Blurred Lines: The Ethics and Policy of Greenhouse Gas Removal at Scale

Abstract

The topic of Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) for climate geoengineering is becoming increasingly salient following the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report and the Paris Agreement. GGR is thought of as a separate category to mitigation techniques such as low-carbon supply or demand reduction, yet multiple social, ethical and acceptability concerns cut across categories. We propose moving beyond classifying climate strategies as a set of discrete categories (which may implicitly homogenize diverse technologies), toward a prioritization of questions of scale of both technology and decision-making in the examination of social and ethical risks. This is not just a theoretical issue: important questions for policy, governance and finance are raised, for instance over the future inclusion of GGR in carbon markets. We argue that the conclusions drawn about how best to categorize, govern and incentivize any strategy will depend on the framing used, because different framings could lead to very different policy recommendations being drawn. Because of this, a robust approach to developing, governing and financing GGR should pay attention first to urgent concerns regarding democracy, justice and acceptability.

Beyond Social Acceptability: Applying Lessons from CCS Social Science to Support Deployment of BECCS

“…Others, however, make the case for separating BECCS (and other CDR approaches) from a geoengineering 'climate recovery' framing, arguing that it is better identified as an 'emission offsetting' strategy [55] to complement mitigation in a way that is comparable to existing 'enhancement of sinks' policies [56] and consistent with a view of CDR as SRM's less-risky cousin [57•]. This conceptual distinction becomes important, not just for how CDR can be incorporated into policy frameworks [56] but also when considering the ethical and governance implications [58] and, consequently, how it is perceived by different actors [25,58]. This distinction is, in part, predicated on whether CDR is used to enable deeper emission cuts in the near term or to allow an 'overshoot' in carbon budgets.…”

“…The literature in this area calls for a more democratic process, one which opens up critical discussion of wider implications, differentiating by scale rather than 'technology', to consider social, ethical, and political impacts of different levels of deployment and decision making (for example, 58,59). Ethical mapping of CCS has identified justice, prevention of harm, and technoscientific and regulatory competence as potential faultlines or areas of contention [71][72][73].…”

Incumbency, Trust and the Monsanto Effect: Stakeholder Discourses on Greenhouse Gas Removal

“…For these reasons, Dale Jamieson (2013) argues that geoengineering 'does not mark a specific category of response to climate change but simply alerts us to the fact that the approach under discussion is viewed by the speaker as novel, weird, exotic, unfamiliar, or untested' (529). There is also increasing recognition that the issues faced by GGR may in fact be quite different from those faced by SRM and that the two should therefore be disentangled (Cox et al 2018;Heyward 2013). Different approaches may also entail different forms of sociotechnical governance.…”

“…Research has also identified multiple ethical concerns associated with GGR, which means that deploying it at scale to meet emissions targets is not a foregone conclusion (Cox et al 2018).…”

“…Similarly, much of the scientific literature argues that GGR (unlike SRM) treats the root cause of the problem rather than the 'symptoms' (Minx et al 2018). Nevertheless, this characterisation of GGR has been shown to be dependent on whether the 'cause' of climate change is defined as the greenhouse gases themselves, or the irresponsible burning of fossil fuels (Cox et al 2018).…”