https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol23/iss3/art26/#Geoengineering
Olsson, L., and A. Jerneck. 2018. Social fields and natural systems: integrating knowledge about society and nature. *Ecology and Society* 23(3):26. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10333-230326 Extract Geoengineering: an illustration of social fields and natural systems The central aim of the Paris Agreement “is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 °C” (UNFCCC 2015:Article 2). This ambitious target in the context of insufficient national mitigation commitments (Rogelj et al. 2016) makes geoengineering seem inevitable (Horton et al. 2016). In contemporary climate science, scholars discuss two fundamentally different approaches to geoengineering: reducing the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth, Solar Radiation Management (SRM) versus removing CO2 from the atmosphere into long-term storage in the geosphere or in oceans, Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR; Vaughan and Lenton 2011). A vast majority of mitigation scenarios for 2 °C and all scenarios for 1.5 °C are now based on massive deployment of negative emission technologies, notably bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) (Rogelj et al. 2015, Schleussner et al. 2016), thus examples of CDR. The phenomenon that we today call geoengineering, to deliberately alter the global climate system in order to alleviate the impacts of climate change (Allwood et al. 2014), has old roots. Geoengineering has been considered at least since Homer’s Odyssey in the late 8th century BC or Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1611 (Schneider 2001). In 1997, in reaction to the increasing demands for emission reductions under the Kyoto Protocol, the physicist (and architect of the H-Bomb) Edward Teller published an article in the Wall Street Journal where he promoted geoengineering under the title “The planet needs a sunscreen” (Teller 1997). Until recently, geoengineering was peripheral to climate science and the climate change debate. But outside of scientific discussions, several think tanks, lobby groups, and other interest groups associated with the fossil fuel industry, such as the American Enterprise Institute (Union of Concerned Scientists 2017) have used their political influence to promote SRM as a cost-effective alternative to reducing the emissions from fossil fuel (Lane 2009). The argument that these challengers make is entirely economic, exemplified by a report from the Copenhagen Consensus think tank that inquired into the benefit/cost ratios of two SRM technologies: 21-56 for injection of aerosols, and 2400-15,000 for manipulating the albedo of clouds (Bickel and Lane 2009). Importantly, geoengineering was neither considered a realistic nor desirable option in the climate discourse until 2006 when the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen stirred up a controversy by discussing the possibility of manipulating the Earth’s radiation balance using SRM as a means of solving the “policy dilemma” (Crutzen 2006). Crutzen described the dilemma of how reducing the burning of fossil fuel as a means of lowering the emission of CO2 would also reduce the cooling from sulphur dioxide. The solution he described was to deliberately inject aerosols into the atmosphere. He ended his essay by saying the following: The very best would be if emissions of the greenhouse gases could be reduced so much that the stratospheric sulphur release experiment would not need to take place. Currently, this looks like a pious wish (Crutzen 2006:217). What Crutzen did not realize was that by publishing the essay he probably made a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (even) less plausible because just the perception of geoengineering as a viable option reduces the willingness to curb CO2 emissions (Faran and Olsson 2018). From a natural systems point of view, his reasoning makes sense; if we cannot reduce global warming by curbing the emission of greenhouse gases, then we should at least try to counteract the warming by injecting aerosols. But if we apply a social field analysis, we come to another conclusion after considering the broader political implications. By initiating a debate on geoengineering that suddenly became very lively (the essay is cited about 1100 times), Paul Crutzen (willingly or unwillingly) became part of the geoengineering discourse aimed at diminishing the will to curb greenhouse gas emissions. In Figure 2 and Table 1, we illustrate how different strategic action fields interact with each other and potentially with the Earth system itself. Inspired by Fligstein and McAdam (2012) we ask, who creates new fields, how is it done, and for what purpose? At its core, this comprehensive question focuses on, where is the power, what are the tactics, and what is at stake? Importantly, Crutzen’s reasoning about the Earth system offered a serious option for scientists, economists, and policy makers of geoengineering to address climate change from this particular angle. Thereby, we argue, he initiated a new strategic action field, which we call the geoengineering field. Further, we argue that it was not so much the message that counted, because similar views had been expressed before, but the messenger. Paul Crutzen was considered an environmental hero, as one of three scientists and Nobel laureates who first described how stratospheric ozone was destroyed by chemicals and whose discoveries led to the Montreal Protocol (Kaniaru 2007), often heralded as the most successful multilateral environmental treaty ever. According to the Web of Science, in the six years that preceded Crutzen’s essay, 2000–2005, only four papers containing “solar radiation management” or “albedo enhancement” were published. In the six years after Crutzen’s essay, 2007–2012, 77 papers were published (January 2018). Thus, it seems clear that Crutzen’s essay was instrumental in initiating the Royal Society landmark report on geoengineering in 2009 (Shepherd 2009). Even if that report takes a very cautious approach to geoengineering, stressing the uncertainty and ethical aspects associated with it, it offered scientific legitimacy to geoengineering, which was reinforced in 2014 by the IPCC in AR5 (IPCC 2014). At the time of the publication of Crutzen’s essay, the strategic action field of climate change mitigation (CC policy regime), i.e., reduction of emissions, was dominated by environmental interests from scientists, governments, Big International NGOs, and NGOs. Within the realm of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, governments had created an “array of narrowly-focused regulatory regimes - what we call the “regime complex for climate change”” (Keohane and Victor 2011). The fossil fuel industry was largely excluded from any of these mechanisms. Their interest was more oriented toward undermining the regime complex by engaging in climate denialism and aggressive lobbying (Mulvey and Shulman 2015). The emergence of geoengineering as a legitimate field in climate change discourses, legitimate because of Crutzen, the Royal Society, and the IPCC, implied that the fossil fuel sector could enter the climate change policy regime. A further implication was that interests associated with climate change denialism could suddenly make an inroad into the climate change policy regime, as seen in Figure 2. In summary, this case clearly shows how a complex web of incumbents and challengers come to interact. The incumbents in the climate change policy regime, such as governments, UN organizations, the IPCC, the broad scientific community, etc., are strong and hard to challenge, but co-optation can be as effective (Friedrichs 2011). The main challengers in this field are primarily the fossil fuel industry and its proponents, including some oil producing countries (Union of Concerned Scientists 2017). Their interest is not climate change per se, but the implications of climate change for the future of fossil fuel production and consumption. So, by embracing the idea of geoengineering, i.e., participating in the Geoengineering field, the fossil fuel industry can now play on yet another arena. More recently, the Trump administration in the USA created a windfall for the fossil fuel industry by opening for them the gates to policy making hubs for both energy (DOE) and the environment (EPA; Marie and Pifer 2017). To recap the idea of a strategic action field, a strategic action field represents a social space where actors, because of dependent interests, are forced to increasingly take one another into account in their own actions and to do so from a more or less privileged position or niche. In this space, issues of power, interest, and values are at work and so are issues of meaning and identity (Fligstein and McAdam 2012). Once we understand how social relations in one strategic action field are tied to relations in others, we can start capturing the dynamics of a given field (Fligstein and McAdam 2012). In the context of sustainability challenges, field theory is supposed to offer insights into whether or not a particular idea, policy, or project will spread and whether it will dominate the field by virtue of who is launching, defending, and/or supporting it. The hope is that such engagement with field theory would increase the potential impact of critical problem-solving research in sustainability science. The special characteristic of the field of climate change is the undeniable link to the Earth system. This means that all subfields must relate to unprecedented empirical evidence of climate change impacts, such as heat waves, floods, intensifying hurricane seasons, collapsing ice sheets, and disappearing sea ice. For the climate change policy regime and climate change science this increases the urgency of acting to prevent severe climate impacts. For climate change denialism it means their arguments for opposing climate change actions are weakened, while the field of geoengineering is strengthened. -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
