The Geopolitics of SRM

Dr. Pete Irvine: [00:00:00] Welcome to Climate Reflections, the SRM 360 podcast, where we discuss sunlight reflection methods, or SRM, ideas to reduce the impacts of climate change by reflecting sunlight away from the earth. I’m your host, Dr. Pete Irvine, and I’m a climate scientist who has studied SRM since 2009.

Compilation of News Audio Reports on Climate Change: …Europe is sweltering. The death toll there is expected to rise. This is not a normal circumstance, and they say this drought…

Dr. Pete Irvine: As climate change continues, its impacts will mount, increasingly threatening food and water supplies, disrupting supply chains, and forcing populations to move. These impacts will be bad enough on their own, but could they further destabilize fragile countries, adding to an already fraught geopolitical situation?

Sunlight Reflection Methods, or SRM, seem to offer a way to lower global temperatures. This might offer a way to reduce the impacts of climate change and [00:01:00] reduce the disruptions those impacts could cause. But who would be in control, and how would they use this new technology? In this episode we focus on how SRM might play out in the international arena.

Could wars erupt over the control of SRM? Could SRM be used in a deliberately disruptive way? Or, might SRM help reduce international tensions by reducing the impacts of climate change? For this episode, we spoke with researchers to understand the potential international and security issues that may arise around SRM as a tool to decrease temperatures. We start with Dr. Olaf Corry, Professor of Global Security Challenges at the University of Leeds.

Dr. Olaf Corry: For a climate scientist, this is about providing a global public good, ideally. Whereas, for a security actor, it’s a potential geopolitical lever, it’s a potential disruptor. If you’re a climate scientist, you think about this as a sort of risk reduction tool, basically.

Um, whereas if you’re a security actor, you tend to think of [00:02:00] this as a potential source of distrust, potential source or vector for disinformation. Um, and if you’re a scientist, you think about, well, there’s a knowledge deficit problem here and we can solve that with more research. If you’re a security actor, you want to think about, uh, in what ways could these kinds of ideas potentially be of value to us or a threat to us.

So this idea that it’ll be a global science project delivered for global average temperature and global risk, climate risk management, I think it’s much more likely to happen more chaotically and in an uneven way.

Dr. Pete Irvine: Olaf makes a fair point. Most scientific analyses of SRM focus on the ideal case, where it is used in the global, public interest as a means of reducing the negative impacts of warming, alongside efforts to cut emissions and deploy carbon dioxide removal.

But, if SRM engenders mistrust between [00:03:00] nations, it could be more destabilizing than not, undermining its purpose. Because the atmosphere crosses national borders, climate change and SRM are international issues that will require cooperation between nations. But do nations get along?

Dr. Beth Chalecki: Do nations get along? *laughs*

Dr. Pete Irvine: That’s Dr. Beth Chalecki, Associate Professor of International Relations in the Political Science Department at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.

Dr. Beth Chalecki: Not really. No, they can get along if their interests dictate that at any point in time, they can get along. But there’s nothing in international relations that says the natural state of nations is to get along. That is a decision they can make every day. Am I going to get along with my neighbor? Am I going to get along with my rival? Am I going to get along with the international community as a whole? So, they don’t have to get along, no.

Dr. Pete Irvine: And here’s Olaf Corry again.

Dr. Olaf Corry: Firstly, I’m not sure nations is always the right prism to see through.

I mean, when we look at the United Nations, we see these 190 something states and they interact. They get along in, [00:04:00] in some ways but there’s another kind of, and the sort of classical IR view of international relations model is to say we have all these different nation states, but they’re all formally equal, but there’s no world government, and therefore we have to cooperate.

But there’s also, in a sense, a different view which is that it’s a very hierarchical place. It’s not just a lot of, uh, equal status actors that are interacting as common units, uh, or similar units, that actually this isn’t, this is a zone of power and of domination and that the age of empire is over in a formal sense, but not in a, in a real sense.

Um, so they get along in some ways, but they get along under terms that not all of them have chosen. And some have chosen the terms upon which they get along to a much, much greater degree than others. And of course, sometimes they do not get along.

Dr. Pete Irvine: How does climate change affect international relations? And how might SRM contribute [00:05:00] to conflict? We’re here again from Beth Chalecki and Olaf Corry.

Dr. Beth Chalecki: Climate change can affect international relations in many ways. We are seeing the first order of climate change, being increasing temperatures, increasing sea levels, changing precipitation levels, increasing numbers and durations of extreme events.

All these will have follow on effects, second, third, and fourth order effects. So for example, you might see a changing precipitation pattern that could lead to, uh, decreasing rainfall over a particular area, which can lead to agricultural shortages and food insecurity, which could lead to a resource conflict.

So you don’t really start with international relations so much as you end with it. Start with climate change and end with international relations. There’s a lot of intermediate steps.

Dr. Olaf Corry: In my view, we’ve underestimated the, uh, disruptive potential of climate measures because they are social interventions, they’re political interventions themselves, and therefore have to go through this social mill, so to speak. So there’s been a lot of research on [00:06:00] how the heat and the impacts from precipitation, for example, might cause conflict, but much less on how different social and political processes to deal with and in reaction to the politics of climate change could affect it, and one of those is SRM.

Dr. Pete Irvine: What if, rather than being used as a tool to reduce global climate impacts, SRM was used to deliberately harm another nation? As in most discussions of SRM, the experts we spoke to focused on Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, or SAI, an approach to lower temperatures by adding tiny reflective particles high in the atmosphere.

Could SAI be used as a weapon of war, or would its potentially disruptive power be more subtle? First, we turn to Josh Horton, Senior program fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, as well as a writer for SRM 360, and we hear more from Olaf Corry too.

Josh Horton: Fears about using SAI, say, to wage [00:07:00] war as a direct tool conflict, are not very credible because they’re very imprecise tools, they don’t lend themselves to being used as weapons.

Dr. Olaf Corry: The idea that it can work as a kinetic sort of weapon, for example, I think that’s a very crude way of thinking about this, and I think most physical science researchers are pretty clear that it’s not going to be a very useful direct kinetic weapon because it’s going to be so imprecise.

Dr. Pete Irvine: So it seems unlikely that SAI or other SRM ideas could be used as weapons, but could their development or use raise tensions between nations? Josh, Olaf and Beth provided insights.

Josh Horton: It’s very hard to predict. Take SAI on its own and imagine what could happen with that if it just were to arrive on the scene because the scene is not blank. It’s full of all kinds of economic, military, security, trade, cultural issues. [00:08:00] And SAI would be a big one, but it would still be one among many, and it would be difficult to predict how it would sort of unfold.

Dr. Olaf Corry: Are we going to fight about the global thermostat, basically? Is it going to cause wars? I think it’s difficult to rule out because these are existential questions. Interventions in sovereign territories, it could be framed like that and therefore it touches on the raw nerve of a sort of the core of security politics, basically.

Dr. Beth Chalecki: I think it could be used as a weapon, but not as a traditional point and shoot type of weapon. You’re not going to just aim yourself at another country and fire. It’s going to be more like a disruption weapon, a long-term disruption weapon. And that’s going to be something I think you might see certain states attempt if they are looking to destabilize a range of other nations.

Dr. Pete Irvine: While SRM might help to reduce climate risks, if used wisely in the global public interest, how would it be used in practice? And how would its use be [00:09:00] interpreted by others? Let’s hear again from Olaf Corry.

Dr. Olaf Corry: Whatever physical effects it might have, all those effects are going to be politically important primarily through the way that they are interpreted and symbolically registered. This is a political question, and so we need to get away from this idea that we can just read out of a climate model whether it’s going to create peace or war.

It’s much better to start from the other side and say, what is the world system that this technology is going to go into? How is it likely to be interpreted? What are the political and strategic risks that are going to come with it?

Dr. Pete Irvine: With SAI and other SRM interventions, a single nation could affect the climate of many others, or even the whole world. How might this kind of intervention be interpreted by the affected nations? Let’s hear again from Beth Chalecki.

Dr. Beth Chalecki: If you’re a sovereign state, you have control over your own territory. But if my neighbor is conducting SAI experiments, then I [00:10:00] don’t have control over my own territory. They can change my weather, whether they mean to or not. So now we have to either rethink what sovereignty means in the international system, or I have to go to my neighbor and say, cut it out, you’re adversely affecting my country, and if you don’t cut it out, now we have a conflict.

Dr. Pete Irvine: Given the potentially destabilizing impacts of SRM, I asked whether there are precedents for similarly challenging issues where countries have cooperated. Josh Horton was quite helpful.

Josh Horton: You know, I think it’s useful to think about the Cold War as an imperfect analog to what’s coming. I think one could look at various instances where the U.S. and the Soviet Union, while obviously ideologically opposed, and militarily opposed, and engaged in a Cold War for decades, we’re able to cooperate on some pretty important issues.

For example, the partial test ban treaty, there was a feeling amongst key countries in the early sixties that it was dangerous to tamper with [00:11:00] the atmosphere by exploding nuclear weapons for testing purposes. And so the U.S. and Russia and the UK came together and cemented what’s called the PTBT, which basically put a moratorium on the atomic testing in the hemisphere that holds to this day.

Uh, there are other examples of environmental cooperation that the U.S. and the Soviets both supported and that was affected in some ways. The Montreal Protocol, now that obviously sort of became fully affected after the end of the Cold War, but it was born during the height of tensions between Reagan and Gorbachev. So these bargains were struck because there were shared interests in avoiding bad outcomes and managing issues and, and trying to protect the environment and hence, public health and environmental stewardship.

Dr. Pete Irvine: Josh mentioned the Montreal Protocol, a multilateral agreement that regulates the production [00:12:00] and use of ozone depleting substances.

It’s a kind of gold standard for international environmental agreements, as it achieved ratification by all nations. It was also highly successful, halting and then reversing a rapidly developing environmental crisis. While Josh finds some hope in the Montreal Protocol and other examples of past environmental cooperation, Beth Chalecki reminded us that no current agreements apply to SAI or to any other forms of SRM. For international SRM governance, the global community will need to draft a new approach, learning lessons from those past agreements that worked, as well as those that didn’t.

Dr. Beth Chalecki: The Environmental Modification Convention of 1977 says you can’t use environmental modification techniques like SAI for hostile use. It explicitly says nothing prohibits non-hostile use. So if a nation is claiming that they are in fact doing this in order to preserve their own environment, to protect their own climate, their own people, nothing in ENMOD prevents them from deploying SAI. But we don’t have any treaty that deals with [00:13:00] geoengineering specifically, it’s all piecemeal. So the ENMOD convention of 1977 says no hostile use, but it says nothing about non-hostile use.

Geneva Protocol 1, same year, says you can’t destroy the environment in warfare, but what if it’s not warfare? Or what if it’s not open warfare? Nothing is prohibited. What about long range transboundary air pollution? If you put sulfur in the sky, does that run you afoul of LRTAP?

Dr. Pete Irvine: I want to jump in here quickly to explain that LRTAP is the Convention on Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution first adopted in 1979 to reduce air pollution across international borders. LRTAP has been broadly successful, leading to significant reductions in air pollution.

Now, back to Beth Chalecki.

Dr. Beth Chalecki: So there’s a bunch of questions that we have to answer, but in order to really plant a flag on this issue, the international community is going to have to come together and negotiate some kind of plan that allows for the research and, and deployment of geoengineering while maintaining a governance structure that ensures that everyone is [00:14:00] protected by it, or at least no one is being harmed by it.

And that’s where I think the parallel with arms control becomes really useful because we tried this in 1946 with nuclear weapons. We tried to have an international nuclear weapons convention called the Baruch Plan, which was proposed by the United States to the brand-new United Nations, to say let’s put all these nuclear weapons under international control. And it didn’t fail because of science, it failed because of sovereignty. The Soviet Union and Poland abstained, they were on the council to negotiate this, they abstained because they didn’t want to lock in a U.S. nuclear superiority, and as a result, this convention failed, this plan failed, and we ended up with 75 years of arms race.

So now, let’s learn from that mistake. Let’s go back and say, all right, we need to govern geoengineering like arms control. Let’s set up a new Baruch plan. We can do it, we just have to do it.

Dr. Pete Irvine: Our focus so far has been on nations. But are these the only actors who could deploy SRM? There are already examples of entrepreneurs launching weather balloons filled with sulfur dioxide into the [00:15:00] stratosphere and larger private companies pushing to develop the intellectual property needed to deploy SAI at large scale.

Is there a chance that a corporation or a wealthy individual could decide to take matters into their own hands and use SRM or SAI at a larger scale? In a recent episode we spoke to Josh about this, and his perspective was that corporations and billionaires wouldn’t have the financial incentives or the power to go ahead against the wishes of their home governments. However, Beth Chalecki had a different perspective.

Dr. Beth Chalecki: I think the problem of commercial actors or non state actors in the SRM arena is growing. When I first started studying this, I wasn’t really worried about it. I didn’t think that any non state actor or even individual would have the ability to do this.

But now, I’m wondering if that’s the case. If you look at some super rich individuals, the Bill Gateses, the Elon Musks, the Richard Bransons, the Jeff Bezoses, they might eventually decide that they want to save the planet, and they might actually attempt to [00:16:00] try their own SRM experiments. I have no opinion on whether or not they’ll be successful, but the fact that they’re trying, from a non-state vantage point, means that the power of states to control super rich individuals like this is waning.

So in a way, they’re eroding sovereignty just as much as carbon dioxide is. If they want to conduct their own experiments and they say you let us do this from your territory or we’re going to pull out the thousands of jobs we just set up, then a state might very well say we don’t have the economic policy to withstand that loss, therefore we will let you do what you want to do. So I think their power is growing, and I think they know it.

Dr. Pete Irvine: To recap, there are no existing international agreements to govern SRM use by nations and international relations experts disagree on whether different actors will even wait until there’s an international agreement before deploying SRM. So, what does the international community need to be aware of [00:17:00] as this field develops?

Dr. Beth Chalecki: Under the rules-based international order, it is not enough that only the great powers participate. Every nation has to have its room to have a say, but when the rubber meets the road, as they say, the main actors, the great powers, are going to be the ones that determine the agenda. They’re going to be the ones that determine whether or not treaties get passed.

They’re going to be the ones that determine whether or not non-state actors are reigned in or brought to justice, and certain technologies will be deployed or not deployed. It’s a complex field, and we’re making it more complex by the addition of all these global technologies that can change living conditions around the world. That’s the kind of adventure that we need to go on; what is the international order [that is] going to be able to handle in the 21st century?

Dr. Pete Irvine: That’s it for today’s episode of Climate Reflections, thanks for listening! [00:18:00] These questions of international cooperation and conflict around SRM are not simple ones to answer. We’ll dive back into these topics more in future episodes.

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