Who Are the Engineers? Solar - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Who Are the Engineers? Solar
Geoengineering Research and Justice

(cid:129)
Olúf.émi O. Táíwò and Shuchi Talati*

Abstract

Solar geoengineering research is a small but growing ﬁeld as concerns arise that reducing
emissions will not be sufﬁcient to limit severe climate impacts. With this increasing
attention, ensuring that the ﬁeld advances equitably and inclusively is of immense
importance. This commentary is a response to arguments that advocate for abandoning
solar geoengineering research altogether because it perpetuates colonialism and pro-
motes injustice. We ﬁnd, however, that this brand of argument is itself performatively
colonial and recommend a more inclusive framework for solar geoengineering gover-
nance that integrates existing research on relevant structures.

There has been increased attention on solar geoengineering (SG) research as
climate impacts are worsening and mitigation efforts are seeing limited success.
This growing attention is evident from a recent doubling of congressional
appropriations for solar geoengineering research as well as the recent National
Academies report on SG research and governance (National Academies of
Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM] 2021; Talati 2020). This tech-
nology, research surrounding it, and its growing prevalence have been extremely
controversial. Numerous NGOs, environmental advocacy groups, and academics
have expressed alarm and condemnation of both research into and hypothetical
deployment of such technologies (Center for International Environmental Law
[CIEL] 2019; ETC Group 2018; Stephens and Surprise 2019; Heinrich Boll
Foundation 2017; Schneider and Fuhr 2021; York 2021).

When referring to SG, we focus on the methods that are highlighted by the
2021 National Academy of Sciences report on this topic: stratospheric aerosol
injection, marine cloud brightening, and cirrus cloud thinning (NASEM 2021).

* Shuchi Talati was a member of the independent Advisory Committee to oversee SCoPEx from

July 2019 to April 2021.

Global Environmental Politics 22:1, February 2022, https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00620
© 2021 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Olúf .émi O. Táíwò and Shuchi Talati

(cid:129) 13

SG could potentially limit harm from climate change impacts and for
relatively low cost. However, concerns are wide ranging and include “moral
hazard” risks of reducing resources and motivation for emissions mitigation,
the “slippery slope” risk that early-stage research would inevitably lead to
deployment, and environmental risks around potential changes in precipitation
patterns and extreme events—especially as impacts may be heterogeneous across
regions. SG additionally does not address the root cause of climate change.

One particular aspect of controversy concerns the geopolitical implications
of SG. Larger and richer countries, along with people from more socially advan-
taged demographics, have so far played an outsized role in the development of
SG, as they have in climate policy more generally. Some worry that SG research
and deployment would be corrupted by this fact—that SG will inevitably create
new political inequalities or exacerbate existing ones, especially between the
Global North and the Global South.

Ironically, such arguments often participate in the very dynamics they
criticize. Stephens and Surprise (2019), for instance, argue that we should reject
geoengineering as an approach being championed “by a small group of primarily
white men at elite institutions in the Global North.” These Global North–based
researchers, without any disclosed consultation with Global South organizations
or researchers, pronounced the Global South’s interests from a microphone based
in the North. They thus introduce a standard their own published argument fails
to meet, and one that is also largely not met by organizations advocating against
geoengineering research (CIEL 2019). We have also observed that often, if Global
South organizations are quoted or consulted, the same few groups are consistently
used by authors and organizations that advocate against research on this topic.

We argue for a better approach to the politics of SG: one sensitive to the very
real concerns of injustice and inequality raised by justice-minded organizations,
but one that decides less from the armchair about what could be beneﬁcial for
global justice and declares less on other people’s behalf. What remains to those
of us who strive for justice depends on the outcome of the political contest on
speciﬁc political questions: if the technologies are advanced, how it would occur,
by whom, and what political structures and institutions they will meet when they
are born. The point of research about SG should be to make these questions
answerable, which may prove that a societally beneﬁcial SG deployment program
is not feasible and thus contribute materially to preventing such deployment.

Rather than abandoning all research in this ﬁeld due to problematic structures
that may currently exist in some institutions and regions, we argue that more
constructive work must be done to build a platform that enables inclusive research
and governance. We assert that we should advocate for and produce a public, non-
military alternative research program that helps fund and build capacity of Global
South researchers and policy makers. Such a program should produce a collective
framework to make collective decisions about SG—importantly, including the
decision about whether to abandon such technologies and further research into
them. A ban at this stage of low information and low involvement of Global South

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14 (cid:129) Who Are the Engineers? Solar Geoengineering Research and Justice

researchers and policy makers—especially if done at the behest of Global North
researchers and organizations—is premature and undemocratic.

The Landscape

There are currently no national or international governance frameworks for SG
research, and there is no question that future decisions should be made in an
inclusive, deliberative manner. The inclusion of Global South and underrepre-
sented voices is vital to producing diverse ideas and building the legitimacy of
SG research (Rahman et al. 2018; Winickoff et al. 2015).

Early efforts focused on building capacity within vulnerable communities,
enabling public participation, and ensuring just decisions are under way. Many
advocates suggest that efforts for inclusive engagement that originate in or are
funded by the North are inevitably inauthentic vehicles to obtain consent for their
values. However, some civil society organizations are focused on efforts speciﬁcally
to help communities new to geoengineering form their own opinions. Examples
include the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative (SRMGI), which
supports capacity-building enterprises in vulnerable communities through its
DECIMALS program, and the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, which held
or participated in deliberative workshops on a range of geoengineering technolo-
gies in the Global South (Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative 2018; SRMGI
2020). The Union of Concerned Scientists is also focused on mechanisms to ensure
that diverse voices are part of decision-making processes for research (Talati and
Frumhoff 2020). There are additional ongoing efforts to govern the ﬁrst small-scale
SG experiment, SCoPEx, through an independent advisory committee, including
creating meaningful public participation processes (SCoPEx Independent Advisory
Committee 2021). Legitimate critiques of such examples exist (Aganaba-Jeanty
2019), but to address concerns with inequality, efforts to incorporate public par-
ticipation into decision-making should expand, not contract.

There are, of course, limitations to these initiatives, and we are early yet in
building global capacity for participation in both SG research and governance
(McLaren and Corry, 2021). Importantly, the United States has begun appropriating
funds for SG research without a federal governance framework (Talati 2020). While
funds remain minimal, this is a clear and dangerous gap that must be addressed.

However, any argument declaring that there is no pathway toward inclusive
governance is similarly premature. SG research still remains extremely nascent:
outdoor experimentation is only just beginning to draw increased attention,
requiring the development of a more robust framework for research governance.
Global North domination of SG is not inevitable, and arguments that portray
Northern dominance as inevitable can, paradoxically, help create the political reality
that they warn us about. Justice-minded researchers abandoning SG research would
only serve to ensure a monopoly on said research by indifferent and well-ﬁnanced
political actors. By Stephens and Surprise’s (2019) own admission, the capabilities
and incentives to develop the ability to control climate outcomes are concentrated in

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Olúf .émi O. Táíwò and Shuchi Talati

(cid:129) 15

the hands of militaries, billionaires, and potentially autocratic states—the institu-
tions and people least likely to be constrained by the negative public perceptions
that justice-oriented arguments might mobilize.

The basic know-how to deploy SG technology already exists: stopping
research at this point only prevents us from gaining the additional knowledge
necessary to evaluate the possible effects of SG deployment across regions. That
might well increase the probability of unilateral and dangerous SG deployment
as climate crisis impacts intensify and decision makers get increasingly desperate
(Osaka 2021). The balance of evidence from sociology and public choice theory
suggests that widespread and multilateral research builds prosocial norms and
reduces bias relative to the state of affairs in which research output on a subject
is conﬁned to a small number of well-positioned actors (Winsberg 2021).

Moreover, Global South researchers and decision makers themselves
might well have different perspectives on all these issues—a set of perspectives
that many of those against research have not engaged with or included as
co-creators in their work. Early engagement efforts with Global South environ-
mental leaders on this topic has illustrated the diversity and richness of views on
SG research and governance across the community ( Winickoff et al. 2015). A
recent workshop to build knowledge in Southeast Asia led by Global South
researchers found that participants supported regional research efforts for
geoengineering and increased international collaboration (Delina 2020).

But we also need to know what will happen to marginalized communities,
directly addressing concerns that SG will buttress a “colonial capitalism”
(Stephens and Surprise 2019). For anticolonial theorists like Amilcar Cabral
(1974), colonialism involves a concrete form of political control—over how a
society is able to meet its material needs over time. This deﬁnition allows us to
say in speciﬁc terms what the colonial dangers of climate crisis itself are: that its
ecological and political consequences will erode the ability of communities to
conﬁdently meet their key needs for food, water, and shelter (Martinez 2014;
Táíwò 2019). It also gives us a way to evaluate the implications of SG for colo-
nial injustice: we should judge prospective research programs, deployments,
and nondeployments of solar geoengineering by whether or not they expand
or contract vulnerable communities’ control over their basic needs.

These are complex questions, but they raise important issues about how
the ecological, social, and political systems will behave under different condi-
tions, with or without SG. Such questions cannot be answered by way of
moralism about the political impurity of scientiﬁc processes or by speculation
about political ones. Anticolonial politics should demand answers to these
questions, not foreclose the possibility of getting them.

Next Steps

More must be done to enable legitimate participation from geographically and
diverse publics in all aspects of SG and to make the study of how to do so an

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16 (cid:129) Who Are the Engineers? Solar Geoengineering Research and Justice

integral part of SG research and climate research generally. These voices are key
not only to justice but to creating valuable knowledge and research. The Global
Citizens’ Assembly to be convened ahead of COP26 is a step in the right direc-
tion, enlisting people chosen by lottery from the world over to participate in
intensive climate discussion (Reuters 2020). This approach ﬁts with other
political experiments in direct democracy like participatory budgeting, lottoc-
racy, and government by sortition—all of which have been lauded for increasing
equity as well as increasing community members’ understanding of both the
issues themselves and the process of government (Guerrero 2014; Su 2017;
Wampler and Hartz-Karp 2012). Policy makers have tended to consign such
efforts to merely advisory roles, but empowering these bodies with direct and
consequential decision-making power is key to their potential to address social
inequalities as such.

Building such an inclusive research enterprise with widespread, politically
consequential participation is an uphill task at that. But it is presumptuous and
self-contradictory to categorically declare that either inclusive research or gover-
nance of SG is impossible, and doubly so to have declared this unilaterally, with-
out the input of the vulnerable communities who are supposedly served by this
genre of argument. Limiting the future of research to the dynamics that currently
exist is a narrow, counterproductive way to look at the injustices that exist in any
of our institutions. As voices in the Global North, we should promote alternatives
that aim to correct, or at least ameliorate, unjust North–South power dynamics.

Olúf .émi O. Táíwò is an assistant professor at Georgetown University. He works
on and teaches social/political philosophy and writes frequently in journals and
public outlets about climate justice, colonialism, and racial capitalism. He has
BAs in political science and philosophy from Indiana University and a PhD in
philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Shuchi Talati is a scholar in residence at the Forum for Climate Engineering
Assessment at American University. Prior to that, she was a deputy director of
policy at Carbon180, where she focused on policies to build sustainable and
equitable carbon removal at scale. She also worked at the Union of Concerned
Scientists, where she led efforts to guide governance for solar geoengineering
approaches. She has a BS from Northwestern University, an MA from Columbia
University, and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in Engineering and
Public Policy.

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