Prof Falk and ccs:
I have seen a sizable number of CDR and SRM "classes of technical
innovations", but not 46. Can you identify a source for the 46? I think it is
not in your
"Worlds in Transition: Evolving governance......" , but if so, I am closing
in on finding a library copy. (I'll definitely purchase if you have detail on
some of those 46.) Might you have a releasable Ppt?
Any SRM or CDR conclusions by you or your audience on the dialog during
the second day of your symposium? Any balloting?
Ron
On Aug 4, 2014, at 2:20 AM, Falk Jim <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi gang,
>
> I am grateful for being copied into your interesting correspondence. The
> report was of both a public meeting with Stephen Gardiner (a philosopher) as
> keynote and myself and Lauren Riccards as respondents, and then a full day
> symposium the next day with Nigel Clark and myself as keynotes.
>
> It was on the first day that Stephen argued that ethical considerations had
> precedence in matters of climate response with special attention to
> geoengineering. On the second day I focussed on the issues of governance.
>
> Stephen did not deal with CDR at all. Instead he focussed on Stratospheric
> Sulphate Injection as a paradigm case and then sought to simplify it to the
> point that ethical reasoning could be systematically applied. My response,
> although it does not come across particularly well in the Guardian article
> was that the term "Geoengineering" has not yet stabilised and I illustrated
> this with some 46 diffferent classes of technical interventions which can be
> found referred to by the term. These have very different scales, impacts,
> methodologies, and of course, ethical imperatives.
>
> All the best,
>
> Jim
>
>
> Prof Jim Falk
> Professorial Fellow, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of
> Melbourne
> Visiting Professor, United Nations University, Institute for the Advanced
> Study of Sustainability
> Emeritus Professor, University of Wollongong
>
> Room 2.11 Alice Hoy Building
> The University of Melbourne
> Parkville, Victoria 3010
> Phone: +61 3 83440614
> Mobile: +61 412290885
> SMS (ipad): +61 437538670
> Skype: jim-falk
> Email: [email protected]
>
> Recent publications, presentations etc:
> http://metastudies.net/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.RecentPublications
> Web: http://worlds-intransition.com
> http://www.apru.org/awi/
> http://metastudies.net
> http://things-that-count.net
>
> ebook Jim Falk, "Things that Count" now obtainable from
> http://things-that-count.net
>
>
> On 2 Aug 2014, at 3:05 pm, Ronal W. Larson <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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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>>
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