Greg, list and ccs
1. I found that Andrew's message of yesterday was mostly about an
evening lecture. That was preceded by a free all-day seminar which had this
description:
The workshop will continue on 30th July with a day-long seminar at the
University of New South Wales. Speakers will include Nigel Clark, Jim Falk,
Lauren Rickards, Josh Wodak,Jeremy Walker, Rebecca Pearse and Jeffrey McGee.
I hope someone could summarize any conclusions coming from that dialog.
In particular, was there discussion on the ethical differences between SRM and
CDR?
2. To your good list below, I would add a need for ethicists looking
closely at each of the CDR approaches - not only a superficial comparison. To
the best of my knowledge there has still not been a single peer-reviewed
article on the ethics of biochar (on which hundreds of millions of dollars are
being expended - with to my knowledge no real concern raised by anyone).
Ron
On Aug 1, 2014, at 9:24 PM, Greg Rau <[email protected]> wrote:
> Since ethicists seem more than willing to point out ethical flaws re actions
> against climate/CO2, how about we turn this around:
> 1) What are the ethically perfect ways of solving the climate/CO2 problem?
> 2) What do we do (and what are the ethics) if "ethical" solutions are not
> adequately employed or fail to solve the climate/CO2 problem?
> 3) Shall we let ethical perfection be the enemy of any effective climate/CO2
> solution?
> 4) Might the ethics of taking a particular climate/CO2 action differ in a
> society experiencing a +2 deg C warming vs a society under a +6 deg C warming?
> 5) Shall we then allow present ethics to dictate the options we research and
> make available to future generations under potentially different ethical
> restraints?
>
> It would seem that the first order of business would be to find out via
> research what the cost- and environmental-effectiveness is of each
> conceivable option. We and esp future generations can then debate what
> option or combination can be ethically deployed and under what circumstances.
> Failing to quickly and fully understand our options from technical,
> economic, and environmental perspectives would seem to put at risk our
> chances of success under any measure of ethics.
>
> Greg
>
>
>
>
> From: Andrew Lockley <[email protected]>
> To: geoengineering <[email protected]>
> Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2014 5:04 PM
> Subject: [geo] Failure to deal with ethics will make climate engineering
> 'unviable'
>
> Failure to deal with ethics will make climate engineering 'unviable'
> http://gu.com/p/4vd69
> Failure to deal with ethics will make climate engineering 'unviable'
> Environmental philosopher warns major ethical, political, legal and social
> issues around geoengineering must be addressed
> Graham Readfearn in Sydney
> 22:00 CEST Thu 31 July 2014
> Geoengineering, also known as climate modification, falls into two categories
> - carbon dioxide removal or solar radiation management. Photograph: ISS/NASA
> Research into ways to engineer the Earth's climate as a last-ditch response
> to global warming will be rendered "unviable" if the associated ethical
> issues are not tackled first, a leading environmental philosopher has warned.
> Prof Stephen Gardiner, of the University of Washington, Seattle, told the
> Guardian that so-called geoengineering risked making problems worse for
> future generations.
> Gardiner was in Sydney for a two-day symposium that aimed to grapple with the
> moral and ethical consequences of geoengineering, also known as climate
> modification.
> Later this year, the United States' National Academy of Sciences is due to
> publish a key report into the "technical feasibility" of a number of proposed
> geoengineering methods, which fall into two categories.
> Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) tries to cut the levels of the greenhouse gas in
> the atmosphere and store it, for example, in trees, algae or underground.
> A second category, known as solar radiation management tries to lower the
> amount of energy entering the Earth's atmosphere from the sun by, for
> example, spraying sulphate particles into the stratosphere or whitening
> clouds.
> Gardiner said political inertia was one reason why the world had failed to
> respond meaningfully to climate change and rising greenhouse gases.
> "There's a temptation for the current generation particularly in the rich
> countries to take benefits now and pass the severe costs on to the future,"
> he said.
> "Arguably that's one of the big reasons we have failed so far on climate
> policy because we have succumbed to that temptation.
> "But when it comes to geoengineering, one of my biggest worries is that we
> might pick geoengineering as an intervention that replicates that pattern.
> "We might try and adopt a quick technological fix but one that holds the
> worst impacts for a few decades without much attention to what happens after
> that. What does happen after that could be even worse than what would unfold
> if we just allowed the negative climate impacts in the near term to
> materialise."
> He said that it was time to engage with the ethical and moral questions now
> that major scientific institutions and a growing group of researchers were
> starting to consider geoengineering.
> "We are still in the early stages and very few people have written and talked
> about this. The good news is that the major scientific reports generally do
> signal that they think there are major ethical, political, legal and social
> issues that need investigating. The crucial thing is whether we get beyond
> saying that as a throwaway line to actually dealing with those implications.
> "Unless you can deal with these social and political issues then any kind of
> geoengineering would be unviable anyway - or at least any remotely ethically
> defensible version would be unviable."
> In 2009, a Royal Society report called for more research into geoengineering
> and concluded that CDR techniques "should be regarded as preferable".
> A proposed experiment to test a way to deliver particles into the upper
> atmosphere using a balloon and a one kilometre-long pipe was cancelled in
> 2012 after it was reported that two of the scientists involved had submitted
> patent applications that were similar to the techniques being proposed.
> A study earlier this year in the journal Nature Communications comparing five
> different proposed methods of climate engineering found all were "relatively
> ineffective" while carrying "potentially severe side effects" that would be
> difficult to stop.
> Prof Jim Falk, of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute at the
> University of Melbourne, told the symposium there were more than 40 distinct
> methods that could be described as geoengineering, including planting large
> numbers of trees and painting roofs white.
> He said: "There's a huge array of ideas and they go from local scale to
> intermediate scale to a global scale. The scale, the impacts and the risks
> all go up together."
> * Graham Readfearn's travel and accommodation was paid for by the symposium
> organisers.
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