Lawfare Daily: Duncan McLaren on the Opportunity Costs of Geoengineering

[Introduction]

Duncan McLaren: They haven't worked out how politically and technically you could definitely guarantee that you were doing the right thing and continue to do so for decades or even centuries, depending upon how quickly the world managed to reduce emissions in, in the interim.

Kevin Frazier: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Kevin Frazier, assistant professor at St. Thomas University College of Law, and a Tarbell Fellow with Lawfare, joined by Duncan McLaren, Climate Intervention Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy at UCLA.

Duncan McLaren: If we're spending our political capital and our time and our effort on negotiating how to do solar geoengineering, are we going to actually keep putting enough attention, enough pressure on accelerating emissions reduction, or are we going to end up making the situation worse?

Kevin Frazier: Today we're talking about geoengineering, which has become, pardon the climate pun, a hot topic in light of an apparent increase in demand for geoengineering experiments.

[Main Podcast]

Kevin Frazier: The New York Times recently profiled David Keith, a professor at the University of Chicago studying geoengineering, and depending on who you ask, recklessly advancing the field. The Times article is a useful introduction to a complex and controversial science. Thankfully, we've got you, Duncan, to help us explore the article's claims as well as related debates. First off, your title is ‘Climate Intervention Fellow’ at UCLA, and I just need to know, what does that mean? What is your role? How did you get involved in this crazy science?

Duncan McLaren: Okay, well, I, I've been looking at geoengineering or, or what some people call climate intervention for more than a decade now. And full disclosure, I started to get interested in it when I was working for an environmental NGO, Friends of the Earth, and I first heard about it back in the 90s. And I put the file of these mad ideas somewhere in the bottom of the filing cabinet and hoped never to have to look at them again. But after the failure at Copenhagen of climate talks, I thought, yup, people are going to start looking at these seriously and it's important that someone who is concerned about climate justice finds out and explores these as well. So I've been looking at them from that perspective of can they contribute to climate justice for over a decade, did my PhD in that, and the current role at UCLA is a two year research fellowship, more or less wrapping up just now. But that's the rubric they use for geoengineering. Both the, the solar variety that we're going to talk about today, and the broader ideas of large-scale carbon removal, which can also be called geoengineering or climate intervention.

Kevin Frazier: Okay. So you've set me up for a whole slew of questions. So thank you for already being a fantastic guest. Let's start with the just subtle nuances and I'm guessing maybe a pretty robust debate about whether it is best to refer to it as ‘geoengineering’, or ‘climate intervention’. What's the rub with these two different names? Because if you can't even agree on what to name a field, then you know it's got to be a controversial one.

Duncan McLaren: Yeah, of course. These are sort of political debates, with a small p political, of course. And oddly enough, the term that I think has been most used over the last decade is actually ‘climate engineering,’ and that was the first effort to move away from the geoengineering term, which, which can be confusing. I mean, people previously associated it with what's called geotechnical engineering, big earth moving schemes and so on. But to be honest, what has gone on over that decade is a process whereby those who have a sympathy for the ideas like to try and avoid terms that the public find scary. And geoengineering is seen as something that when we talk to publics and lots of scientific exercises have done this, have done deliberation with publics, the first reactions are very negative. They're very much, “Oh, these are, these are mad ideas. I really don't, don't want to talk about this if you don't mind.”

I have a sort of an ambiguous relationship, I suppose, with climate intervention. When that was first suggested, and I think it was as part of one of the National Academy reports in about 2015, I thought it was a very American thing to do. So it's like: yeah, you've got a friend who's, who's maybe doing a bit too much drugs or alcohol, so you stage an intervention and it's a good thing to do. But in Europe, it's a very neutral term. It's not loaded at all. And that it was clear that that seemed to be the inspiration to, to do it, to discharge the debate over whether geoengineering was a good thing or a bad thing. Personally, I tend to talk about climate geoengineering, but that's my preference.

Kevin Frazier: Right. Well, as you've made clear, this is not a new field. And I think if we search through the annals of human history, we could find arguably a whole set of efforts to manipulate our climate in some way, whether it's a dam, whether it is just plowing a field, I mean, we're always manipulating the climate in some way. What is it that differentiates those sorts of normal interactions with the climate as compared to something like geoengineering or climate intervention?

Duncan McLaren: There's a couple of things that I think are really important here. One is scale and the other is intentionality. So again, people who are sympathetic to this idea like to say: “oh yeah, humans have been geoengineering the climate for centuries or millennia that we started when we started felling forests.”

And there are very few occasions in recorded or unrecorded history where we can deduce that the intention behind clearing forests or plowing fields was to change the climate. It's very much more obvious that it was to provide food, or to get timber, or whatever, and that the climate effects was unintentional. So, the intentionality of making interventions to change the climate is critical.

And the other is, say, the scale of it. Typically, when we talk about these techniques and technologies, we are talking about something that is intended to have a global impact, to change the average global temperature. It may do many other things besides that and there's probably a blurry line there. There are some techniques that could be used to change regional climates, but typically, when we talk about climate intervention, climate geoengineering, it's global and intentional.

Kevin Frazier: Thank you very much, that definitely helps clear things up for me, but there is one set of questions we haven't fully resolved, which is these different techniques. So you introduced from the outset, this idea of solar, which is often referred to, I believe, as SRM or solar radiation? And I'm blanking on the M. Fill in the blank for me?

Duncan McLaren: Management or modification, depending on who you ask.

Kevin Frazier: Solar radiation management. Let's stick with that. So we've got SRM on one hand, and then we have carbon sequestration on the other hand. So are these the two main techniques and what are the attributes of each of those?

Duncan McLaren: Those are the two main categories of what we could call climate geoengineering, and both of them, the reason I would say we should categorize them both as geoengineering, is they're both things we do after the fact of there being too many emissions.

So that is that timing, which obviously I didn't mention in the scale and intentionality, but the timing is also relevant here. So solar geoengineering or solar radiation modification or management. People are moving away from management because it gives perhaps too great an impression of controllability, but that was the word used for most of the last decade. Those intervene in the radiative balance of the Earth system, so typically by trying to reflect some incoming sunlight. And there are ideas to do that at all sorts of altitudes. So you could put mirrors in space, in theory, or you could spread reflective particles in the high atmosphere, the stratosphere. That's the sort of poster child idea of ‘stratospheric aerosol injection’.

Or you could brighten clouds, or you could, in theory, brighten the Earth's surface enough of it to have that sort of global effect. There's also a subcategory of cirrus cloud thinning, which, rather than trying to reflect solar radiation, is designed to increase the rate at which the Earth radiates itself. So rather than the clouds capturing the Earth radiation, that goes back out into space and cools the planet. That's a slight detail. We probably shouldn't need to talk about that at great length. Carbon removal techniques all aim to function to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that is present in the atmosphere, so thinning the blanket of greenhouse gases that is causing climate change.

That's a little more proximate to the problem, and many of those techniques are now pretty well mainstream, understood as desirable things that we might want to do. But some of them. share more characteristics with the global interventions of SAI, so ocean iron fertilization is an example here. The idea that we might add some micronutrients to the parts of the ocean that don't have enough, that algae will grow and bloom and then sink to the bottom carrying that carbon to the bottom of the ocean. Like SAI, there is a sort of Earth system science understanding of why that might work, but in practice, it's intervening in an open system, trying to have a global effect. Most people would see that as geoengineering or climate engineering, climate intervention.

Kevin Frazier: So after hearing that list of climate interventions, I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking, “Oh my gosh, is this a James Bond movie where we've got some evil villains thinking about putting massive mirrors in space?” “Do we have folks who are just going to start flying planes over huge swaths of the planet, dropping aerosols?” All these ideas come to mind. And I think to some, it may sound implausible. Who's going to do this? Who's going to support this? Surely no one's actually working on this. But can you just list some of the big names in addition to folks like Bill Gates who are actively funding or exploring or thinking about SRM approaches and some of these more maybe sci-fi type interventions?

Duncan McLaren: So, I mean, it's interesting that you sort of approach that from the Bond villain approach. There was, in the literature, an idea of there being a, a green finger, the single actor, and that finger quite often got pointed at Bill Gates.

Kevin Frazier: Well, for our Gen Z listeners or folks who aren't Bond fanatics, please go watch Goldfinger, you'll enjoy the entire movie, but yes, a green finger in the form of Mr. Gates. Fascinating.

Duncan McLaren: Yeah, I think it's fair to say that while a very rich individual or a single state, small state or a big corporation could do something that was in a sense performative to say, “yeah, we can get aerosols into the stratosphere or we can dump iron in the ocean in large quantities.” It would probably only be a one off to demonstrate that this could be done. The analysis that I and others have been involved with would suggest that to do this seriously, which takes prolonged and continued intervention, needs the power of a global institution, or of a major state, or multiple states.

The most likely candidate in that analysis is the U.S.A., with the power and reach of U.S.A. military bases around the world to be able to spread these aerosols in a global fashion. I mean, this is delving into the more detailed science of it, but to do a, what's called a balanced form of SAI, Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, one would need to be able to inject aerosols both in the Northern Hemisphere and in the Southern Hemisphere at the right season, at the right time. So this, this is not one person or a billionaire with a couple of planes. This is a big fleet of planes managed over multiple years.

Where's the interest in this? Well, there have been a series of reports from the National Academies of Science in the U.S. that have advocated for more research into this area and just in the last year, we've seen a real burgeoning of funding. So the Quadrature Foundation has put in the order of 40 to 50 million dollars in; the Simons Foundation has done the same. In the UK, the Natural Environment Research Council has just announced a 10-million-pound program of modelling. Our new Advanced Research Institute, ARIA, has is floating the idea of putting 50 million pounds, or so, into outdoor experiments in this area. So that's, that's sort of a flavor of, of what's going on.

And in the U.S. NOAA are doing some, a research program that is about ensuring that they have, we have better baseline data on the stratosphere, so that if someone else were to do this, or if this was experiments were to be done, we would better understand the results. So, there's a lot of building blocks in place. Probably also worth mentioning that last year the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy produced a report, under congressional direction, on what a research program could look like. As far as I'm aware, they also said pretty clearly that they weren't intending to start that research program under this current administration and obviously all bets could be off under a future potential Trump-Vance administration.

Kevin Frazier: So you're teeing me up with all sorts of fascinating questions and we're going to dive into the details of the Dr. Keith article in a second. But one thing just to close this kind of introduction quick course into geoengineering for me sitting here in Florida, I hear about things like Saharan sand helping prevent or mitigate hurricanes. Or I read about folks like Dr. Keith, for example, who observed a volcanic eruption and saw that the subsequent year the temperature went down. And so we see these natural phenomena apparently help mitigate some climate effects. Why isn't it just as simple as us emulating these natural phenomena and just scaling them up? You know, no big deal: it's easy. Press the button, send the sand into the Atlantic and boom, less dangerous hurricanes!

Duncan McLaren: So part of the answer here is about this question of a single point versus multiple points of intervention. So your volcanic analogue, yes it's true that the historic and geological records suggest that major volcanic eruptions put sulfates into the stratosphere that last for two to four years, perhaps, depressing global temperatures. Pinatubo is the recent example, and the calculations suggest that it could be taken between a half and one and a half degrees off temperature for that period, but they also disrupt regional climates. So we go back in time to previous eruptions like Krakatoa, and we find that that was followed by what was called the year without a summer and huge famine in Europe.

So, yes, the analog suggests that the scale of leverage is possible. Relatively small amounts of particulates in the stratosphere can have a relatively large effect. But scientists, and David Keith amongst them, have been involved in lots of modelling studies that suggest that if we want an effect from that, which is not so disruptive in some areas and is evenly reducing temperatures, well, for first, first fact, we can't do that. We can't get an even reduction in temperatures. We'll always have more cooling at the tropics and less at the poles because the science of the way greenhouse gases and reflective aerosols work is different, basically. But the problem here is that we have these models then go on to say, oh yeah, if, if we were to inject at 60 degrees north and 60 degrees south in the northern spring and the southern spring and so on, then climates would change, very few global regions would have, would be, would be disadvantaged and everyone would be better off than the baseline of not doing it at all.

Yeah, but can you guarantee that you're going to be able to do that? What happens if one summer, your one southern summer, your one base in Patagonia is disabled for some reason and suddenly you've got an asymmetric injection? Well, what happens there depends on which hemisphere gets disabled. But one of the possible problems is that you would get drought in the Sahel. So you would intensify the problems of famine in Africa as a result of doing this. Other problems have been found, again, from non-coordinated deployments that could disrupt monsoon rainfalls in South Asia. So the fans of solar geoengineering say, yeah, we've worked out what you'd need to do to avoid that.

But they haven't worked out how politically and technically you could definitely guarantee that you were doing the right thing and continue to do so for years, decades or even centuries, depending upon how quickly you managed, the world managed to reduce emissions in the interim. The other thing to say about the studies on asymmetric injection: if you inject in one hemisphere only, you get Sahelian drought. If you inject in the other hemisphere only, you strengthen hurricanes in the South Atlantic. So you've got this dilemma, particularly if you're the U.S. Would you do the one that affected the Sahel the worst, or would you do the one that affected Florida the worst?

Kevin Frazier: You know, I have a, a bet.

Duncan McLaren: Yeah, we can all speculate on, on what sort of negotiations would be needed. In the end, this is almost where it comes down. People talk about SRM as something, oh yeah, we could do that more quickly. It has more, immediate leverage, but when you take into account the fact that we're at a complete standing start on negotiating it, then it would take us the same amount of time broadly to deploy that as it would to get a grip on global emissions.

I'm not saying we're going to do that. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sort of a wizard who can say, here's the answer and here's how we slash emissions and get to net zero by 2050. But then we get into the big problem at the center of this debate, which is, if we're spending our political capital and our time and our effort on negotiating how to do solar geoengineering, are we going to actually keep putting enough attention, enough pressure on accelerating emissions reduction? Or are we going to end up making the situation worse, end up in a world where we can't agree on how to do solar geoengineering, so we take that off the table and then find that we've not cut emissions anything like enough?

Kevin Frazier: This opportunity cost question is a huge one and as you pointed out deciding who the winners and losers are going to be is whether in the short run or long term is always a difficult one. I'm not sure anyone's going to raise their hand for the year with no summer, but we'll see who volunteers for that. Before we get more into the weeds of those opportunity costs, I do want to just dive a little bit more into this New York Times article in part, because I think one of the most fascinating aspects of it was Dr. Keith, a professor at the University of Chicago, seems pretty intent on doing some experiments sooner rather than later. Can you walk us through his previous considerations of experiments and where those went or didn't go?

Duncan McLaren: I'd say, say a couple of things by way of introduction. So David Keith was previously at Harvard and did much of his work there. And he has consistently over the last decade sort of said he's in favor of research, but doesn't have necessarily a view on deployment and that he, he wants to do outdoor experiments. He thinks we have, and I'm not sure he's right, but he thinks we've sort of run up against the knowledge creation potential of modeling and lab work, and that we would learn a lot quickly by doing very small scale things outdoors. And there's some rationality in that.

So, over the last, I think over a decade, he's floated this idea of a project to put a small balloon platform into the stratosphere to, in particular, early on, it seemed to be motivated by the idea of testing what effect the particles would have on ozone depletion, because one of the fears learnt from the volcanic analogues was that if we put more sulphates up there, we would slow the process of ozone recovery. So that would be potentially harmful.

And there have been at least three iterations of this project for which the acronym is SCoPEx. There have been three attempts to get this off the ground, none of them have worked, and in at least two of them, part of the problem, or certainly they have triggered very adverse reactions from indigenous and tribal groups, one in the western U.S., in New Mexico, and more recently in northern Sweden, in the lands of the Sami people. Essentially, it just feels like they have not learnt from the past experience, or indeed the past experience of other outdoor proposed projects. So there's one in the U.K. called ‘SPICE’, the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering project, which wanted to test a balloon delivery model with what they called a small scale test bed. That garnered a lot of public opposition and even went through a stage gate procedure in which another associated team did public engagement on the ground to discuss with local people. But Keith and Goeschl and the Harvard team just cruise in, say they've got an agreement with the space company up in Kiruna. And then NGOs plus Indigenous people say, hold on, you didn't ask us and it ends up getting, they end up backing off because otherwise they could see that the writing was on the wall.

And the most worrying thing about the NYT article with David Keith, and maybe the journalists putting a little bit of spin on it. But my recollection is that not only does David now say, oh, yeah, if it comes to deployment, I'll put my hand up to do it. So he's moved away from this ‘we need to learn’ to ‘I think it's beneficial so we, we should work towards it.’ And he says, if I were to do more experiments, I wouldn't tell people first. It's become more secretive and that to me seems the absolute opposite of the direction that researchers should be taking. So, the American Geophysical Union, the AGU, is going through quite a long and convoluted process to try and come up with some ethical guidelines for climate engineering, geoengineering research, in which transparency is right up there and independent review and possibly stage gate procedures, things like that, are all in the frame. Trying to create a governance framework in which we could do responsible research, even possibly outdoor experiments, while not triggering a sort of a rush to or even a schedule to an idea of deployment.

At the moment there is, I really don't think there's evidence to say yes this would be beneficial if it were done in the way it could be done politically and technically. It's not that in an abstract ideal world where the scientists ruled the roost and the technology was there to make sure those injections went in in the right places at the right times. And that we could monitor them and get the feedback to know that they'd had the effect within the natural variability of the system. All that needs to be in place and I mean, that's some of the sort of things that researchers might learn by doing small controlled outdoor experiments, but even that might not be enough. I mean, there is an argument that says essentially to understand whether we can influence the global system safely, we have to influence the global system, and that doesn't seem like a good bet, at least unless we're in very, very dire straits.

Kevin Frazier: So if I didn't buy into this notion of go big or go home with respect to actually being able to see if these interventions had any effect and let's just say I bought as much iron as me and my best friends could procure and we take a boat we leave from Miami just go out into the middle of the Atlantic and drop a whole bunch of iron in the in international waters. Should I be fearful of any legal ramifications? Have we made these sorts of activities illegal? Obviously in the U.S. we have the Clean Air Act, we have the Clean Water Act. But if I leave domestic shores with my iron boat, in international waters is there anything holding me back legally from trying to do my own geoengineering experiment?

Duncan McLaren: So this, this is an issue that it, one would say is debatable. So the Convention on Biological Diversity have passed decisions that say there should be no such interventions apart from those that are scientifically justified, experiments, properly registered, et cetera, et cetera. These are not necessarily binding, and the U.S. has not ratified, so that would be called a de facto moratorium on geoengineering. More pertinently, the parties to the London Convention and London Protocol have agreed that ocean iron fertilization for commercial purposes is a no-no. But that agreement also has not yet come into force because it's not yet been ratified by enough of the participating states. That has some very clear rules for what could be legitimate scientific research and what wouldn't be. The London Convention is also now discussing adding other things to what it calls marine geoengineering, which could include marine cloud brightening, one of the forms of solar radiation management, and potentially other SRM techniques. It's unclear yet.

It’s, so on the other hand, Mexico has announced its intention to ban solar geoengineering over its territory, whether that could affect you if you were doing something elsewhere. So, essentially, there is no existing governance regime. There are a whole host of norms of international law that would I think would encourage the U.S. government to clamp down on you and stop you. But I can't say that you would, you would be up in court and facing fines or imprisonment or whatever, should you take this into your own hands. I'm not encouraging you to do that, of course!

Kevin Frazier: Yes. No, of course. Well, and listeners can rest assured: I don't own a boat. So that's, that's the first hurdle for me. But zooming out a little bit, geoengineering seems to have captured the public's attention in Apple's series, Extrapolations, prominently featured the field, and that's been combined with ongoing reports of extreme climate events. Already this year, we've seen hurricanes rapidly developing, we've seen fires, again, that these hundred year storms that seem to occur every single year on, on a dime. So do you get the sense that the public, even with the opportunity costs you’ve raised, is perhaps becoming more attentive to and maybe even supportive of geoengineering?

Duncan McLaren: There's been a recent study that conducted surveys and focus groups in 20 odd countries around the world and what they found was very little knowledge of geoengineering to begin with. But generally, certainly as far as the solar geoengineering approaches were concerned, opposition outweighing support across the rich world and a more balanced, balanced, maybe not the right word, but a less clear-cut result across the global south. And I think it's very fair to say that if I was someone in the global south already facing the impacts of climate change and feeling no ability to do anything about it myself, seeing as my emissions are virtually zero to begin with. And the opportunities to reduce them further would be very limited and potentially feeling that I don't have a responsive government that can help negotiate global agreements or whatever, then I think I would say, yeah, we should explore this a bit more.

In contrast, though, some of the work that I've done with talking to people in Kenya and Nigeria suggests that there is also the same sort of deep skepticism. I'm reminded of one, one guy from a Christian organization who said, I tell my grandmother about this, she'll call it witchcraft! And that's, that's no joke because that's a serious way of understanding the world in some of those settings. So yeah, I think publics generally are getting to learn more about it, and there's a great diversity of views, a lot of really quite polarized views. So people who enjoy modern day lifestyles and think that technology is the way to solve any problems associated with them tend to be sympathetic or supportive. People with a more environmentalist sensibility tend to see this as messing with nature, playing God, those sort of things, and tend to be very opposed to it.

Kevin Frazier: And before I let you go, with this notion of playing God, or playing some omnipotent being, any bold predictions for us? Any thoughts that we should look out for? Are we going to see the first massive geoengineering experiment in the next five or ten years?

Duncan McLaren: I'd be very surprised if we see any geoengineering experiments in the next five years. Certainly, I'd be very super surprised if anyone was attempting to do something at scale, simply building the infrastructure to do it is likely to take that sort of time.

Something though that will continue to sort of crank up the tensions in the atmosphere here is the growing awareness of tipping points in the climate system and the fear that we may already be committed to going past tipping points such as the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet. And there's been some, some useful work done, which the last year's report global review of tipping points summarized to basically say, yeah, at present, we should not be seeing geoengineering as a way of responding to tipping points. Everything we know here tells us first that rapidly cutting emissions is the most reliable and most appropriate response. And that we need to achieve transformative interventions in our social and economic systems in order to cut emissions quickly enough. And that's where the focus of activity and research should be.

Sadly, I think the ‘Geoclique’, as some have called it, will, will go on wanting to research and investigate geoengineering. And we may learn good things from, from that research. It's not unreasonable, but I think we're more likely to see a political agreement that says we're not going to use this, we're not going to deploy this, we need to focus on cutting emissions, financing adaptation and helping people deal with the existing effects of climate change.

Kevin Frazier: Some of the best lessons are the simplest ones, right? You can't clean your room by putting everything under the bed. Sometimes it just requires using those tried and true drawers, right? Just get those clothes back in the drawers. Well, Duncan, thank you so much. I think we're going to have to leave it there.

Duncan McLaren: Great. It's been a pleasure talking with you, Kevin.

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