- The Ethics of Geoengineering: Should Humanity Hack the Climate? - September 24, 2025
- What The Decline Of Pollinators Means For American Agriculture - September 23, 2025
- Feds Warn La Niña Is Coming – What It Means For Hurricanes And Your Winter - September 19, 2025
The Moral Hazard Dilemma
Imagine telling someone their house has fire insurance, then watching them become careless with matches. This encapsulates the core ethical concern plaguing geoengineering today: the moral hazard argument, where geoengineering might be perceived as an insurance policy against climate change, undermining support for existing climate policies. The biggest concern researchers argue, is that geoengineering could create a sociological effect called a “moral hazard,” diminishing the urgency of climate action among the public, fossil fuel companies or policymakers. One study co-author warns “This is the fear – that instead of mitigation, they’re going to use that as an excuse to continue emitting”. However, research shows mixed results on whether people actually reduce their climate action when learning about geoengineering options. One earlier study suggested that people tend to think moral hazard is a risk, but another paper found that social media posts about geoengineering did little to tamp down the desire to tackle climate change, with researchers noting “On this very individual level, we do not find consistent evidence for moral hazard”.
The AGU Ethical Framework Revolution
In October 2024, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) released its Ethical Framework Principles for Climate Intervention Research, with the world’s largest association of Earth and space scientists launching an ethical framework as a guide to responsible decision-making and inclusive dialogue. This groundbreaking framework emerged at a critical moment when climate pressures are mounting worldwide. Drawing on precedents developed for ethical research in other emerging fields with unknown consequences – including human cloning, genetic engineering and nuclear weapons – this framework proposes five guiding principles for geoengineering research. The principles emphasize that climate intervention research should not be presented as an alternative to emissions reductions, and researchers should consider whether their work would shift climate impacts from one group to another, looking at the likely impact on groups experiencing social, economic, climate and environmental injustices. The framework represents a major step toward ensuring geoengineering research proceeds with proper ethical oversight. As the risks and opportunities of climate intervention are evaluated, all voices need and deserve to be heard, with more systematic, transparent and accountable governance frameworks needed to ensure safety and justice across geographies.
Stratospheric Aerosol Injection: Playing God with Sulfur
Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is a proposed method of solar geoengineering to reduce global warming by introducing aerosols into the stratosphere to create a cooling effect via global dimming and increased albedo, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluding that it “is the most-researched solar geoengineering method that it could limit warming to below 1.5 °C”. The concept isn’t entirely foreign to our planet’s history. Large volcanic eruptions have demonstrated the widespread cooling effect of sulfate aerosol in the stratosphere, with the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo estimated to have cooled global mean surface temperatures by up to 0.5°C over the following year. Modern SAI proposals would essentially recreate this volcanic effect artificially. Once injected into the stratosphere, sulfur dioxide would form sunlight-reflecting sulfate aerosols, with previous studies showing these aerosols would have a cooling effect similar to that of a major volcanic eruption, and the injections could continue to cool Earth for decades or even centuries. However, this technology carries significant risks. Previous research has emphasized the potential risks of SAI, such as changing the stratospheric ozone layer and altering global precipitation patterns.
The Technological Challenge of Reaching the Stratosphere
While passenger jets routinely reach the lower stratosphere on transpolar flights, getting efficient global coverage requires deploying aerosols at low latitudes where the stratosphere’s natural circulation will distribute them worldwide, with the average height of the troposphere about 17 kilometers in the tropics, and models suggesting injection needs to be several kilometers higher at around 20 kilometers – nearly twice the height at which commercial jets cruise. This presents a formidable engineering challenge that goes far beyond current aviation capabilities. A fundamental challenge of SRM is the technological requirement to implement any strategy at the scale required to achieve appreciable global cooling, with both SAI and marine cloud brightening requiring development of reliable methods for producing aerosols of a specific size and uniformity, in addition to the platforms needed for deployment such as ships and high altitude aircraft. The scale difference between research and deployment is mind-boggling. Debates about stratospheric aerosol injection commonly focus either on small-scale research using mere kilograms of aerosol material or deployment that could substantially slow warming involving millions of metric tons per year – a billionfold difference in scale. Current research efforts remain modest, with recent trials using only hundreds of grams of material for testing purposes.
Health and Environmental Consequences Nobody Can Predict
Prior research has determined that SAI will not only decrease global temperatures but is likely to have direct impacts on ecosystem and public health, investigating various ways SAI may impact global public health outcomes related to hydrologic cycling, atmospheric chemical cycling, frequency of natural disasters, food system disruptions, and ecological systems. The health implications stretch across multiple systems that sustain human life. Studies show that SAI could weaken the stratospheric ozone layer, alter precipitation patterns and affect agriculture, ecosystem services, marine life and air quality, with impacts and risks varying by how and where it is deployed, the climate, ecosystems and the population. What makes these risks particularly troubling is their unpredictability. Small changes in variables such as the size of aerosol droplets, their chemical reactivity and the speed of their reactions with ozone can produce different results, with studies varying the amount and location of sulfur dioxide injection producing different outcomes. The complexity of Earth’s climate system means that even small modifications could trigger cascading effects that scientists cannot fully anticipate. Large uncertainties remain regarding changes in large scale circulation, regional climate, air quality, and weather associated with SRM, while research on low-level clouds has revealed complex interactions with aerosols making the net climate effect difficult to project.
The Governance Vacuum: Who Controls the Planetary Thermostat?
There is no international, national or state framework that currently governs geoengineering, creating a worrisome future scenario where climate impacts in a particularly vulnerable country could be so severe that it resorts to deploying SAI on its own before the world is ready, potentially causing political instability or provoking retribution from other countries. This governance gap represents one of the most dangerous aspects of geoengineering technology. The ease of unauthorized deployment is particularly concerning. Another possible scenario is that an individual or startup decides to experiment with geoengineering on their own, with current U.S. regulations requiring only that anyone wanting to shoot aerosols into the sky fill out a one-page form for the Commerce Department and NOAA 10 days beforehand. The international implications are staggering – imagine one nation’s climate intervention affecting weather patterns, agriculture, and natural disasters in neighboring countries without their consent. This is particularly important for technologies that have the potential to adversely impact landscapes and peoples, or those that carry significant geopolitical risks – sometimes far from the location of original intervention.
Global South Voices: The Ethics of Climate Colonialism
Research has found that people from the Global South are generally more open to solar geoengineering than those in the Global North, perhaps because they are presently bearing the brunt of climate impacts, with Global South participants more likely to have experienced a major natural disaster in the past 3 years and to expect that climate change would harm them personally. This disparity reveals a troubling ethical dimension: those least responsible for historical emissions may be most willing to accept the risks of experimental climate interventions. The framework for inclusive research reflects this concern. Research criteria aim to “promote optimal approaches from a climate perspective while carefully weighing the benefits and risks and making sure to include the perspectives of underrepresented groups and the Global South,” with assessment structures promoting enhanced interdisciplinary and international collaborations while intentionally engaging the underrepresented Global South. However, meaningful inclusion requires more than consultation – it demands genuine power-sharing in decision-making processes. The high cost of developing and deploying these tools could exacerbate global inequalities between countries of different economic weight, especially in terms of the distribution of risks, while geoengineering tools could also have potential for military or geo-political use.
The Carbon Removal Ethics Maze
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods remove CO2 from the atmosphere into durable storage, representing a rapidly growing, albeit contentious, topic in climate governance, with substantial research on techno-economic feasibility and a growing body of literature exploring the ethics of CDR. Unlike solar radiation management, CDR appears less controversial on the surface, but ethical complexities abound. Research indicates carbon removal could lead to a reduction or delay in near-term emission reductions, echoing the moral hazard concerns surrounding solar geoengineering. Several moral concerns arise if the contribution of carbon dioxide removal technologies to achieving net zero is not specified, but such concerns can be met by defining a permissible target for CDRs, with frameworks needed to identify categories of emissions for which the permissibility of CDRs varies depending on the ethical costs of both emission abatement and CDRs. The challenge lies in preventing CDR from becoming an excuse for continued emissions. Comprehensive governance frameworks are needed so that oil and gas industries don’t rely on CDR to justify continued fossil fuel production, and to protect communities already facing increased pollution from additional risks tied to land, water and energy use from new CDR facilities.
Public Engagement: Democracy in Climate Intervention
As attention to carbon dioxide removal in climate policy grows and many CDR methods become controversial, broadening knowledge creation to include stakeholder perspectives upstream of policy becomes important, with studies providing insights into stakeholder engagement processes and co-creative CDR policy design and evaluation. Meaningful public engagement goes beyond simple consultation to genuine collaboration. Community engagement practitioners emphasize “We move at the speed of trust,” with companies learning that their first step must be understanding a community and its needs, moving “from just informing to, ‘How do we collaborate? How can this be more beneficial to you?'” Successful projects require more than scientific validity – they need social license. Without public trust and community support, CDR projects may struggle to gain social license and scale, limiting their ability to contribute to climate goals, with other clean energy projects that did not adequately engage communities facing delays or cancellations. Large-scale projects will only succeed if they’re a good match for the local culture, with success requiring understanding “the culture and history of the local area”.
Research Ethics: The SCoPEx Controversy and Beyond
In 2021, Harvard planned a small field trial that would have been the first experiment done in the stratosphere, with the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) planning to launch a balloon releasing half a kilogram of sulfate and monitoring particle dispersal and sunlight reflection, but the test launch in Sweden was cancelled due to objections from local Sami Indigenous people and environmental groups who feared SAI “entails risks of catastrophic consequences”. This cancellation highlighted the tension between scientific curiosity and community consent. In contrast, other projects have succeeded by “winning over the public,” becoming “the first solar geoengineering project to stage a real world test” with researchers noting “We’re the first ones to ever go and test anything outside” after securing community support. The difference between success and failure often lies in genuine community engagement from the project’s inception. Rather than imposing projects on communities, successful approaches involve communities inviting researchers, as demonstrated when “a startup was able to run its first field trial after the local community invited the company to come and pitch the experiment to them”. These contrasting outcomes illustrate that the ethics of geoengineering research extend beyond laboratory safety protocols to encompass fundamental questions of consent and democratic participation.
The Economics of Playing God
Despite increasing political attention and support, the high costs of many carbon dioxide removal technologies remain a barrier to large-scale deployment, with cost ranges for BECCS generally lower than DACCS. The economic dimensions of geoengineering raise profound questions about who pays and who benefits. Stratospheric aerosol injection is feasible with existing technologies and could be implemented in a very short period of time at a relatively low cost, making it potentially attractive to nations or actors seeking quick climate fixes. However, the apparent affordability of some geoengineering approaches may be deceptive when considering long-term commitments and global governance costs. Research shows that planning for high CDR under a 2°C target leads to minimal fossil fuel phase-out before mid-century, and if large-scale CDR is not feasible, the rapid transition required afterward increases global stranded assets by 38%, while a robust policy strategy planning for low CDR opens up the possibility to limit temperature change to 1.5°C. The economic risks of betting on unproven technologies could leave society worse off if these solutions fail to materialize at the anticipated scale and cost.
Unintended Consequences: When Solutions Become Problems
Experts point out that given current knowledge gaps, geoengineering techniques cannot yet be relied on to significantly contribute to meeting climate targets, and due to lack of perspective and experience, we cannot anticipate the consequences of these interventions on climate, with possibilities of initiating chain reactions with considerable risks to humans, oceans, global temperatures, and biodiversity. The history of technological interventions in complex systems offers sobering lessons about unintended consequences. Research has revealed that the international shipping fleet has been inadvertently geoengineering the planet for decades, with new shipping regulations restricting sulfur dioxide emissions in 2020 causing a resulting rise in sea-surface temperatures, suggesting the pollution had been brightening clouds above the sea. This accidental experiment demonstrates how even small changes to aerosol emissions can have measurable climate effects, underlining the unpredictability of intentional climate interventions. SRM deployments large enough to temporarily offset climate change impacts could have substantial risks and unexpected consequences driven by complex chemical, radiative, and dynamical interactions, such as changes to the hydrologic cycle and clouds, effects on ecosystems and agriculture, additional impacts on stratospheric ozone, and alterations to climate patterns. The interconnected nature of Earth’s climate system means that attempts to address one problem may create others that are harder to reverse.
The Time Factor: Emergency Measures or Dangerous Delays?
Earth has warmed by approximately 1.1-1.2 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century – already perilously close to shattering the Paris climate agreement’s attempts to limit warming to “well below” two degrees C, and with governments and corporations backing off on previous climate goals while annual greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb, this lack of action has led some researchers to seriously propose planetary-scale geoengineering schemes. The urgency of climate crisis creates a dangerous pressure for rapid deployment of unproven technologies. Earth’s poles are warming up to four times faster than the planet as a whole, with polar sea ice expected to be completely gone during summers in the 2030s, the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melting at unprecedented rates potentially raising sea levels by up to 1.9 meters by 2100, and the Himalayas seeing record low snowpack in 2025. A common argument is that stratospheric aerosol injection can take place quickly and would buy time for carbon sequestration projects to be implemented and start acting over decades and centuries. However, this “buying time” argument may create false confidence that delays necessary emissions reductions. The temporal mismatch between quick-acting geoengineering and slow-acting carbon removal creates ethical dilemmas about inter-generational responsibility and the right to make planetary-scale decisions that will affect future generations for centuries.
Building Ethical Guardrails for Climate Intervention
As the carbon removal industry ramps up, there is growing emphasis on “responsible” carbon removal to ensure communities don’t experience harm and have access to local benefits, emphasizing sustainably and safely deploying CDR approaches while complementing efforts to reduce emissions without exacerbating historical harms, including thoroughly assessing social, economic and environmental impacts while minimizing negative effects and equitably distributing benefits. The path forward requires unprecedented international cooperation and ethical frameworks. Establishing a federal monitoring function or independent standards body within government, free from vested interests, is essential to ensuring high-quality, transparent oversight for CDR, providing accountability and verification that projects deliver promised removals, with standardized frameworks critical for carbon removals to be recognized in national reporting and avoid perverse incentives. As policymakers develop frameworks for carbon removal, embedding equity and environmental justice principles is critical to ensure that benefits are maximized, risks are minimized and both are distributed fairly. These principles should guide not just carbon removal but all forms of climate intervention. The challenge lies in creating governance structures that are both scientifically informed and democratically legitimate, capable of making decisions about planetary-scale interventions while protecting the rights and interests of all affected communities.
The question of whether humanity should hack the climate through geoengineering doesn’t have simple answers. As we stand at this crossroads, the decisions we make about researching, testing, and potentially deploying these technologies will shape the planet’s future for generations. The ethical frameworks being developed today may determine whether geoengineering becomes a tool of climate justice or climate colonialism. What kind of world are we willing to engineer, and who gets to decide?
