Geoengineering: The Next Era of Geopolitics?

Dalby, Simon

doi:10.1111/gec3.12195

Cited by 71 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…SAI's low cost and its resulting 'free driver' properties often invoke considerable discomfort (Burns et al 2016, Lawrence andCrutzen 2017). While largely unstated, one possible concern that may underlie this discomfort is what one might call a deployment program's presumed 'secret driver' properties: the prospect that deploying SAI even at scale could remain undetected (Dalby 2014, Hamilton 2014, Stilgoe 2015.…”

Section: Further Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment

Smith

Wagner

2018

Environ. Res. Lett.

134

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We review the capabilities and costs of various lofting methods intended to deliver sulfates into the lower stratosphere. We lay out a future solar geoengineering deployment scenario of halving the increase in anthropogenic radiative forcing beginning 15 years hence, by deploying material to altitudes as high as ∼20 km. After surveying an exhaustive list of potential deployment techniques, we settle upon an aircraft-based delivery system. Unlike the one prior comprehensive study on the topic (McClellan et al 2012 Environ. Res. Lett. 7 034019), we conclude that no existing aircraft design-even with extensive modifications-can reasonably fulfill this mission. However, we also conclude that developing a new, purpose-built high-altitude tanker with substantial payload capabilities would neither be technologically difficult nor prohibitively expensive. We calculate early-year costs of ∼$1500 ton −1 of material deployed, resulting in average costs of ∼$2.25 billion yr −1 over the first 15 years of deployment. We further calculate the number of flights at ∼4000 in year one, linearly increasing by ∼4000 yr −1 . We conclude by arguing that, while cheap, such an aircraft-based program would unlikely be a secret, given the need for thousands of flights annually by airliner-sized aircraft operating from an international array of bases.

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Section: Further Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment

Smith

Wagner

2018

Environ. Res. Lett.

134

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“…Drawing on the idea of contextualization, scholars can pinpoint such wider social, economic, and political dynamics which are highly relevant for understanding climate–conflict links, but which are easily ignored by approaches focusing on the narrow relationships between two variables . Examples of such macrovariables include international conservation discourses, global carbon offsetting economies, or even geoengineering …”

Section: Common Methods In Climate–conflict Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Research methods for exploring the links between climate change and conflict

Ide

2017

WIREs Climate Change

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The potential links between climate change and conflict have received much attention in recent years, but there is little consensus on the issue in the relevant literature. So far, few methodological reflections exist in climate-conflict research. This is unfortunate given the tremendous innovations in methods the research field has experienced in recent years and the potential of diverse methods to shed light on different aspects of the subject matter, thereby increasing our understanding of potential climate-conflict links. In order to counteract this shortcoming, this paper provides a comprehensive review of the developments and innovations in methods in climate-conflict research. It first identifies and discusses the most common methods in the research field: large-N statistical analysis and qualitative case study. The study goes on to evaluate four new methods that have emerged particularly since 2012: integration of statistical techniques and qualitative case studies; field experiment; risk analysis based on geographical information systems (GIS); and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). The review provides an overview of these methods and their potentials and pitfalls when used to study climate-conflict links. It also discusses how future research can deal with a pluralism of methods in order to gain deeper insights into the relationship between climate change and conflict.

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“…The geopolitical consequences of large‐scale geoengineering, involving multiple players, are particularly important to transboundary issues, such as compensation for any damage to regional resources [see Horton et al ., ]. If a catastrophic regional event occurred, this could ratchet up geopolitical tensions, particularly if there was equivocal evidence of the environmental driver(s), including the possibility that some geoengineering agency (who were receiving benefit financially from their project(s)) was inadvertently complicit in such an event [ Dalby , ]. Clearly, any future governance of geoengineering [ranging from research to adaptive governance, Banerjee , ; Parson and Ernst , ; Foley et al ., ; Horton et al ., ] must take geopolitically relevant detection and attribution into account on an equal footing with those for SRM and/or CDR detection and attribution for planetary accounting.…”

Section: Developing Geopolitically Relevant Ranking Criteriamentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of geopolitically relevant ranking criteria for geoengineering methods

Boyd

2016

Earth's Future

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A decade has passed since Paul Crutzen published his editorial essay on the potential for stratospheric geoengineering to cool the climate in the Anthropocene. He synthesized the effects of the 1991 Pinatubo eruption on the planet's radiative budget and used this large-scale event to broaden and deepen the debate on the challenges and opportunities of large-scale geoengineering. Pinatubo had pronounced effects, both in the short and longer term (months to years), on the ocean, land, and the atmosphere. This rich set of data on how a large-scale natural event influences many regional and global facets of the Earth System provides a comprehensive viewpoint to assess the wider ramifications of geoengineering. Here, I use the Pinatubo archives to develop a range of geopolitically relevant ranking criteria for a suite of different geoengineering approaches. The criteria focus on the spatial scales needed for geoengineering and whether large-scale dispersal is a necessary requirement for a technique to deliver significant cooling or carbon dioxide reductions. These categories in turn inform whether geoengineering approaches are amenable to participation (the "democracy of geoengineering") and whether they will lead to transboundary issues that could precipitate geopolitical conflicts. The criteria provide the requisite detail to demarcate different geoengineering approaches in the context of geopolitics. Hence, they offer another tool that can be used in the development of a more holistic approach to the debate on geoengineering.

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Geoengineering: The Next Era of Geopolitics?

Cited by 71 publications

References 41 publications

Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment

Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment

Research methods for exploring the links between climate change and conflict

Development of geopolitically relevant ranking criteria for geoengineering methods

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