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Humans have dramatically changed Earth’s environment, on the land, in the ocean and in the atmosphere. The rate of change of these perturbations in the Anthropocene is unlike any in our geological past. This also means humans need to develop plans to counter the most severe effects. Geoengineering is probably the best example of the search for a solution to such a self-created problem. However, a long-term solution most likely requires a shift in our thinking towards sustainable development, putting environmental cost before capital gains and developing a more cyclic economy. This requires changes in the way we define and perceive the interaction between the biogeochemistry of Earth system and our own economies.

This chapter examines the role of geoengineering in the mitigation of climate change. It begins with an overview of the state of geoengineering science before turning to the politics of geoengineering, with particular emphasis on scientific assessment and regulation and the need for regulatory treaties. It argues that norms to govern deployment of geoengineering systems are necessary, which might arise through intensive research organised by the academies of sciences in key countries.

This chapter addresses different sorts of justificatory reasons – consequentialist and nonconsequentialist – with the objective of demonstrating how consequentialist reasoning has permeated the environmental discourse. It uses the cases of geoengineering and vaccination (from in imaginary deadly illness – the Schmoo) to illustrate how ethical orientations toward the good often come up short when seeking to justify complicated interventions that encroach on human lives.

This chapter uses climate change governance to illustrate how policymakers can engage in an integrated analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of defining agency jurisdiction along each of the dimensions for different governmental functions. In particular, the chapter assesses and considers alternatives to the interjurisdictional frameworks that have begun to develop, with a three-part focus on climate change adaptation, mitigation, and geoengineering activities. Though undoubtedly contextual within these three general categories of emerging governance, each presents challenges and implies different tradeoffs that are likely to be more consistent with particular types of allocations. The chapter extrapolates from the insights from the book's earlier case studies and draws plausible inferences based on justifications for particular allocations to propose configurations for these three emerging regulatory regimes. Finally, the chapter explains how climate change governance illustrates the merit of integrating into institutional design strategies that promote learning about the efficacy of adopted allocations.

The chapter focuses on climate change in general and geoengineering in particular. It explains who we are in the context of ethical complaints about our understanding of global environmental change. The chapter also considers some categories of negative ethical appraisal to which failure makes humanity susceptible, including those involving tarnishing, marring, and blighting evils.

Clare Heyward, and Steve Rayner, and Julian Savulescu examine the legitimacy and social control over the research, development and eventual deployment of geo-engineering to reduce human caused climate change. They believe that it is permissible in principle but all geo-engineering R&D should be subject to some sort of governance given its potential to affect everyone in the world. They defend the Oxford Principles of ethical-political decision-making principles. 1) Geo-engineering is in the public interest and should be regulated as a public good; 2) there should be public participation in geo-engineering decision-making; 3) geo-engineering research should be transparent and available to the public; 4) risk assessments should be conducted by independent bodies, and be directed toward both the environmental and socio-economic impacts of research and deployment; and 5) the legal, social, and ethical implications of geo-engineering should be addressed before a project is undertaken or technology deployed. The authors then compare the Oxford Principles favorably the three main alternative models that guide geoengineering development. They argue that it has a greater scope of application than the alternatives and better lend themselves to action-guiding recommendations and regulations, appropriate to different technologies -- while preserving longstanding environmental and political values.

This essay analyzes the shift from incremental to exponential accelerations in atmospheric CO₂ and its implications for the science and governance of climate change. It examines some of the models and tools that scientists are developing to address and manage environmental uncertainty, as well as their emerging forms of scientific monitoring of increasingly unpredictable ecosystemic behaviors. A central question concerns how such sciences contribute to prospective thinking about how natural systems and societal infrastructures might adapt to imminent ecological dangers linked to climate change. The essay shows how a scientific predication toward ecosystemic “tipping points” has ushered in a new kind of intellectual labor, a horizoning work, involving the construction of empirical tools and appropriate “scaling rules” for recognizing and keeping a “safe distance” from unsafe ecosystemic thresholds. Here the notion of horizon acts as a kind of contemporary equipment for managing and sometimes mitigating complex futures. The horizon also sets a stage for contemplating relations between nonparametric realities and a social science of survival. With a public increasingly enamored with magic bullet solutions to the problem of climate change, the essay’s conclusion explores alternative frameworks of prevention and biomanipulation as antidotes to intensifying pressures to geoengineer.

In the contemporary discourse of sacrifice in the context of climate change and environmental sustainability, geoengineering is believed to be a technology-based means to change and control a climate system. Geoengineering is getting attention and consideration worldwide from media outlets, commentators, and policymakers. The author explains that a technological development like geoengineering is a sacrifice-free form of action that fixes environmental concerns and reduces the burden. The author further discusses three hidden technological sacrifices: material, political, and existential.

Beginning with the coining of “terraforming” by science fiction writer Jack Williamson, this chapter explores the boundaries of the term in scientific discourse and in fiction, focusing attention on its significance for stories of interplanetary colonisation. It compares terraforming with its Earthbound counterpart, geoengineering, thus highlighting how science fiction explores modes of relating to Earth’s environment. It introduces James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and explains its significance for terraforming, and explores the nature of science fiction’s environmental engagement and its intersections with ecocritical concerns. It also introduces the concept of nature’s otherness and of landscaping, and connects the latter to Bakhtin’s chronotope, thus delineating an analytical framework for exploring how space and time is invested with human value and meaning in science fictional narratives.

Paying special attention to the role of landscaping, Bakhtinian dialogism, the science fictional megatext, pastoral and utopian discourse, ecology and environmentalism, the conclusion to Terraforming considers how the terraforming motif provides a point of convergence for all these dynamics and discourses. The main part of this section reflects on the terraforming narratives that have been published during and after the mid-1990s and suggests many fruitful avenues for further research into terraforming. Ultimately, this section argues that terraforming demonstrates the tendency for science fiction to operate as a literature of landscaping, an environmental literature that examines the importance of the world in the light of contemporary technological innovation and intervention into nature.

The conclusion argues that weather control and the American state grew in tandem during the twentieth century and that weather control was different from other state controls of nature because modifying the atmosphere affects everything downstream, not just a large patch of land. In contrast, even large dam and levee projects are essentially local. But now the effects of climate change add a new level of interest to humans’ desires to choose their environmental conditions. Geoengineering techniques, including carbon sequestration and reflecting sunlight back into space, are on a much larger scale than any weather control attempts. They would also be subject to global, not state, control, which makes them less likely, though not impossible. Depending on where they live, people will probably be clamoring, however, for more or less water, and that is within the capability of current weather control techniques, which have always been about water. Weather control may have lost its luster as a state tool in the 1970s, but that does not mean it is gone for good. Lessons learned from those earlier attempts could be key to future fresh water supplies.

Our planet and its biosphere will remain our home, until the day (if it ever comes) when we emigrate into outer space or virtual realities. Human activities are altering this environment in unintended and misbegotten ways, which may harm our prospects for a prosperous future. This chapter focuses mainly on the climate crisis and on various radical proposals for fixing it, including the dangerous geoengineering idea of pumping sulfur into the stratosphere to block out some of the sunlight. Artificial removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is possibly a better idea, because it attacks the problem at its roots rather than just the symptoms, but it is not clear how we can implement it.

This chapter considers the potential for tensions between the United Natesion Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) regimes relating to disputes at the intersection of climate change and ocean governance, using geoengineering as a case study. The chapter explores the substantive commitments relevant to geoengineering and existing dispute resolutions mechanisms under the two regimes. It considers where tension, conflict, and overlap may arise, and how they may be resolved in various forums, such as the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The discussion includes description of particular geoengineering methods, including direct carbon dioxide removal (CDR), and solar radiation management (SRM).

This chapter focuses on international law and the regulation of marine geoengineering. Specifically, it provides an account of the international political and legal responses to ocean iron fertilization activities on the high seas, that have led to the establishment of international control over activities that intend to manipulate the marine environment, for the purposes of combatting the effects of climate change. The chapter provides a brief background on geoengineering and clarifies the meaning of the term as well as the different strategies comprised by this concept, including ocean iron fertilization. Following an outline of the challenges posed by the absence of an international regulatory system and the limits of the international legal framework relevant to ocean iron fertilization experiments, the chapter provides an analysis of the amendment to the 1996 Protocol to the London Convention, which establishes a global and transparent regulatory mechanism for ocean iron fertilization and other marine geoengineering activities.

The role of adaptation and mitigation to climate change is described using the concept of planetary boundaries. The future evolution of the main reservoirs of carbon is described. The role of the land and ocean sink, the permafrost feedback and ocean acidification is described. The challenge to keep Earth’s temperature below 1.5 °C or 2.0 ºC is discussed. As this will involve large amounts of negative emission technologies, such as carbon capture and storage, this may be hard to achieve, as an analysis of their potential and environmental costs shows. Geoengineering has a separate of difficult problems to cope with, which makes the application non-trivial. Decarbonization of societies is discussed and an outline given for a transition path towards a carbon-free society.