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Now I want to talk about for the balance of my time is
the questions of governance. Testing, deployment, and governance.
There will be no more pictures. They're going to be all word slides and for that I apologize,
but that's because we have to think about this problem conceptually.
And I think one of the reasons that there's been less discussion about
governance, serious discussion about governance, is that it's hard to imagine
it,
it's hard to have nice pictures, it's less sexy and yet it's really really
important.
So I want to talk about governance from two different vantage points. One is
testing.
We know a lot about the technologies or analogous
technologies that you can imagine what a variety of geoengineering programs might
look like,
but we're just at that early stage right now. We've done some modeling studies, a
little bit of field trials on
some analogous things and nothing else. So we have big questions
about research and development, especially field testing. And then of
course deployment.
Ultimately, how would we deploy the system,
when would we deploy the system, who would control that deployment, and so on.
And these are two very different aspects and they've raised different kinds of
strategic challenges for governance.
I'm going to talk about the end first. I'm going to talk about deployment
first and then work backwards because I think the deployment
story is very very worrying.
The governing mechanisms that would be needed for deployment or for avoiding
deployment or for avoiding premature deployment or deployment by a country that
doesn't care about side effects or if it thinks
the geoengineering side effects are mostly going to harm other countries, that's what
we're trying avoid. So let's talk about deployment first and then we'll work
backwards
and talk about what's frankly more relevant for the next
5, 10, maybe more years,
which is testing and research to ready options for ultimate deployment.
Okay. What do we think we know
about deployment. Well
one way to think about deployment and about the governance challenges
of deployment is to ask a series of questions that will give us a sense of who
might deploy and how might they think about
deployment. So, who could geoengineer right now or in the near
future?
There is a
hot debate about whether it's a lot of countries or a small number of countries. This is
a debate that's analogous to a debate that happened several decades ago
around the question of who would go off and build nuclear weapons.
Many analysts, I would say the majority viewpoint
about building nuclear weapons three, four decades ago was that we would have
dozens of nuclear states today.
And of course that's not true. And that's not true for a variety of reasons. Some related to the
difficulty of obtaining nuclear weapons,
a lot related to governance, and so on and so I would just underscore that
nobody really knows
how many countries could deploy geoengineering systems today
or especially in the future, because this is not just a technical question.
This has to do with how countries organize internally
and what they might actually want to do. If you look at it
just technically, there's no question that at least a dozen countries today
would have the capacity to develop rocket programs,
high-altitude aircraft programs, and so on. Some people said, oh that's
not true,
because these are soft assets. You start flying airplanes around
and injecting stuff in the atmosphere. We could shoot those airplanes down.
People forget that shooting airplanes down from another country,
even if that country's doing things that seem pretty egregious, that's a very
costly act.
And so I think it's actually technically and politically feasible, especially if a
country were thought it were in a real emergency,
to imagine at least a dozen, maybe more countries, that could do this. In theory
some rich dude could go off, or dudette, could go off and buy an island
and get the air space associated with that island and start doing
a geoengineering program on their own.
It's a little hard to see how you do this, but there are a lot of wealthy people out there
and many of them have become kind of self-appointed
protectors of the planet and so
maybe if they thought something was happening they could go off and do that.
What are the circumstances for deployment? When would a country
or a green finger, an individual who
thinks they're protecting the planet, when might they actually deploy this, and how would
they declare
an emergency, or the conditions exist in which
they could or would want to actually deploy geoengineering
systems. There's no easy answer for this. There's no answer in law. There's
no answer in established practice and so on.
If you believe the fat tail kinds of projections,
it's totally plausible that low lying island countries for example,
Bangladesh is the example I gave earlier - not an island but very low-lying -
countries whose economies and whose geography is highly vulnerable to
climate change
could find themselves very severely impacted by climate change
with lots of evidence that the impacts are due to
unchecked global warming, and no way to fix the problem themselves.
Even the biggest emitter on the planet, China today, cannot through unilateral action
alone have a material, a substantial impact
on current and future warming. China cut its emissions,
about a fifth of the world's total to 0 over any plausible time horizon,
the impact of climate change on China and on the rest the world would still be
substantial.
And so you could see countries coming to this conclusion.
How would side effects be assessed and managed?
I think the question about whether geoengineering has side effects and risks and so
on is not
an interesting question. A lot of people have said we shouldn't be talking about
geoengineering because it's risky.
That's the wrong question. The right question is if you got into an emergency,
are the risks associated with geoengineering kinds of options,
are those risks greater or lesser then unchecked climate change.
That's the real policy question here, and that requires
that countries that might actually deploy geoengineering systems
go off and act and do their homework, and have a sense of what are the possible
side effects.
If there are some countries that might be severely harmed by geoengineering schemes,
what kind of compensation scheme might you set up to help keep them
help keep them whole. Would they be required to engage in advance notice
of testing and deployment of those
systems? And I think one of the last questions that's going to be very important
is, what are the internal politics of geoengineering inside countries that might
deploy these systems?
It's often helpful, political scientists often divide the world into democracies and
autocracies, kind of two extremes.
Where democratic rule is lots of people grabbing for control and
elections and turnover and
civilian institutions and so on And autocracies have exactly the opposite.
What we don't know right now is whether democracies or autocracies are more
likely or less likely to actually deploy
geoengineering systems. My sense from looking at the debate so far
is that democracies are very likely to find themselves gridlocked on this issue
because there's alway going to be a substantial, not just a minority, but a substantial
group of people
who are concerned about this, and I understand those concerns greatly, and it
is very hard for government to move under those kinds of circumstances.
Where autocracies, or democracies who are operating this program in the black,
and some of the precursors for what could be a US program in this area I
think
were developed originally in the military not for this purpose but for
other purposes,
autocracies may have an easier time doing this. I'm not saying easier is
better.
I'm not saying one from government is better than the other, but
we are likely to see very large differences
in how countries think about the risks, evaluate the risks,
build testing programs and deployment programs based on the internal
political characteristics of those countries as well as other factors like
the extent to which those countries are actually vulnerable. So what does all that tell us
about implications for governance. Let me just talk a little about this and then I want to
work backwards and talk about
testing.
I think one of the most interesting things, and this is an insight that Tom Schelling
first had before anyone else, is that
strategically, the geoengineering problem is almost the exact
inverse of the mitigation problem. The mitigation problem requires countries
to cooperate together, bear near term costs for distant uncertain future
benefits,
and they all have to do that year in and year out,
and then finally there's less climate change in the future, whereas the challenge in
governance for geoengineering is the exact opposite. What you're trying to do
is avoid a road. You're trying to avoid a country that would just go off
and start geoengineering on its own, and if the governance system
fails for a year or two, or a country feels deeply compelled to just start a geoengineering
program
then the governance system has
failed. Any country
can break the deal, especially when they're under severe internal pressure,
like the example I gave earlier of Bangladesh. And that might be especially
true of autocracies.
Autocracies may be especially likely to be able to build up secret
geoengineering programs and deploy them quickly before anybody
notices, but maybe democracies can do that
as well.
Once geoengineering starts, it's very expensive to stop,
and that's because once you begin the masking,
removing the masking will almost certainly result in more rapid
changes in climate
as well as other side effects that are essentially unknown, I think, and probably
unknowable,
and so the trick in governance on deployment
is to avoid rogue geoengineering and the first place to make sure that
as countries actually want to begin geoengineering, if they thought carefully
about the side effects and tried to manage the side effects and so on,
but once that process has begun,
it's not impossible because you could simply stop flying the aircraft and allow
the stratosphere to heal over a period of a couple years and so on,
but the costs and potential impacts on climate could be even worse at that
stage
than allowing a deeply flawed
geoengineering system to proceed.
That logic, if you're persuaded by that logic, leads you to at least one central
implication,
which is: these governing systems are unstable.
If countries are running off thinking about their own interests and prone not to
think about side effects and so on,
somebody at some point is going to go off and start geoengineering.
Now, this comes with a caveat that right now we don't know.
And people made similar arguments three, four decades ago about nuclear
non-proliferation or proliferation. They made the argument that
countries are going to go off and build their own weapon systems and we're gonna have
a terrible world with lots of nuclear weapons and in fact today, although nuclear
weapon dangers remain,
the world is a lot safer and
has many fewer nuclear weapons than people who believe this kind of logic thought
three or four decades ago. But we do have to take seriously the idea
that you cannot build a governing system that is intrinsically stable, that creates
self-interest
in governing the technology properly. And that's the first test for seeing
whether we can actually govern this
properly. That to me is a big concern.