Britta Clark

It is increasingly common to hear solar geoengineering compared to opioids. I argue that probing this analogy can help us appreciate the following surprising point: Common arguments for solar geoengineering, if taken to their logical conclusion, imply that the technology should be used to slow the pace of emissions reductions. Indeed, Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs)—a widely used and influential climate policy tool—produce the same result. This conclusion is striking because, if there is one area of consensus across debates about solar geoengineering, it is that the technology should not be used as a ‘substitute for’ or to ‘delay’ the energy transition. I argue that we can make sense of this apparent tension by recognizing that different parties to the solar geoengineering debate have different conceptions of the kind of ‘substitution’ or ‘delay’ to be avoided. The surface-level consensus that solar geoengineering should not substitute for emissions reductions thus masks an important dispute: How does the prospect of solar geoengineering influence the speed of emissions cuts we should aim for? In the final pages of the paper, I’ll return to the opioids analogy to briefly draw out the implications of answering this question in the way recommended by IAMs. In short, we risk adopting an approach to solar geoengineering policy that advances our own interests at the expense of locking those that follow us into a form of addiction.

What role should emerging technologies such as carbon removal and solar geoengineering play in our response to the climate crisis? To critics, these technologies fail to address the root cause of climate change and allow wealthy nations to evade their climate responsibilities. To supporters, these technologies could make it easier to meet climate targets and even contribute to making the energy transition fairer. Indeed, carbon removal is widely considered to be a necessary component of the energy transition. This dissertation aims to advance this debate by unearthing and critiquing a web of normative and conceptual errors that confuse and constrain it. In doing so, this work contributes to broader questions concerning the relationship between technology, fairness, efficiency, and growth.

Should high‐income countries engage in solar geoengineering research and possible deployment? On the assumption that the speed of the energy transition will be insufficient to abate catastrophic climate impacts, research into solar geoengineering begins to look like a technically and socially feasible route to mitigate such impacts. But on the assumption that a rapid and relatively just energy transition is still within the realm of political possibility, research into solar geoengineering looks more like an ideological tool designed to divert time and resources from less risky climate solutions. At the heart of debates over solar geoengineering, then, is disagreement over what political actors can be expected to do in the future. In this article, I argue that both objectors to and proponents of solar geoengineering research often make background assumptions regarding expected future actions that are either (a) inaccurate or (b) inconsistent. I propose an account of expected future actions that avoids these problems and sketch what the debate over solar geoengineering looks like with these assumptions in place.

Suppose the present generation leaves future ones with a world depleted of all the natural resources required for many valuable human pursuits. Has the present generation acted unjustly? According to contemporary theories of liberal egalitarian intragenerational and intergenerational justice, the answer, it appears, is no. The explanation for this verdict lies in the liberal commitment to remaining neutral between different ways of life: many value-laden environ- mental sites and species are not an all-purpose means to any reasonable human end and so their existence is not directly relevant in an assessment of whether justice obtains. Against this view, I argue that a commitment to neutrality and its underlying justification – the idea that individuals should be equipped to live lives of their own design – in fact supports the opposite conclusion. If justice requires that citizens can pursue whatever way of life they do or might value, then it will also demand the continued existence of the natural resources necessary for those pursuits.

Attempts to determine the value and intergenerational importance of environmental goods have a difficult time accounting for the non-basic services that ecosystems provide. Discussions of ‘Critical Natural Capital’ deem some ecological goods ‘non-substitutable’: acting justly towards the future requires their preservation. These characterizations, however, often miss a crucial distinction between the type of non-substitutability exhibited by basic CNC and sociocultural CNC: the former is only technologically and practically non-substitutable while the latter is constructed as such by specific groups regarding token natural spaces. In this thesis, I address whether sociocultural natural capital is a required component in the basket of goods we leave for future generations. While the constructed nature of the value of these goods makes their implication in a theory of intergenerational justice subject to a number of objections, I argue—employing the Rawlsian tools of the veil of ignorance and the original position—that they are indeed a required component of a just bequest.