CALIFORNIA GOVERNMENT BACKS AWAY FROM SOLAR GEOENGINEERING PROJECT

[Andrew Lockley]

Poster's note: the moratorium claim is controversial/wrong, but I don't know if the rest of this stands up 

http://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/2020/06/california-government-backs-away-from-solar-geoengineering-project-but-doesnt-withdraw/

CALIFORNIA GOVERNMENT BACKS AWAY FROM SOLAR GEOENGINEERING PROJECT – BUT DOESN’T WITHDRAW

JUN 17 2020

The California State government is looking to distance itself from a controversial solar geoengineering project after pressure from civil society and movement groups around the world.

Last July, the California Strategic Growth Council – a part of the California State government with direct ties to Governor Gavin Newsom’s office – announced that its Executive Director, Louise Bedsworth, would be joining the advisory committee of a prominent solar geoengineering project, SCoPEx, hosted at Harvard University. They even issued a press release – featuring the California Strategic Growth Council logo, which features a map of the state – announcing that Bedsworth would be chairing the advisory committee, which aims to legitimize the SCoPEx experiments.

A letter signed by civil society groups from around the world called on Bedsworth and seven other “advisors,” all US-based, to resign.

That press release has now been removed from the Harvard University SCoPEx web site. Strategic Growth Council officials, including Bedsworth, have attempted to backpedal by issuing statements claiming the SGC has nothing to do with SCoPEx, and that Bedsworth is acting in a personal capacity.

SCoPEx is aiming to proceed despite an international moratorium on open-air geoengineering experiments supported by 196 countries that have signed the UN Convention on Biodiversity. 

Development of solar geoengineering at a large scale would have serious global impacts, including changes in weather patterns, and potentially floods and droughts affecting the global south. For this reason, groups from around the world have called on all members of the SCoPEx advisory committee to step down.

To date, Bedsworth has not stepped down. The Executive Director of the California Strategic Growth Council continues to serve as the chair of a committee designed to legitimize something it has no authority to authorize — even as the state agency makes efforts to distance itself from previous support for the research. Sign the letter here.

Response from Kate Gordon, Chair of California Strategic Growth Council and Director of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research

Thank you for reaching out. Louise Bedsworth participates in SCoPEx in her personal capacity; no state resources have been expended on this work and it is unrelated to her work at the Strategic Growth Council. We are working with Harvard to make this clearer on the website; however this was made very clear in the original statement from the advisory committee on their engagement in this work, found at http://scopexac.com/news-and-updates/:

“We are contributing to this Committee as individuals with different expertise, experiences, and perspectives, and we will remain true to our values and beliefs as we conduct this work.”

Below please find a statement from Dr. Bedsworth. If you have additional comments please address them to Sally Klimp, Executive Coordinator, SCoPEx Advisory Committee, skl...@g.harvard.edu

Thank you, 

Kate Gordon

Statement from Louise Bedsworth, PhD, Chair of the SCoPEx Advisory Committee

June 11, 2020

I am writing this statement in response to recent claims that my participation in this Advisory Committee represents an endorsement of this research by my employer, the California Strategic Growth Council. I will state emphatically that it does not. 

I am undertaking this work in a volunteer capacity based on my previous work on broader issues of research governance, related both to solar geoengineering and other topics. The SCoPEx team has received no funding or endorsement by the Council, nor have any state resources been used to support this work. We have updated the Advisory Committee’s website to make this clear.

Neither my role nor the committee’s role is to enable this research to happen, but rather to establish norms and rules around the scientific, regulatory, and societal repercussions of this work. As our Committee has stated, none of us have entered into this work with a preconceived idea that this research should happen. Rather we are committed to ensuring that if the research proceeds, it does so in a technically and ethically sound manner. We will continue to conduct our work in an open and transparent manner to achieve these goals.

[Douglas MacMartin]

Well, to the extent that one can interpret the CBD decision as a moratorium or not, it still has an explicit exception for research (and I think one would be hard-pressed to claim that SCoPEx will itself have negative impacts on biodiversity), so I think it is fair to say that the authors of this piece are perfectly well aware that their statements are not true.  They clearly don’t support the CBD decision as written and want to pretend that it says something else...

 

(And it has always been clear that Louise was acting in a personal capacity, so the first line of this is also simply silly.)

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