Geoengineering and the Question of Weakened Resolve

[Geoeng Info]

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-72372-9_7

Geoengineering and the Question of Weakened Resolve

• David A. Dana

• Abstract

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• One of the most-discussed topics in the social science literature regarding geoengineering is the inter-relationship between geoengineering and climate change mitigation. This literature has two distinct strands. What we might call Strand # 1 assumes that there may be some optimal mix of geoengineering and mitigation from a welfare economics perspective, and explores what an optimal mix might be and under what conditions it might obtain. What we might call Strand #2 of the literature builds on the recognition that global mitigation efforts have been wildly sub-optimal and that a huge increase in mitigation efforts, as a normative matter, is needed for the sake of current and future generations. Strand # 2 recognizes, too, that mitigation is not easy, it is expensive, it requires individual and collective changes in behavior, it poses a threat to entrenched, powerful economic interests, and it implicates complicated questions as to who exactly should bear the costs of mitigation and in what measure.