Talking Past Each Other - On Moral Hazard in Solar Radiation Management Research

[Andrew Lockley]

https://www.gcr21.org/publications/gcr/gcr-quarterly-magazine/qm-3-4/2021-articles/qm-3-4-2021-sconfienza-talking-past-each-other-on-moral-hazard-in-solar-radiation-management-research

Both the capture from economic interests and the possibility of emission displacement remain valid concerns when it comes to the issue of opting out of SRM. Strategically linking SRM to mitigation could offer a possible solution to this problem; this means that countries which planned and pursued an ambitious mitigation strategy could use SRM to shave off the peak in temperatures later in the century. But once again, problematic collective dynamics remain: if a country doing its part of the mitigation effort could implement SRM at the scale and level to significantly cool the atmosphere, then we might solve a moral hazard problem in the country implementing SRM but not globally. If, on the other hand, a country doing its part of the mitigation effort implements SRM in a way that it is proportional to its mitigation, then we might not be able to reach a significant cooling of the atmosphere. Another proposal to address the possible termination problem is to have a governance system which kickstart a gradual phaseout of SRM when certain conditions are met, for example, when a percentage of the countries wishes to pull out because of unplanned adverse effects. But while admirable and ingenious in theory, this solution might not work in practice. Time and again international politics has been driven by the interests of the most powerful countries: what would happen if the majority of the countries wanted to pull out of SRM and kickstart the gradual phaseout but not USA and China?