that way, but you’re not really doing anything about the underlying problem.

And the implication of that, which, as you just alluded to, is that if you stop doing this, so if you stop seeding the upper atmosphere through stratospheric aerosol injection, you’re going to lose that cooling effect, and you’re going to be right back where you were. And in fact, you’re probably going to see rapid warming or a rebound effect once you stop doing that, that cooling. And so it is a strategy that you’re basically committing to doing, as long as you’re not reducing emissions, and therefore, reducing the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

And it is critical to say up front, that as a potential response to climate change, the value of SRM, of solar geoengineering, is entirely predicated on the idea that you are basically using it as a short term way of cooling the planet while reducing emissions. You’re essentially buying time to reduce those emissions to a level that will reduce overall climate change and the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. You’ve got to cut the emissions, otherwise, there’s really no long term benefit to solar geoengineering.

Stone: Now, one of the interesting aspects of the technology is that it may be something that is relatively easy for an individual actor, and be that a country or some other entity, to unilaterally undertake, and this is what’s known as a free driver problem. Scott, I wonder if you could tell us about this.

Moore: Sure. Yeah, one thing that we really kind of emphasize, in fact, you know, part of the reason we wrote the paper, is that in relation to the scale of climate impacts that we’re seeing, geoengineering, and in particular, stratospheric aerosol injection, is kind of shaping up to be a relatively inexpensive and straightforward potential kind of response to that. And it’s maybe worth saying that, just over the last year, I mean, you know, basically the story of climate change is increasingly bad news from a climate perspective.

But in the last year or so, we saw two really alarming studies, that the world is much closer than we thought. Two key tipping points. One is the permanent destabilization, and then therefore, loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. And the second is shut down of what’s called AMOC, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which really helps to drive a lot of the Earth’s climate, especially in Europe and North America. And you know, these two things are not quite inevitable, but we’re closer to those tipping points than we thought, which is to say that we’re seeing more dramatic impacts of climate change at lower levels of warming than was once thought.

And so it’s sort of in that context that you jump over to something like stratospheric aerosol injection, which folks have been looking at now in sort of a serious way for a couple decades. And basically, the estimates are that it would be fairly inexpensive, on the order of a few billions to tens of billions of dollars per year to do this, and would not really require any special or new technology. You could deliver the particles, the aerosols, up into the atmosphere using aircraft, balloons, there are several possible delivery mechanisms, none of which are, you know, really that technologically complicated.

So it’s kind of, from that perspective, that the practical barriers to doing this seem fairly low. And that creates what economists often call a free driver problem. So this is the opposite of the much better known free rider concept, which is basically the idea that humans, you know, are generally pretty selfish, and most of the time would be quite happy to have someone else do the work for something that, nonetheless, benefits them. We can all think of, you know, examples in our everyday life, where maybe, you know, a neighbor organizes a cleanup, which makes you feel better about your block or your neighborhood, but if you don’t actually have to go do it, that’s probably even better for you, if someone else takes that responsibility. That’s free riding.

Free driving is the opposite, where the costs of doing something are so low that people are actually kind of incentivized to do it, and stratospheric aerosol injection may fall into that category. As the effects of climate change worsen and accelerate the relative cheapness and simplicity of SAI may lead more and more parties to seriously consider doing it. That’s really the premise of our paper. And the last thing to say is that it’s so cheap and easy, that very possibly SAI could be accomplished by individual small countries like the Maldives that are heavily impacted by climate change, private companies, and there are already a couple of small startups who are sort of playing around in the SAI space, or even NGOs, non-state entities, environmental groups, wealthy individuals who are really worried about climate change.

That’s really the starting point for our paper, is just observing that, relative to the scale and intensity of climate change, this is a fairly cheap and easy thing to do, that, in principle, can blunt some of the worst impacts of climate change, and yet is very dangerous, and therefore, we think we need a lot more thinking about how to regulate it and prevent individual countries or companies or even individuals from doing something like SAI unilaterally.

Stone: I just want to jump in on this one. One country or one corporation, whatever, could do this by itself, because once these aerosols are up into the atmosphere, they disperse, I guess, evenly around the globe, and have an even impact on solar radiation, or blocking that solar radiation coming into Earth. So it could be done at one point on the globe, but the effect would be global.

Moore: That’s correct, yep. I mean, to an approximation, there are some technical nuances, but yeah, more or less, this is something that you could sort of do from a number of points on the globe. But you know, if at sufficient scale, it would have global implications, not all of them positive. And that’s really where a lot of the risk and concern, you know, comes in. And I do want to bring Craig in. I guess one sort of final thing I want to just flag at the outset is that there may be some good reasons to really think hard about whether the scale of our climate crisis and the intensity makes something like stratospheric aerosol injection really worth considering.

As an international community, we don’t necessarily, or at least I don’t, I’ll invite Craig, you know, to give any particular views he might have on this, but we’re not necessarily saying that that it should be ruled out. What we are saying is that the risk of somebody doing it without any consultation is pretty high and is growing. And therefore, we really need to develop a better, stronger set of rules to ensure that somebody isn’t doing something like stratospheric aerosol injection and potentially imposing these harms and risks without a proper discussion and consultation of how those risks stack up against the potential benefits.

Stone: Craig, so as Scott just began to allude to, there is no governance framework right now to guide research into the technology, into its impacts, and there’s no framework at this point for global dialogue to agree on its implementation if and when that would happen. What mechanisms might be developed to govern SAI going forward?

Martin: Well, I think, I mean, there’s a lot to be said actually, before we get into what sort of governance structure might be developed. I think it’s worth noting, as you allude to, that there’s very little in the way of a governance structure in place now that would operate to either constrain unilateral action or to regulate the development and to coordinate agreement and approval of any collective and cooperative engagement in SAI, or SRM more generally. And I think just to backtrack on a few of the things that Scott said, and I think are worth emphasizing, is that SRM in general, and SAI in particular, are really aimed at moderating or modulating temperature increases, which, of course, is one of the worst outcomes of climate change.

It’s the effect that is having the biggest impact right now and is starting to really, I think, inject itself into collective public consciousness. Finally, right, in the last couple of years, we’ve seen temperature increases in ways that are really starting to get through to the general public. But as Scott alluded to, it’s really the concentration of greenhouse gasses that is the problem. And the problem with SRM and SAI in particular is that they do nothing to mitigate the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

And so you’re treating the symptom, not the causes. And so the governance structure that’s in place right now is aimed at mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s getting at the causes of climate change. And so it hasn’t really contemplated, and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the later Paris Agreement, which is a protocol under the UN FCC, do not really contemplate, and therefore, do not have provisions that regulate the idea of solar radiation modification, or SAI in particular.

And thus, you know, when we look at the actual legal provisions in these treaties, and we look at other treaties that might have some relevance, like the Montreal Protocol on Ozone, there’s nothing really there that you can, you know, sort of latch on to as a provision that would constrain or that would impose responsibility on a state or a non-state actor for engaging in this kind of unilateral effort. And so I think that, you know, as Scott alluded to, one, there’s little in the way of governance to constrain individual state action. And moreover, there’s very little in the way of domestic regulation that would prevent non-state actors. So as Scott referenced, the one company that has already engaged in sort of experimental work on SAI, it did so in Mexico, specifically for the reason that Mexico didn’t have any kind of regulation in place that would prevent this kind of activity.

So this is one of the biggest sort of problems that we see, is that there’s nothing that’s going to constrain this. And as Scott alluded to, there is this very differentiated distribution of potential risk from SAI, right? So the negative consequences of SAI would be things like altering both weather and climactic patterns, such that you might see the suspension of monsoons in some places like South Asia, monsoons that those countries depend on for food security, which would therefore result in famine. Drought would lead to migration, displacement of populations.

So you see the real negative consequences, or possible potential negative consequences of SAI having sort of geopolitical ramifications. And therefore, the risk that unilateral SAI poses is that some countries are going to see this as a real threat to national security, and are potentially going to respond to any proposed unilateral SAI effort as a threat to international peace and security, which is an aspect of the risk that hasn’t been fully appreciated and fully discussed.

Stone: Would that unilateral action on SAI potentially be considered an act of aggression by some countries for which SAI would have, on the balance, offer many more problems than benefits? And would action in response to that, even military action, be justified in self-defense?

Martin: So this is precisely the sort of issue and question that we grapple with in our paper. So on the one hand, our view is that the international legal regimes that govern climate change do not create sufficient constraints on this kind of unilateral solar radiation modification efforts, and so that’s a governance problem. On the other hand, we think that countries would perceive a unilateral effort like this as being a threat to international peace and security and a threat to their national security, and rising to the level that they might actually contemplate a use of force against a country that was proposing to engage in unilateral SAI.

And this, by the way, I mean, Scott had made a number of references to science fiction. This exact scenario has been fleshed out in a number of science fiction or climate fiction novels, like Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. Indeed, one of the episodes of the sort of acclaimed and star studded series by Apple TV on climate change called “Extrapolations,” focuses on an SAI effort that results in a use of force against the entity that’s engaging in this.

And so would an SAI effort, a unilateral SAI effort, be viewed As an act of aggression? Possibly not an act of aggression, per se, but it would certainly be perceived as a threat to national security, and a threat to national security that might rise to the level to triggering the use of force. Now, your question was, well, would it be justified? Well, for that, you have to turn to the international legal regime that governs the use of force, and, as it stands today, this regime, which is called the Jus Ad Bellum Regime, would absolutely not justify the use of force against a country for engaging in unilateral SAI.

But the problem is that the Jus Ad Bellum regime has been under a lot of strain in the last 20 years. We’ve seen countries trying to modify the justifications for uses of force. The exceptions to the prohibition on the use of force in the United Nations Charter. We’ve seen efforts to modify these limits and prohibitions on the use of force for reasons of dealing with nuclear proliferation, transnational terrorism, humanitarian intervention, and humanitarian crises. And so, in precisely the same manner that we’ve seen the Jus Ad Bellum regime sort of distorted, and with creative arguments being raised to justify uses of force to deal with what are perceived as novel threats, we anticipate, and one might predict, that states would again come up with creative arguments for justifying the use of force against a country that was about to engage in unilateral SAI in a manner that was perceived as being a threat to that country’s, you know, the moving country’s, food security, for example.

And so we do think that, indeed, there is this threat or this risk that unilateral SAI would pose a geopolitical risk to the point of potentially triggering armed conflict. And a number of international institutions, including the United Nations Environmental Program, the IPCC itself, as well as the United States intelligence community, have alluded to this geopolitical risk associated with unilateral SAI, but they haven’t actually unpacked it and explained what that geopolitical risk is. And part of the focus of our paper is to do precisely that, to unpack it and to explain why it is that the Jus Ad Bellum regime and international law is not likely to constrain a use of force against a country that tried to engage in unilateral SAI, and that, therefore, this is precisely why a unilateral effort in SAI poses this geopolitical risk that isn’t sufficiently factored into the analysis.

Like, Scott alluded to, the fact that we need to sort of balance the cost and the benefits of SAI generally, and in that debate, you know, we need to look at all of the potential advantages and disadvantages of engaging in this stop gap measure while we get energy transition and greenhouse gas emissions in check. But one of those risks is not being sufficiently analyzed, and that is this risk of potential armed conflict if countries go it alone. And therefore, we make the argument that this is one more reason why we need a much more robust and stronger governance structure in place to constrain this kind of unilateral engagement in solar geoengineering.

Stone: You know, I want to go on a tangent for just one moment, and I believe it’s in the White House report on geoengineering research that came out about a year ago, but there’s this concept of when you’re considering geoengineering, SAI more specifically, but kind of the range of different technological options, there’s this risk versus risk analysis that has to go on. You’ve got a risk with no action. Climate change is not addressed. Mitigation is not successful. Temperatures rise. That brings a lot of problems. And then you have the risk of implementing SAI or some other geoengineering technology, which brings its own risks. There are no ideal solutions here, right?

Martin: No, I think that’s exactly right. And I think that that risk versus risks analysis has to confront, first and foremost, the fact that we are not engaging in mitigation quickly enough, right? So the IPCC’s latest reports indicate that we are on a path to somewhere between 2.5 and four degrees Celsius increased by the end of the century. 2.5 degrees, the implications of that are fairly severe. A four degree increases seen as pretty catastrophic. And what people do not sufficiently appreciate is that the greenhouse gas emission concentrations already in the atmosphere have baked in an increase of over two degrees.

So even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today, there is enough greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere now that would lead to something like a two degree increase by the end of the century. And so if we don’t find the carbon removal technology necessary to bring those concentrations down, we’re going to see something like a two degree increase. And therefore, there is this pressure to do something to decrease the temperature increases, and this is where I think the appeal of SAI comes in. And so there is, indeed, a risk of doing nothing in terms of solar radiation modification.

But balanced against that are all of these other risks, right? The risks of climate and weather pattern disruptions, ocean acidification, depletion of the ozone. And I think that Scott alluded to this, but just to emphasize the fact that there is this so called moral hazard, right? That if we engage in SAI or SRN, such that we moderate temperature increases, it reduces the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and likely, diverts both energy and attention and resources away from mitigation, which is, of course, the much more important process.

So those are the normal risks that are associated with SAI. But in addition to those risks, you have the risk of unilateral SAI, which creates all of these other further risks of geopolitical risks, including the potential risk for armed conflict. So you’re quite right that there is this risk versus risk. There are no good options, in a sense, and it’s looking for the least bad option in this mix of options.

Moore: That was a fantastic set of comments by Craig, and I think added a lot of important points. There were just two that occurred to me that I’ll quickly jump to. One is on the sort of what the value of SRM would be, or of undertaking SAI would be, from a climate perspective, we’ve already talked about moral hazard, the fact that it’s not solving the underlying problem. There is kind of a potential part of the solution space to climate change, though, that’s emerging, and that, I think, part of the growing interest in SAI helps to explain, which is to say that although we’re seeing these more dramatic climate impacts earlier than we kind of expected a few years ago, we’re also starting to see some of the really important pieces of the puzzle of long term decarbonization falling into place, most notably the scaling of wind and solar, which is pretty much, you know, been unprecedented in the history of technology almost.

That’s good news. It’s just kind of a question of how you buy enough time for that kind of to get to that end state while avoiding catastrophic climate impacts in the meantime. And I think that’s really kind of where, you know, the idea of SAI kind of has some conceptual appeal. Craig already, I think, really clearly outlined the risks involved in that. The other thing I would just point out as a practical matter is this is deeply, deeply controversial though, the idea of undertaking any form of geoengineering, including SAI. It is something that, you know, is pretty much taboo in the COP negotiations, largely for the moral hazard reason that Craig mentioned.

It’s also worth noting that a very modest resolution put forward, the Swiss government at the UN Environment assembly earlier this year or late last year, was basically shot down, even though all it did was create essentially an expert group to do some more analysis of solar geoengineering. So it’s a deeply controversial approach, and I think that goes to the sorts of conflict and geopolitical risks that Craig mentioned.

Stone: Well, I’d like to take that a step further. So, as you just pointed out, and I find this kind of shocking and very interesting at the same time, within the Paris context, this is not really being discussed, it’s too controversial. Yet, as you mentioned earlier, some sort of global framework is going to be needed to cover the research implementation and the Jus Ad Bellum considerations that surround SAI. What would a framework look like, in what context, given that at least at this point, it’s not really something that you talked about within the Paris context. What context might it be developed within?

Martin: One of the arguments that we make in our forthcoming paper is that, while a lot of discussion about geoengineering and even solar radiation management is predicated on some idea of trying to facilitate research and development and figure out the best ways to develop geoengineering, we argue that for SAI there needs to be a very specific governance structure set up, in particular to constrain this possibility of unilateral action, and that, for that purpose, you need to have a multilateral agreement along with an institutional structure, a secretariat that can engage in the kind of monitoring and information sharing and so forth that is typical of these kinds of regimes. And that seems like a very high order, to develop a multilateral treaty on an issue which, as Scott alluded to, is highly controversial and is seen as taboo in many — in sort of many climate circles.

But in our view, and the argument that we make in the paper, is that both the Montreal Protocol and the UNFCCC itself, and the COP structure that is subsidiary to the UNFCCC would be the best places to begin, right? And so there’s precedent for this. So if you take a look at the Montreal Protocol, and I don’t think we have sort of the time and scope to get too much into the weeds of this, but, you know, the Kigali Amendment of the Montreal Protocol was an amendment to the Montreal Protocol that created a new agreement on emissions that actually are not ozone depleting, but were are greenhouse gas emissions.

And therefore, you know, we have this precedent of the Montreal Protocol being used for climate change purposes, and the superstructure is already in place, right? So that the negotiations could be facilitated, the institutional structure is there, the technological expertise is in place within the secretariat of both the Montreal Protocol and the UNFCCC COP superstructure. And so either one of these institutional foundations would be a good place to start for the negotiations of a multilateral agreement that would be focused specifically on SAI, and specifically on regulating the development, ensuring transparency relating to all research and development and experimentation, and in particular, constraining any kind of unilateral efforts to deploy SAI without multilateral approval. So that’s sort of the starting point.

Moore: One just quick, quick additional point on that. There have been, you know, a lot of — we talked earlier about some of the sort of, like, reports that have come out on, there’s been a lot of sort of closed door discussion of solar geoengineering among sort of the great and good. There was a period where the elders, the sort of group of, you know, former heads of state, was interested in in this approach. I know, you know, several major emitter governments talk about it. But none of them, nobody’s really been been willing to come out and put this on the table as a sort of practical thing to look into. And again, I think that underscores the sensitivity of it and this risk that we really highlight of conflict.

Stone: I want to ask, is consensus on implementation in particular even achievable? I mean, when you talk about climate mitigation, there aren’t necessarily immediate impacts. When you talk about solar geoengineering and SAI, the impacts are immediate and felt globally, as you already mentioned, they may not be felt equally. Given that, can we get all countries aligned in a way to actually implement SAI if we would get to that point?

Moore: It’s a tall order, as Craig mentioned. We do think, though, that there is some scope. You know, I already kind of mentioned that the closed door discussion. I’ve been able to kind of, you know, broach that topic with some major emitter government officials. And I think there is recognition that it is something, and here I’m referring specifically to the governance arrangements that would be needed to conduct something like SAI responsibly, warrant further attention. I think we are very far from what, as Craig mentioned, we will ultimately need, which is some type of multilateral agreement. Whether it’s, you know, kind of nested under UNFCCC or something else.

We’re very far from that. But I do think there is kind of underappreciated interest in beginning those discussions. And, you know, I think from a policy perspective, that’s really the place to start, is just to kind of begin those dialogues. And I would also just kind of flag that there was a report that came out in March from an official advisory board to the US Secretary of State that included that specific recommendation, that the US Department of State investigate the feasibility of launching kind of a structured dialogue on geoengineering governance with other countries. So I do think it’s, you know, there’s something to work off of. And I think one of our key points is that the risk is kind of at a point where, even though this is going to be hard work, it’s work that we really have to dig into.

Martin: Yeah, I would just add to that, I think that there’s precedent for what are sort of called mini-lateral discussions that have ultimately led to multilateral agreements. And so the partial Test Ban Treaty, which is a treaty that prohibits nuclear testing, for example, as well as the Montreal Protocol itself, grew out of discussions among smaller groups of countries, like-minded countries that shared certain concerns, and then that sort of mini-lateral negotiation then drew in other countries and developed into a multilateral agreement.

And I think that, to your question, you know, can we reach a consensus, I think it will be very difficult to reach a consensus on the deployment of SAI, because I think that a lot of the countries that are most likely to suffer the worst of the disadvantages, the negative consequences, will likely hold out. But I do think that it’s more plausible to get consensus on a constraint against unilateral engagement in SAI. I think most countries have an interest in preventing other countries from engaging in SAI against their wishes. And so I think that that’s something that, as Scott alluded to, has to at least be the focus of preliminary discussions. You know, we can’t simply ignore the problem, given the growing risk and given, you know, the free driver problem that we’ve outlined.

Stone: Let me ask you all a final question here, and that is, how much time do we actually have to act on this? When might we see, conceivably, and I know this is a crystal ball, but when might we see SAI ready to go, and how optimistic are you that governance structures around SAI will be ready in time to address any movement?

Martin: Well, I think — I mean, Scott may have different views on this, but I think, first and foremost, you know, the point that we make in the paper is that SAI is is ready to go now. The studies on SAI indicate that the technology already exists. It would not be very difficult for even mid-level countries to bring the resources to bear to develop the — for example, the high altitude airline fleets necessary as a delivery mechanism for the aerosols. So we could see this in the very near future, given a certain triggering event.

So, you know, Scott mentioned the famous novel that was made famous, in part, by President Obama at the time, Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson, begins with a heat wave event that kills millions of people in India and triggers the Indian government into engaging in an SAI effort. And so, I mean, that’s, of course, climate fiction, but it’s a very plausible scenario, where, if we saw a sort of horrific event that galvanized action in some part of the world, it could lead to the engagement in unilateral SAI. But by the same token, as we’ve discussed earlier, there’s already private entities experimenting with this. I mean, the one company that engaged in SAI from Mexico has a business plan to try to sell carbon offsets that relate to the amount of cooling it’s able to create through its SAI efforts. And so we’re already in the early stages of seeing some forms of development of this.

Moore: Yeah, I think, just to add to that, I think really kind of, you know, any — almost any time. And I think that that just sort of goes to why we think this is something that really deserves much more robust attention that it’s getting. And it is getting some. You know, we’ve — as we’ve talked about, I think one of the things that I’ve come to in the course of writing this paper, and thinking about it with Craig is that, I think there’s just an urgent need to kind of bring this out in more into the open, this discussion, that, you know, a lot of people are having more behind closed doors. Because, ultimately, this is a global problem, and, you know, as a potential response, SAI would be something that would have global impacts. And therefore, it needs to be something that’s really brought into the public domain.

And just to add one other quick point to this. You know, Craig mentioned that there’s a couple companies looking at this. There’s also an Israeli startup that has at least said that it’s pursuing similar technology. It’s not clear to me exactly what the, you know, status of that is. There is also activity in the research arena, more in other forms of SRM, not SAI particularly. But suffice it to say that, you know, there is activity, and to some degree, this is being attempted at small scales. Not you know, sufficient to trigger any of the kind of planetary impacts that we’ve been talking about, but it’s something that’s very much on the cusp of being implemented at a more significant scale.

Stone: Craig and Scott, thank you very much for talking.

Martin: Thanks very much for having us.

Moore: Thanks, Andy.

Stone: Today’s guests have been Craig Martin, a Professor of Law at the Washburn University School of Law, and Scott Moore, Practice Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks for listening to Energy Policy Now. This is the final episode of season eight of the podcast. We’ll be back on September the 10 for the start of season nine, and an exciting new year of conversations with energy policy leaders here at the Climate Center. and with leaders throughout academia, industry, and policy circles. In the meantime, visit the Climate Center website for our podcast archive, as well as new research, news, and upcoming events at the center. Thanks again for listening to Energy Policy Now, and see you in September.