Taming the Climate Emergency: Geoengineering and Ethics

Abstract

In this article, we shed some light into two questions with regard to te idea of climate emergency and dangerous climate change: Presuming that the negative effects of climate change can occur abruptly we want to investigate, in particular, whether there is any kind of rational basis to the conclusion that a state of climate emergency would require geoengineering implementations such as solar radiation management (SRM). Related to this, we will pose the question whether there can be exemptions from conventional morality justified by climate emergency for instance to use such largely untested geoengineering methods like SRM. We will take a look at SRM from an ethical point of view and analyze the concept of climate emergency and its policy relevance in order to assess the moral justification for the implementation of SRM.

Keywords

• Geoengineering
• ethics of solar radiation management
• applied ethics
• emergency
• climate change