Moral hazards and the need for debate

This Ted Talk from David Keith is a few years old now, but much of it still seems relevant today. Keith is professor of engineering at Harvard University and has been very vocal on the topic of geoengineering for many years. In this speech he introduces the idea of using stratospheric aerosols as a form of solar radiation management. As you can see from the comments, many of his views are highly controversial.

His weak argument for stratospheric aerosol injection (the sort researched by SPICE) certainly isn't convincing. However cheap it may be, Keith massively overlooks key concerns with this technology (continued ocean acidification to name but one). 

But this Ted Talk isn't meant to be a hard sell for stratospheric aerosols, right? Keith's key message comes in the latter half of his talk and is worth taking note of.

He claims that geoengineering hasn't been spoken about enough because it poses a moral hazard. In other words, something that could allow us to carry on with business as usual, in the knowledge that we have a get-out-of-jail-free card should things get prickly: merely acknowledging it as a future possibility might lessen our impetus to reduce emissions in the first place.

But by omitting geoengineering from political forums on how to tackle climate change, we are missing out on discussing important questions: who would authorize such technology? Who would control it? How would it be governed? What temperature would we set the planet at?!

It's certainly important to have these discussions openly in advance of geoengineering technologies being developed or even deployed - especially if we reach a situation where global warming could spiral comletely out of our control and somebody decides to rashly implement a quick-and-dirty techno-fix. We need to have serious debate about geoengineering, even if the outcome of such discussions is that under no circumstances will it be used to engineer the climate - that would still be a valuable conclusion and could be enshrined in law.

Otherwise, Keith warns, we run the risk of engineers deploying technology that could affect the entire planet, without these concerns having been discussed and without proper regulation and governance procedures being put in place.