This thesis explores the ethical challenges that a potential research program for solar climate engineering via Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) could incur. These ethical challenges are comprised of epistemic hurdles in relation to the research process, as well as societal questions of justice and the value of nature. The thesis proposes a variety of tools and approaches to assess and possibly govern the risks and uncertainties invoked by the research of SAI and its societal implications. The methodological approach is based mainly on ethical and philosophical analysis and reflection and the main findings take the form of discursive argumentation and normative reflection.

SAI is a form of climate engineering that seeks to reduce global warming by increasing the planet’s reflection levels through the injection of reflective agents (aerosols) into the stratosphere. The mere potential of researching a technology that would actively intervene in the global climate is highly contentious and has led to passionate debates throughout the expert community. Designing a research process for such a polarizing technology such as SAI inevitably raises fundamental moral questions, wherein issues of global justice, democracy, the value of and humanity’s relationship with nature, and the societal impacts of technological innovation all intersect. Given these far-reaching consequences, the thesis operates under the assumption that SAI is a highly disruptive idea and technology, that has the potential to challenge and undermine existing societal values and institutions. Accordingly, this work presents a range of philosophical modes of inquiry and assessments, in order to supply any proposed SAI research governance program with the necessary ethical considerations and frameworks.

The thesis is structured along four major inflection points, which form the individual chapters tied together through differing but interrelated research questions. What follows is an overview of the research questions, along with a brief description of how those questions were answered…
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This chapter focuses on the maintenance of waste infrastructures in urban areas, arguing that waste infrastructures and their maintenance should be made more visible to allow for a more extensive, ethical engagement with waste. This contribution claims that cities need to approach the (re)design of municipal waste infrastructures through dynamic maintenance and reflexive repair, wherein waste, repair and maintenance are understood as discursive processes. Waste infrastructures and their maintenance are mostly invisible in daily interactions in cities in High-Income Countries, despite the diversities in waste practices, such as collection and processing. Invisibility is an intended outcome of the design and operation of these infrastructures, stemming from a nineteenth-century waste imaginary called ‘the tidy city’. Current municipal waste infrastructures are kept invisible, upholding beliefs and practices that disvalue waste. While visions have been proposed that challenge this disvalue, few of them have been able to materialise in stratified municipal waste management systems. This engagement is seen as a first step in challenging modern notions of dirt and waste. Visibility is a (new) design criterion for municipal waste infrastructures, a criterion that the authors relate to waste-affirming beliefs and practices, elaborating on anthropological perspectives on dirt and waste.
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This chapter discusses the societal and ethical challenges of climate engineering or large-scale intentional intervention in the climate system. Climate engineering is highly controversial, and raises many questions about the values of human societies and the desirability of technological visions of the future. Yet existing ethical theories and concepts may not be equipped to deal with the resulting ethical issues. To understand the potential social and political disruptiveness of climate engineering, we argue it must be placed in the context of global environmental changes caused by human activity. However, climate engineering is also accompanied by a high degree of uncertainty and risk in terms of potential and actual unintended impacts on natural processes and society. An important challenge stems from epistemic and normative uncertainties about the reversibility and variability in spatial and temporal scales of deployment. Epistemic uncertainties arise in the methodological framework of climate science, while normative uncertainties arise from the challenge of reconciling a plurality of values. A key question is how forms of climate engineering enforce or hinder disruption in social practices and institutional settings in the direction of a sustainable future. Climate engineering technologies can affect and potentially disrupt existing conceptions of climate and environmental justice, due to the scale and scope of impacts upon people currently living on the planet, future generations, and non-human species and ecosystems. The availability of climate engineering may also require rethinking the responsibility for climate mitigation, as well as applications of the precautionary principle. Climate engineering also raises the question of how the perspectives of affected communities can be adequately represented. While it remains unclear whether climate engineering techniques can genuinely assist in lessening the impacts of climate change, the question is whether and to what extent it should be used as a complementary approach to systemic changes in social, economic, and political practices.

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The paper explores how the framework of systemic risks can help govern the risks imposed through solar climate engineering research. The central argument is that a systemic perspective of risk is a useful tool for analysing and assessing the risks imposed through Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) research. SAI is a form of climate engineering that could cool the planet by enhancing its albedo through the injection of aerosols into the stratosphere. Researching such a technology creates systemic risks with a strong sociotechnical component. This component consists of the potential societal harm that a developing or new technology might cause to existing norms, values, institutions, and politics. The systemic risk framework is a valuable heuristic for this case, given the complex interdependencies of societal systems, infrastructures, markets, etc. At the same time, the systemic risk framework can be enhanced through the inclusion of a more robust and reflected ethical considerations on technological risks. Consequently, this article seeks to supplement the systemic risk governance framework with insights from technology ethics. Specifically, the paper offers an ethically reflective conception of societal value dynamism and stakeholder engagement and participation, tying it to existing systemic risk governance approaches.

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This paper explores what kind of uncertainty a research program governing solar climate engineering through Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) needs to account for. Specifically, it tries to answer two central issues with regards to SAI research and it’s ethical evaluation: One, what irreducible uncertainties remain throughout the decision-process, and, two, how do these remaining uncertainties affect the ethical evaluation of SAI research. The main assumption is that decisions on SAI research governance will be made under normative uncertainty, i.e. situations under irreducible knowledge-constraints that arise in concrete, practical decision-contexts. These decision-contexts are multi-lateral and empirically ambiguous, and the decision-makers need to reconcile a plurality of values. While normative uncertainty complicates the ethical evaluation of policy decisions, I argue that moral considerations can be accommodated through the inclusion of recognitional, participatory justice approaches, as well as adaptive and anticipatory governance methods.@en

After years of missing the agreed upon goals for carbon reduction, we might conclude that global climate policies set infeasible standards to halt climate change. The widespread non-compliance of many signees with frameworks such as the Paris Agreement indicates that these frameworks were too optimistic regarding the signees’ motivation to act. One of the suggested ways out of this impasse, is geoengineering, which is seen as a “techno-fix” of the non-compliance problem, relieving signees and other actors of some, or most, of their mitigation duties. This paper scrutinizes different approaches towards climate mitigation that focus on behavioral change or on technological solutions. We argue that these different approaches do not originate from categorically different theories of climate justice. Indeed, seemingly realistic and seemingly idealistic proposals do not disagree on the substance of climate justice, but about what is to be considered feasible. Furthermore, by applying this dialectic lens on ideal vs. non-ideal theorizing in the context of climate justice, we show that (backward-looking) residual responsibility is an overlooked aspect of geoengineering as a (forward-looking) non-ideal approach to achieve climate justice. We will outline three possible consequences of this moral residue: 1) Residual responsibility can provide grounds to demand compensation, 2) it can constitute other forward-looking responsibilities (e.g., the maintenance of geoengineering technologies) and 3) it provides a reason to employ other techno-fixes equal in effectiveness and risks that do not sidestep the problem of non-compliance.@en

This article brings a new perspective to the ethical debate on geoengineering through stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), incorporating the emerging techno-moral change scholarship into the discussion surrounding sustainability. The techno-moral change approach can help us understand different ways in which technology might shape society. First, it helps highlight how values and norms are interrelated. Second, it shows that techno-moral change can happen even if the technology is in no way realized. Through the introduction of two techno-moral vignettes, two diametrically opposed ways in which SAI forces us to rethink sustainability and our relationship with nature are suggested. SAI could lead to a situation of entrenchment, wherein sustainability as a norm is undermined, or transformation where the necessity of acting according to sustainability is highlighted.@en