Cooperation on Climate Is Hard – SRM Would Make It Harder

We have a good sense of how SRM could change the climate system, but we don’t give enough thought to how it would change climate politics – and how it wouldn’t. Some aspects of climate politics will get more difficult with SRM. Other aspects won’t get any easier.

Tossing a grenade into the dumpster fire of climate politics

The global politics of climate change are extraordinarily challenging. To be blunt, it’s a dumpster fire. Adding SRM into the mix is akin to throwing a hand grenade into that dumpster fire.

Consider the uneven nature of its impacts. While there is considerable disagreement on the details, it is probably fair to assume that some countries and regions would lose out – SRM would cause them economic and other losses that exceed the benefits they receive from avoided climate change. Not everybody would win from global SRM deployment, which raises questions of liability and redress, or insurance schemes to compensate SRM victims.

How might it look if liability and redress for SRM were added to the agenda of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or some other international forum? Bear in mind that there is no single issue in international climate diplomacy that is presently as divisive as climate finance. Developing countries forcefully insist that developed countries need to scale up their commitments to finance mitigation, adaptation, and to cover loss and damage, but this remains a sticking point in negotiations.

The first thing that is bound to happen once you parachute SRM into the international climate negotiations is that developing countries will demand, among other things, an international fund to compensate for SRM-related harm – with funding that is additional to these existing financial commitments. These demands will encounter limited enthusiasm from developed countries, since they are expected to front the bill.

Disputes over liability and redress could quickly escalate, leading to developed countries threatening exit, that is, to pursue SRM outside of a multilateral framework to avoid onerous financial commitments. Given its global impacts, developing countries plus large parts of civil society would consider unilateral or minilateral¹ SRM deployment as fundamentally illegitimate. And there we go: SRM just made the global politics of climate change significantly more complicated than they already are.

SRM won’t change the incentives to delay cutting emissions

Aside from the complications that SRM would add to climate politics, there are the things that SRM won’t improve.

Let’s take a step back and ask what exactly the problem is that SRM is supposed to fix. Everybody, from skeptics to advocates, assumes that SRM would be a temporary stop-gap measure that would shave a degree or two off global warming while decarbonization efforts continue in parallel. SRM would thus buy more time for transitioning towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. The net-zero transition thus becomes smoother and more gradual than it would otherwise have to be. This would reduce overall adjustment costs, including for the fossil fuel industry, agribusiness, carbon-intensive industries, and other greenhouse gas emitters. In the meantime, technological innovation would continue in areas from renewable energies over smart grids to carbon capture and storage.

This argument assumes that the global politics of climate change will become easier if we stretch out the time frame for the net-zero transition. But this is not a reasonable assumption. Ask yourself: 20 or 30 years from now, will Saudi Arabia see more reason when it comes to the need for ambitious international emissions targets? Or will the fossil fuel industry finally come through and determine that it has profited enough from the sale of hydrocarbons, and would now prefer to be a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem? Will political leaders listen to science rather than climate denial, misinformation, and conspiracy theories, as some of them do today? Buying time does not solve these problems but leads us straight into mitigation deterrence.

The real climate change problem

SRM thus complicates some aspects of global climate politics and fails to simplify others. But we miss out on these nuances by focusing exclusively on temperatures. Yes, we know that SRM would allow effective global temperature control, but climate change is not a temperature problem. It is a cooperation problem. And that is why it is misguided to assess SRM from the perspective of its temperature impacts, rather than its consequences for political cooperation.

This is partly because SRM advocacy has become a form of moral blackmail: Are you willing to go ahead with an admittedly risky global experiment for the large-scale manipulation of the climate system, or would you rather prefer the planet (and developing countries in particular) to cook in the heat of a carbon-based world economy? Framing the problem like this does not leave a lot of moral flexibility. Focusing on the broader political implications of SRM shows that we can’t spray ourselves out of the problem.

For more from Florian on the implications of “techno-fixes” for environmental cooperation, check out his recent piece in Global Environmental Politics.