Who May Geoengineer: Self-defense, Civil Disobedience, and Revolution (Part One) – Patrick Taylor Smith
Andrew Lockley
Who May Geoengineer: Self-defense, Civil Disobedience, and Revolution (Part One) – Patrick Taylor Smith
Much of the discussion about the appropriateness or usefulness of geoengineering—particularly dangerous and risky geoengineering strategies like sulfate aerosol injection—has relied upon a shared assumption aboutwho will end up deploying these new tools. That is, we’ve (mostly) assumed that fairly wealthy, high-emitting states, private actors based in those countries, or international institutions dominated by those states will be the ones to finally inject sulfates or fertilize the ocean. This is entirely reasonable. Rich and high emitting states have the resources (or contain private agents with the resources) to engage in geoengineering research and, potentially, deployment. Powerful states will have the political wherewithal to either ignore the entreaties of global governance institutions and civil society, or to gain their assent. From a practical perspective, the rich and powerful states are those that are likely to fund the research that would be needed should risky geoengineering strategies ever be deployed, and perhaps even if they are not.
Yet, there is something odd, from a normative perspective, about this emphasis. After all, geoengineering is presented as a solution to a problem that has been—to a great extent—created by rich and powerful, high emitting nations. There is something unsavory—or as Stephen Gardiner has put it, morally corrupting—about the idea that rich countries would geoengineer in order to allow them to retain a greater proportion of the benefits they’ve accrued from emitting in the first place. Of course, one can try to justify risky geoengineering as a way of reducing the negative impacts of climate change on the poor, marginalized, and low-emitting. But again, this is an odd argument for those responsible for those impacts to make: “I’ve caused a terrible threat to hang over your head and I’ll remove it through a strategy that is risky for you but more convenient for me.” So, the idea that rich countries could justify risky climate strategies by appealing to the protection of the people their policies endanger is problematic.
What can we say if this nation decides to engage in an act of self-defense, protecting its territorial integrity and political autonomy from the actions of more powerful nations?
This kind of worry doesn’t apply if those victims themselves decide to geoengineer. They are simply defending themselves, or so the thought goes. Let’s consider a scenario (borrowed liberally from Oliver Morton in The Planet Remade); imagine a fairly wealthy but low emitting island nation that will suffer catastrophic flooding. Adaptation measures are either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. So, what can we say if this nation—that is not responsible for climate change but nonetheless suffering from its ill effects—decides to engage in an act of self-defense, protecting its territorial integrity and political autonomy from the actions of more powerful nations? Consider an analogous case. Suppose that a nation builds a dam which it knows will destroy all of the arable land of a neighboring country. It seems pretty clear that the the flooded state can—assuming that it met all of the conditions of just war—engage in a military action to destroy the dam. In other words, risky geoengineering could very well be a response to a set of bad consequences that—under different circumstances—would justify going to war. And if something as potentially risky and dangerous as military action could be justified, then it seems hard to deny that similarly risky geoengineering could be as well.
There is something appealing about this scenario. The weak and powerless get to take matters into their own hands and defend themselves from the predations and exploitation of the rich and powerful. Setting aside any contingent issues about proportionality, effectiveness, or necessity, I want to suggest that there nonetheless some problems with thinking about geoengineering this way. Consider two different scenarios.
Accident: I am attacked by a ninja assassin. I defend myself by firing a gun at the assassin, but I miss and the bullet goes through the wall, striking an innocent bystander.Redirection: I see that a ninja assassin is about to attack me, but I change the number on my apartment so that the assassin attacks my innocent neighbor.
While fully working out the difference between the two examples would take a lot more argument than a single blog post, it seems pretty clear to me that Accident is much more easily justified or defended thanRedirection. And this is not merely due to risk; after all, I know that firing a gun in an apartment complex is a dangerous thing to do and that changing my address might not actually work. The difference, or so it seems to me, is how I use the death of the innocent bystander. In one case (Redirection), the death is—in some sense—a necessary part of defending myself and in the other (Accident) it seems like a merely contingent feature of the case. In Redirect, I seem to be allying myself with the ninja assassin in order to kill my neighbor. That does not seem to be true in Accident. The conclusion we can draw is that even when there is an uncontroversial and obvious case of self-defense, you are not allowed to dojust anything in order to save yourself.
Potentially dangerous geoengineering activities—like iron fertilization or sulfate aerosol injections—will inflict harm on others in the course of saving our island nation. And these people will be disproportionately those who are also suffering and suffering innocently from climate change (note, if you redirected the ninja assassin to killanother ninja assassin that is coming to kill you, that might be okay, but that isn’t the case here). So, is dangerous geoengineering more like Accident or Redirection? I leave it to the reader to make their own judgment, but I want to point out two things. First, it is interesting that the potential permissibility of dangerous geoengineering might ride on a fairly subtle distinction in moral philosophy; trolley problems are not so impractical or useless. Second, I think there is a strong case to be made that dangerous geoengineering is a redirection (see my commentary in Ethics, Policy, and the Environment for a somewhat longer case)Redirecting Threats, the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, and the Special Wrongness of Solar Radiation Management, Ethics, Policy, and the Environment 17, no. 2, pp. 143-146 (2014) . The key feature of sulfate injections—for example—is the very mechanisms that make it is so effective as a potential shield also create the negative impacts. The bullet hitting the bystander in Accident plays no role in making the gun a useless tool for defending myself, but the very cooling effects that make SRM useful are also what make it dangerous; they seem very closely linked.
Of course, I could be wrong about that. But the fact that dangerous geoengineering looks like a redirection of a threat against an innocent population would, if true, seriously undermine any claim that it can be used in self-defense.
Next up in part two: Civil disobedience and the global governance
Patrick Taylor Smith, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He is writing a book titled “A Leap Into Darkness: Domination and the Normative Structure of International Politics,” and researches climate change and climate engineering. His papers can be found here.
Ronal W. Larson
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineerin...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to geoengi...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Andrew Lockley
Part Two now published at
Who May Geoengineer: Self-defense, Civil Disobedience, and Revolution (Part Two) – Patrick Taylor Smith
Two quick notes before we proceed. First, by ‘dangerous/risky geoengineering strategies,’ I am merely referring to those strategies that bring with them a substantial risk of negative climate change impacts. This is not meant to pre-judge whether those risks are worse than climate change impacts under plausible emission scenarios and is not meant to claim that all geoengineering strategies are dangerous or risky. Second, the paper is proceeding upon the basic normative idea that one cannot violate people’s rights in order to generate better social consequences and is then exploring whether risky geoengineering is consistent with or violates individual rights. In other words, “business as usual will be worse” is not good enough, on this view, to justify actions to intentionally violate people’s basic rights. Anyway, moving on…
In Part One, we discussed whether those nations at a substantial risk of severe climate change impacts had a claim—based on the right to self-defense—to deploy dangerous geoengineering strategies. We concluded that they did not because it is not permissible to redirect dangerous threats onto innocent third parties in order to save yourself.
Yet, there are times when it is permissible to act unilaterally to impose costs on others. Some, perhaps sensing the moral difficulties associated with the riskier kinds of geoengineering, have argued that the deployment of those strategies should be understood as acts of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience, on this view, is a public, conscientious action—contrary to law—designed to bring attention to and exert pressure towards the rectification of serious injustice. They suggest that geoengineering might shock the conscience of the world and generate a set of deliberations that will ultimately lead to a more satisfactory policy outcome. So, the idea is not that risky geoengineering is itself a particularly good idea—it represents an egregious flouting of well-justified norms—but that it can be justified as an extraordinary response to a long history of injustice and failure. The parallels with the civil rights movement—which deliberately violated the law in order to motivate changes to the apartheid-like, Jim Crow regime in the American South—are obvious. Moreover, civil disobedience usually achieves its objective by imposing some social or economic cost on the larger society as a whole in order to pressure elites to make changes (see Stephan and Chenoweth), and these costs often affect those who are innocent—or at least, those who are not particularly guilty—of the injustice being protested. Again, this is true of geoengineering, which risks inflicting costs on those innocent of having caused climate change.
The key difference between ‘geoengineering as self-defense’ and ‘geoengineering as civil disobedience’ is what does the justificatory work. In the former, geoengineering’s ability to block or reduce severe climate change impacts is the essential feature of its moral justification. In the latter, however, geoengineering is justified because its knock-on effects will come to benefit everyone. So, the civil rights movement can, for example, call for a bus boycott in Montgomery or a sit-in in Nashville—knowing this will harm the economic livelihoods of particular African-Americans—because the political consequences of their civil disobedience will redound to the benefit of all victims of the injustice. Similarly, one might argue that geoengineering as civil disobedience can avoid the objections to self-defense because it purports to benefit all victims of climate change.
Yet, we cannot go around hurting other people and claim we are justified simply because it might be the case that those costs will redound to their benefit. Both the act and the agent of civil disobedience must meet certain criteria. First, it seems plausible that the civil disobedient must reasonably believe that there is a sufficient possibility of success and that belief must be true. If you are going to hurt someone with the hope of generating some justifying political benefit, you cannot simply be lucky that everything works out okay; there must be some non-trivial connection between what you believe will happen and what does happen. Second, the civil disobeyers will need to satisfy certain ‘good faith’ criteria: they must be conscientious (acting for moral reasons) and political (aiming for the reform of institutions that will benefit the oppressed class) as well as willing to operate in public. Third, civil disobedience is non-violent, which distinguishes it from violent revolution. Finally, and most controversially, it is usually understood that civil disobedience requires a willingness to accept punishment even if that punishment is unjustified.
Yet, we cannot go around hurting other people and claim we are justified simply because it might be the case that those costs will redound to their benefit.
This last element is worth discussing in greater detail. Acceptance of punishment—according to civil disobedience theorists like John Rawls, Kimberly Brownlee, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—is required in order to respect the relationship of equality between citizens in the face of law-breaking. The idea is something like this. The civil disobeyer is engaging in a kind of political communication and making a moral demand on the polity. The nature of the demand is deliberative: the civil disobeyer wants to awaken the community to an injustice and pressure them take actions to remedy it. Yet, this kind of communication requires that you treat the people you are communicating with and the institutions of political deliberation with some respect. By accepting punishment, the civil disobeyer expresses the idea that they respect (or even love, in the case of MLK) their shared political institutions and their fellow citizens while demanding that an egregious injustice be rectified. It accomplishes the difficult task of violating the law while respecting it, which is precisely the special virtue of civil disobedience according to MLK and others.
Is it likely that geoengineering by a victim, low-emitting state will meet these requirements? Two criteria are fairly straightforward even if it might be difficult for us to know whether they are satisfied. First, there is no reason—in principle—to think that state actors cannot satisfy the ‘good faith’ requirements even though, epistemically, it will be sometimes difficult to determine state actor motivations. Second, if geoengineering has too low a likelihood of generating the relevant political effects, then it will not be justified. As a political philosopher, I leave to others the analysis of the relevant causal mechanisms.
The other two criteria are more interesting. First, it is not obvious that the geoengineering state would be willing to accept punishment as a matter of fact. But more importantly, it is unclear that the geoengineering state could even accept punishment if it wanted to. The international legal order, except in quite extraordinary circumstances, simply lacks the capacity to engage in the kind of democratically authorized punishment for law-breaking that seem to be a basic predication of civil disobedience; the adjudicative and legislative institutions are—with few, extraordinary exceptions—simply lacking. What’s more, the basic values that make the acceptance of punishment an attractive requirement do not obtain: there is no meaningful global, democratic polity or set of deliberative institutions that the geoengineering state would be respecting with their willingness to accept punishment. In fact, norms about climate change are so inchoate that it is not even especially clear what international norm or law would be violated by, say, sulfate albedo modification. So, it just isn’t that clear how helpful or productive a civil disobedience lens would be.
Now, let’s consider nonviolence. The reason that civil disobedience is often associated with non-violence is because, I would submit, that is difficult to argue that you are respecting someone as an equal deliberator when you are directly harming them. The essential claim is that civil disobedience normally does not violate what we might call the legitimate entitlements held by fellow citizens. When civil rights activists sit at a ‘whites only’ lunch counter, they are violating the legal entitlements of the restaurant owner (or at least, they were doing so at the time) and likely hurting the owner’s business. Yet, the restaurant owner does not have the right—not really—to either the custom or to discriminatory lunch counters; the law that grants him that entitlement is unjust. So, civil disobedience usually needs to overcome the wrongness of acting against the rule of law and, perhaps, disrespecting shared deliberative mechanisms, but civil disobedience does not normally need to overcome the wrongness of violating the specific rights of the particular people upon whom it imposes costs.
Yet, this is not true of geoengineering. As I said in Part One, the negative side effects of risky geoengineering will likely fall on the most vulnerable and least responsible individuals. Now, it is, of course, often difficult to distinguish between just and unjust entitlements. Yet, the rights potentially affected by risky geoengineering are uncontroversial and important: rights to adequate drinking water, food, health, and even life. To put it more simply, civil disobedience does not look all that attractive when it kills people and geoengineering will likely do that. So, unlike paradigmatic cases of civil disobedience (e.g., the lunch counter sit-ins or Gandhi’s Salt March), the ‘civil disobedience’ of geoengineering will violate the legitimate entitlements of particular people and likelywon’t disrespect international legal norms or international rule of law.
So, I think we are forced to conclude that civil disobedience is not an especially productive framework for justifying geoengineering. First, the international order simply is not robust enough to make possible the kind of deliberation that civil disobedience depends upon. Second, like ‘geoengineering as self-defense,’ ‘geoengineering as civil disobedience’ does not take sufficiently seriously the rights violations likely generated by the most dangerous geoengineering strategies.
Any attempt to justify geoengineering will need to grapple seriously with the fact that it will violate the vital and core interests of many people. I believe I have such an account, which I will share in Part Three.
Patrick Taylor Smith, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He is writing a book titled “A Leap Into Darkness: Domination and the Normative Structure of International Politics,” and researches climate change and climate engineering. His papers can be found here.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com.