Well, for what it’s worth, here are two pieces of mine that address concerns that David mentions below: both the labelling problem – whether there is a morally relevant distinction between CDR and SRM – and the moral hazard problem.
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/hale/Remediation%20vs%20Steering%20--%20Final%20Published%20Version.pdf http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/hale/Hale%20--%20Geoengineering%20and%20Moral%20Hazards%20--%20Published%20version_no_cover.pdf Benjamin Hale Associate Professor/Graduate Director (ENVS) Philosophy and Environmental Studies University of Colorado, Boulder Tel: 303 735-3624; Fax: 303 735-1576 http://www.practicalreason.com <http://www.practicalreason.com/> http://cruelmistress.wordpress.com <http://cruelmistress.wordpress.com/> Ethics, Policy <http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cepe21/current> & Environment Center for Science and Technology Policy Research <http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of David Morrow Sent: Friday, January 24, 2014 8:27 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [geo] Ethical differences between CDR and SRM In an earlier thread, Ron had asked about ethicists' views on the differences between CDR and SRM. I don't know of any detailed treatment of the topic. I'd be grateful if anyone could point one out. For the reasons I'll explain below, ethicists have focused most of their attention on SRM or on specific methods of CDR, such as ocean fertilization. But I figured I'd take a stab at articulating what I see as the main differences between the ethics of CDR and the ethics of SRM. The following comments apply to SRM and CDR generally. Not all of the comments apply to all SRM or CDR technologies. I'll say a bit about that at the end. In general, SRM is much more ethically problematic than CDR. This is for four main reasons, in descending order of importance: 1. SRM involves larger, more geographically dispersed risks than CDR does. The magnitude of the risk matters because any decision to test or deploy SRM is unlikely to be unanimous, and the ethical issues involved in imposing risks on others increase with the magnitude of the risk. The geographical scope of the risk matters because imposing risks across borders raises questions of global political legitimacy that are not well understood. That is, we know much more about how such decisions ought to be settled within a country than across many countries. My sense is that some key risks are less well understood for SRM, too, which makes it harder to make good decisions. 2. CDR would (in principle) enable us to "clean up the mess we're making," while SRM would pass the problem on to future generations while keeping its worst effects at bay. Thus, SRM raises special concerns about intergenerational justice that CDR might not. (If, however, current generations built the infrastructure for CDR, pumped a lot of GHGs into the atmosphere, and then left future generations to pay the costs of capturing and sequestering the carbon, that would raise problems of intergenerational justice.) 3. SRM represents a greater intervention into natural systems than CDR does. A high-GHG world cooled by SRM is a much more heavily "managed" world than one that in which warming has been slowed or reversed by CDR. Some ethicists -- especially environmental philosophers -- think that significant intervention in natural processes is "pro tanto wrong" (roughly, "wrong to that extent"), meaning that being a significant intervention is a "wrong-making feature" of an act. This is *not* to say that all significant intervention is "wrong, all things considered." Wrong-making features can often be offset by other features of the act. To take a non-environmental example, many people would say that "being a lie" is a wrong-making feature of an act, but that lying to save an innocent person's life would be justified. To take an environmental example, large-scale agriculture represents a very significant intervention into natural systems, but it is justified (in some form) by the need to feed large numbers of people. Since SRM is a more significant intervention than (most forms of) CDR, it is ethically more problematic than (most forms of) CDR. 4. SRM is more susceptible to charges of hubris than CDR is. Sometimes this is expressed in terms of "playing God." Roughly, the idea is that believing we can manage Earth's climate through SRM requires greater confidence in our knowledge and technical abilities than does believing that we can capture and sequester carbon. Thus, it's thought that someone who claims that we can pull off SRM without bad side effects is more open to charges of overestimating our abilities than is someone who merely claims we can pull off CDR. The main overlap between SRM and CDR, ethically speaking, concerns the so-called "moral hazard" problem. This is the worry that developing SRM and/or CDR will cause the world to cut back their mitigation efforts. Some people think this is a bigger problem than others do, but I'd say it's at least as big a problem for CDR as it is for SRM. There are some other objections that apply to both SRM and CDR, but I don't think they're as important as the issues above. Finally, particular CDR technologies may share some of the ethical problems of SRM. Ocean fertilization comes to mind as posing large, poorly understood, and geographically dispersed risks. But the ethical problems with, e.g., ocean fertilization have to do with the mechanism by which it aims to capture and sequester carbon, not with the fact that it is a form of CDR per se. I hope the other ethicists lurking on the list will chime in on this topic. I'm also interested to hear from everyone else on the list. I don't think the ethics of CDR are all that well explored, so I expect we'll learn some new things from the discussion. David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
