From moral hazards to moral responsibilities

In 2020, the International Maritime Organization introduced new restrictions on sulfur content in shipping fuels. Coupled with ongoing reductions in sulfur dioxide pollution worldwide, atmospheric aerosol concentrations have declined sharply. Their removal constitutes a notable change in global radiative forcing dynamics; multi-model analyses estimate an effective increase in forcing roughly equivalent to the impact of the last few years of global carbon dioxide emissions. This added heat content has accelerated global warming with high significance for threshold-sensitive systems, such as low-lying cloud decks, coral ecosystems, and ice shelf stability.

This is but one example of what happens when climate system dynamics that are insufficiently understood—at least until human activity perturbs them to such a degree that the impact is impossible to ignore—are subject to human influence. That global warming has accelerated to the extent it has in recent years surprised many scientists. Had we understood global sulfur dioxide and aerosol cooling dynamics more intimately previously, perhaps it wouldn’t have.

Absent advanced research on climate systems and empirical tests of potential interventions, the risks of destabilization in climate systems will remain more opaque to us than we should allow for. Developing better monitoring and modelling capacity to understand how sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere “mask” global warming by producing a net cooling impact, as one example, would help better inform understanding of ongoing and future climate change dynamics at large, as well as plans for preparedness and adaptation. If we someday elect to conduct solar radiation management, that baseline work would help make that effort more targeted, effective, and predictable. But it doesn’t inherently advocate for that intervention. It better elucidates whether it’s potentially worthwhile and a fuller gamut of its potential impacts and implications.

Stratospheric aerosol injection is also only one example. The list of potential interventions stretches well beyond atmospheric radiation management; many proposed albedo-enhancement interventions are more local and leverage interventions in different parts of the atmosphere or at ground level. Further, some proposed strategies to prevent catastrophic impacts from climate change wouldn’t necessarily entail albedo enhancement at all. Stratospheric aerosol injection, of all the examples, may prove hardest to coordinate and govern globally, insofar as it’s an intervention in a completely open global climate system with high spatial variability and asymmetry.

Not so fast: What about the moral hazard concerns?

Concerns regarding the moral hazard of conducting direct interventions in climate systems are often well-founded, but they shouldn’t artificially constrain foundational scientific inquiry. That constraint limits our capacity to better understand the Earth's climate system science at large, as discussed in the atmospheric sulfur research and tracking example referenced above, let alone catalyze governance frameworks for interventions that may ultimately become desired if not necessary.

As such, we should reframe programs focused on advancing intervention viability assessments, even including those that would benefit from small-scale testing, as efforts, at least at first, to generate valuable scientific data and illuminate how climate systems function, influence one another, and what risks of change and destabilization they already face. Climate change has entered a non-linear era marked by accelerating warming, mounting risks of destabilization in certain critical climate systems—dramatic changes in any of which could trigger cascading havoc across others—and significant overall uncertainty.

Moral hazard concerns will remain front and center to this overarching work, both alongside and as an additional foundation for governance and coordination efforts. But they should not crowd out equal consideration of what moral responsibilities we have to advance research that will augment and accelerate climate system science in general, adaptation and preparedness efforts, and an understanding of what interventions to mitigate the biggest potential harms that climate change poses are tenable. Where there are questions of morality, neglecting some in favor of others does little to reduce risk.

The development of carbon removal and adaptation industries was once similarly constrained by moral hazard concerns. Now, these are understood as vital components of holistic climate change response efforts. Whether that is someday true with respect to direct interventions in climate systems is unanswerable. But advancing scientific baselines and developing programs to coordinate diverse stakeholders across disciplines, geographies, and interests is essential regardless, both for the scientific data and understanding it will yield, and because it is a transferable exercise for many complex risk response and coordination challenges in general (the governance complexity of AI risks vs. rewards comes to mind here, too).

There’s also a vanishingly narrow timeframe of opportunity to create the scientific, technical, and governance baselines to make certain interventions feasible should we ever desire to. It’s now or never, effectively. Continuing with stratospheric aerosol injection as an example, scientists estimate it could take decades to prepare for successful deployment. One buzzy, albeit secretive (so far) startup is working on the deployment architecture. But if we ever want to pull the proverbial trigger on that option, especially if we want to do so responsibly and well rather than haphazardly and poorly, we should fund and advance R&D today.

If we allow the current scientific and governance vacuum for interventions to persist, it increases the risk of unilateral action by select parties. This has already happened in the past, and—if and when it invariably happens again—it will inevitably be ineffective, potentially environmentally harmful, and certainly harmful to credible, responsible research-focused efforts, and could even precipitate geopolitical conflict. Advancing scientific baselines safeguards against an alternative future in which action is unilateral, ill-informed, and based on desperation rather than empiricism.

Should we elect not to advance scientific inquiry in this field, we’ll also implicitly acquiesce to simply paying lip service to environmental justice considerations. We can expect climate change to disproportionately affect many of the most disadvantaged people. Neglecting to consider all options to ameliorate harm, especially harms to those of the least means to act and respond themselves, is no moral victory.