Why Geoengineering is a False Solution to the Climate Crisis – Center for International Environmental Law

Revealed October 15, 2024

By Mary Church, Geoengineering Marketing campaign Manager on the Heart for Worldwide Environmental Legislation, and Rossella Recupero, Communications Marketing campaign Specialist on the Heart for Worldwide Environmental Legislation

That is the primary in a multi-part collection exposing the threats and dangers linked to geoengineering and why these applied sciences should not be thought-about efficient local weather motion.

As world temperature data proceed to be damaged month after month and excessive climate occasions improve in severity on account of local weather change, governments and corporations worldwide are more and more investing in and exploring local weather geoengineering as a supposed “answer” to world warming.

As soon as dismissed as science fiction, geoengineering has began to enter mainstream local weather discourse. Regardless of being at odds with worldwide legislation and topic to a de facto world moratorium, an alarming variety of geoengineering subject experiments are deliberate or underway, many pushed by voluntary carbon markets.  

Behind the shiny facade of those extremely speculative  “techno-fixes,” geoengineering is fraught with dangers, uncertainties, and risks that threaten to delay actual local weather motion and trigger extra hurt than good. 

What Is Geoengineering?

Geoengineering refers to massive or planetary-scale interventions within the Earth’s ambiance, oceans, and land to counteract among the results of local weather change. These strategies vary from reflecting daylight to eradicating carbon dioxide from the ambiance. 

Crucially, none deal with the basis causes of the local weather disaster, the first driver of which is the manufacturing and burning of fossil fuels.

Geoengineering Classes

Photo voltaic Radiation Modification Or Manipulation (SRM)

 SRM strategies try and replicate daylight again into house to chill Earth. Strategies embody releasing massive quantities of tiny reflective particles (e.g., sulfur dioxide) into the stratosphere, deploying mirrors in house, or modifying clouds, ice, and vegetation to make them extra reflective.

Carbon Dioxide Removing (CDR)

CDR strategies theorize eradicating carbon from the ambiance on an enormous scale. Strategies vary from sucking carbon straight out of the air to the large-scale burning of bushes for power, capturing and storing the emissions, and even dumping minerals within the ocean or creating monoculture seaweed mega-farms to extend carbon uptake.

Different approaches

Different theories embody slowing ice soften by pumping seawater onto polar and glacial ice to thicken it, spreading billions of tiny reflective beads on the floor of the Arctic or glacial ice to extend its reflectivity, and constructing an enormous curtain within the ocean to dam hotter waters. 

Why is Geoengineering a Unhealthy Thought?

It received’t repair the local weather disaster

Geoengineering applied sciences do nothing to deal with the drivers of the local weather disaster, and all include main dangers and unknowns. For instance, photo voltaic geoengineering is inherently unpredictable and dangers additional destabilizing an already destabilized local weather system. Fashions present that it could have an uneven impact regionally and will exacerbate local weather change in international locations on the entrance line of the disaster. What’s extra, it carries the chance of ‘termination shock’ the place temperatures out of the blue spiral if, for no matter purpose, deployment is paused or stopped. In the meantime, no marine carbon dioxide elimination strategies have been confirmed efficient within the long-term elimination and storage of CO2, and a few might undermine the ocean’s capability to sequester carbon. 

It’s a harmful distraction that undermines actual local weather options 

The phantasm that geoengineering may help “repair” local weather change is a harmful distraction from the actual options to the disaster and dangers prolonging fossil gasoline dependence. In truth, geoengineering applied sciences are inherently unpredictable and pose new, important, unprecedented dangers to the delicate ecosystems that maintain life on Earth, that are our greatest allies within the combat in opposition to the disaster. What’s extra, counting on the promise of future speculative applied sciences as a substitute of implementing actual options immediately will result in an overshoot of the essential local weather threshold of 1.5ºC and lock in catastrophic local weather change. By undermining transformative, justice-centered options to the local weather disaster, geoengineering approaches additionally danger entrenching inequitable political and social energy and perpetuating neocolonialism. 

It will flip Earth right into a dangerous lab

By their very nature, it’s unattainable to check geoengineering applied sciences for his or her meant affect on the local weather with out large-scale outside deployment, by which period any dangerous and doubtlessly irreversible impacts can be locked in. Analysis displaying theoretical advantages tends to make use of extremely idealized fashions underplaying dangerous impacts and the chance that deployment wouldn’t go as deliberate in the actual world. Small-scale outside experiments solely serve to assist develop expertise and danger a slippery slope to deployment.  

It requires an unprecedented scale for any significant local weather affect

To have any probability of their meant affect on the local weather geoengineering applied sciences must be deployed at a very unprecedented scale – with huge political, social, and environmental penalties. For instance, ocean fertilization and ocean alkalinity enhancement would require roughly 10 p.c of the ocean’s floor for a significant local weather affect. Whereas for SRM to have its meant impact, the Earth can be locked into utilizing these dangerous applied sciences for an indeterminate period of time whereas emissions had been decreased by extremely speculative CDR approaches, with so-called “peak-shaving” situations for stratospheric aerosol injection implying deployment of 100- 200 years.

It dangers  undermining human rights of billions

The United Nations Human Rights Council’s Advisory Committee has warned that geoengineering applied sciences “might severely intervene with the enjoyment of human rights for hundreds of thousands and maybe billions of individuals” – due to the meant scale of deployment and the inherent dangers concerned. It has additionally drawn consideration to the disproportionate affect on those that have performed the least to trigger the local weather disaster, together with communities within the world South, Indigenous Peoples, peasants, and fisherfolk. 

It’s at odds with worldwide legislation

Geoengineering has been restricted by a de facto moratorium below the Conference on Organic Variety since 2010. States Events to the London Conference / London Protocol, which regulates air pollution at sea, are contemplating increasing its 2008 prohibition on ocean fertilization to incorporate 4 further classes of marine geoengineering strategies. The event and deployment of geoengineering applied sciences are additionally doubtlessly inconsistent with a variety of authorized obligations and rules below worldwide legislation.

It will be unattainable to manipulate deployment pretty or safely 

Due to the proposed scale and period of geoengineering, and the inherent dangers it poses, there’s nothing in human historical past to counsel that deployment might ever be pretty or safely ruled. For instance, Stratospheric Aerosol Injection is more likely to require fixed injection of sulfur compounds within the higher stratosphere over a number of generations if not centuries – a feat that solely highly effective nation-states or navy regimes would be capable of try. What’s extra, the uneven affect of any cooling would create  ‘winners and losers’, exacerbating geo-political tensions, and the chance of termination shock from any pause or cessation.

What Ought to Policymakers Do?

Geoengineering is neither insurance coverage to “purchase time” nor any type of complement to mitigation. As a substitute of chasing fantasy techno-fixes, governments ought to urgently prioritize actual options to the local weather disaster. This implies equitably phasing out fossil fuels and supporting the various decentralized, various, and available options for socially and ecologically sustainable manufacturing and consumption patterns. 

It requires rich international locations to step as much as their duty for inflicting the local weather disaster and  present local weather finance in accordance with their truthful shares, to allow international locations on the frontlines who’ve performed least to trigger the issue to chop emissions, adapt to local weather impacts, and eradicate poverty . 

It additionally means defending and restoring the forests, oceans, and polar and different ecosystems which can be our greatest allies within the combat in opposition to local weather change, whereas upholding the rights of Indigenous Peoples who’re in direct relationship with these ecosystems, and the communities who depend upon them for his or her livelihoods.