Climate Justice and Geoengineering. Ethics and Politics in the Atmospheric Anthropocene

Abstract

This thought-provoking collection of essays examines how the potential deployment of climate engineering (CE) technologies could affect matters of global justice. Christopher Preston makes it his priority to underline the stakes associated with the controversial geoengineering debate – a debate that has been ongoing since Paul Crutzen’s historical article in Climatic Change (2006). In that article, Crutzen proposed what many consider to be a radical alternative towards reducing CO2 emissions causing climate change: that is, a way to cool of the Earth artificially.These technologies are generally referred to as “geoengineering” or climate engineering (CE), and they adopt one of two forms: carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM). Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could, for example, involve fertilizing the oceans with iron, increasing the level of marine phytoplankton, which use (and thus capture) CO2 for photosynthesis. SRM, on the other hand, might involve injecting sulphur into the atmosphere, enhancing its albedo and thus reducing radiation from the sun.