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Calculating the Incalculable: Is SAI the Lesser of Two Evils?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2017

Mike Hulme
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Abstract

Christopher J. Preston's use of the doctrine of double effect to claim that hypothetical climate engineers might very well be less culpable for climate harms than those who continue to emit greenhouse gases is unpersuasive. His argument rests shakily on the ability to determine and quantify climate harms and to distinguish forensically between their causes. He is also largely silent about the distributional effects of these harms and their ethical and political ramifications.

Keywords

climate engineeringstratospheric aerosol injectiondoctrine of double effectunintended harmsdistributional climate impacts
Type
Carbon Emissions, SAI, and Unintended Harms: Three Responses
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , Winter 2017 , pp. 507 - 512
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2017 

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Footnotes

*

This essay is in response to Christopher J. Preston's “Carbon Emissions, Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, and Unintended Harms,” Ethics & International Affairs 31, no. 4 (2017).

References

NOTES

1 Preston, Christopher J., “Beyond the End of Nature: SRM and Two Tales of Artificity for the Anthropocene,” Ethics, Policy & Environment 15, no. 2 (2012), p. 191 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See, for example, Preston, Christopher J., “Re-Thinking the Unthinkable: Environmental Ethics and the Presumptive Argument against Geoengineering,” Environmental Values 20, no. 4 (2011), pp. 457–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For my position regarding condition (b), see Hulme, Mike, Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

4 For the sake of the argument here, I focus only on GHG emissions resulting from energy generation and ignore emissions related to land use, although the latter are also a by-product of securing necessary welfare goods.

5 See Foot, Philippa, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

6 Preston is somewhat inconsistent here. On p. 480 he states that the overall reduction in harms caused by the use of SAI is not known (and can only be established through extensive modeling), yet on p. 482 he states that the harms of SAI are known.

7 See, for example, Pezzey, John C. V. and Burke, Paul J., “Towards a More Inclusive and Precautionary Indicator of Global Sustainability,” Ecological Economics 106 (2014), pp. 141–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 For a recent demonstration of this, see Nalam, Aditya, Bala, Govindasamy, and Modak, Angshuman, “Effects of Arctic Geoengineering on Precipitation in the Tropical Monsoon Regions,” Climate Dynamics (2017, early view), pp. 1–21, doi:10.1007/s00382-017-3810-y Google Scholar.

9 Mike Hulme, Can Science Fix Climate Change?

10 Ibid.