Mitigation Displacement: Could SRM Undermine Emissions Cuts?

SRM could reduce many of the harmful effects of climate change, such as extreme heat and melting ice, by lowering temperatures. It would also do so more rapidly and at a lower direct financial cost than emissions cuts and carbon dioxide removal (CDR).

However, SRM would not address the root cause of climate change – the build-up of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – and it would bring risks and challenges of its own. If SRM led to a delay in emissions cuts, this would lead to increased ocean acidification and a greater amount of global warming to offset or endure.

Could the promise that SRM could reduce climate risks undermine efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions?

Mitigation displacement

There is a widespread concern that researching and developing SRM could reduce pressure to cut emissions, helping to justify the continued use of polluting fossil fuels.¹ This concern is known as “mitigation displacement”, “mitigation deterrence”, or “moral hazard”.²

“Moral hazard” is an idea from economics and insurance, suggesting that people may act less responsibly if they feel insulated from the consequences of their actions.¹ Everyday examples include drivers acting more recklessly because they feel protected by seatbelts and airbags, or a patient eating less healthily after being prescribed a blood pressure medicine.

The jury is still out on whether SRM would undermine emissions cuts if it were deployed. The recent history of its research and initial experimentation shows no clear sign of the public or governments seeing SRM as a reason to reduce cuts to emissions.³ Could this change as the idea of SRM becomes more mainstream?

Might lower costs drive mitigation displacement?

One area of concern lies around the economic calculations that inform climate policies, and their shortcomings. Economic models play a key role in climate policy discussions: helping to identify the lowest cost approaches for meeting goals and how to balance the costs of emissions cuts against the costs of climate change impacts.

Making large cuts to emissions requires significant up-front investment without immediate returns. SRM, on the other hand, could offer a relatively inexpensive means of rapidly lowering temperatures, though it would bring with it a long-term commitment.⁴

Some interest groups or even states may advocate delaying costly emissions cuts on the basis that SRM offers a cheaper solution, or because they are economically tied to the fossil fuel economy. But so far, that argument has rarely been made explicitly.

Does learning about SRM undermine the public’s commitments to cut emissions?

Public perception studies generally find that people, after learning about SRM, do not on average show a change in their support for policies to cut emissions – that is they generally find no mitigation displacement effect.^5,6 Some studies even find an inverse effect, where after learning about SRM people express a greater commitment to cutting emissions.^6,7

Studies have found that the way SRM is presented to the public can matter a lot. One study presented three different framings: a very negative one, a neutral one, and a very positive one. They only found a mitigation displacement effect when SRM was described as a “great solution” requiring “[little] more to stop the worst effects of climate change”.⁸

While these studies offer some insights into individual reactions and choices, they tell us nothing about how corporations, interest groups, or governments might react.

A long history of mitigation displacement concerns

Concerns that a new climate policy option could undermine emissions cuts have been raised before. In the 1990s, there were worries that talking about adaptation could undermine emissions cuts.⁹

However, as the impacts of climate change transformed from a future prospect to a lived reality, and as progress on emissions cuts proved slow, there was a change in attitudes.¹⁰ The need to increase climate resilience in the face of growing climate impacts led to adaptation becoming a widely accepted part of climate policy.⁹

More recently, proposals to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere have raised similar concerns. Bringing CDR into climate policy plans makes it possible, in theory, to achieve long-term climate goals with less ambitious near-term emissions cuts. However, if CDR fails to live up to its promise, it may end up providing cover for the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels.¹¹

Would the world have made faster progress on emissions cuts if adaptation and CDR had been permanently sidelined? It is difficult to tell, but those working against stringent emissions cuts have promoted these as alternatives,¹² and it seems reasonable to assume that SRM will also be promoted as an alternative by these same interests.

Emissions cuts, adaptation, CDR, and SRM each offer a unique means of reducing the risks of climate change and could all play a role in the response to climate change. However, without emissions cuts, there will be no end to the climate crisis. The challenge policymakers will face is to work out whether and how to incorporate SRM into the climate policy portfolio without undermining other essential climate policies.