Rules for Geoengineering the Planet

The 2015 Paris climate agreement was a major milestone, but the truth is, achieving its ambitious goal of keeping temperatures to within 1.5 °C to 2 °C of preindustrial levels would require rates of mitigation far in excess of what’s been achieved—or even what’s been planned.

Because of this, more people are contemplating geoengineering—notably solar radiation management, which involves reflecting a portion of the sun’s radiation back into space. The idea raises many questions. We don’t know how effective it would be, and we don’t fully understand its potential impacts. There are also ethical issues about its use and its governance.

We need to acknowledge that the aggregate environmental and socioeconomic risks of solar radiation management would probably be small in comparison with the benefits of reducing global temperatures. But those benefits and harms would be unequally spread among regions of the world, and between current and future generations.

Read the observations of Janos Pasztor on MIT Technology Review - “Rules for Geoengineering the Planet.”