Green Moral Hazards

[Andrew Lockley]

http://gwagner.com/greenMH

Green Moral Hazards

July 8th, 2020

Working draft — comments welcome

Abstract:

Moral hazards are ubiquitous. Green ones typically involve technological fixes: Environmentalists often see ‘technofixes’ as morally fraught because they absolve actors from taking more difficult steps towards systemic solutions. Carbon removal and especially solar geoengineering are only the latest example of such technologies. We here explore green moral hazards throughout American history. We argue that dismissing (solar) geoengineering on moral hazard grounds is often unproductive. Instead, especially those vehemently opposed to the technology should use it as an opportunity to expand the attention paid to the underlying environmental problem in the first place, actively invoking its opposite: ‘inverse moral hazards’.

Keywords: risk compensation; environmentalism; climate; carbon removal; geoengineering

Full text: “Green Moral Hazards” (version: 8 July 2020; C2G blog, 9 January 2020).

Citation:

Wagner, Gernot and Daniel Zizzamia, “Green Moral Hazards,” NYU Wagner Research Paper (8 July 2020).