Do climate engineering experts display moral-hazard behaviour?

Merk, Christine; Pönitzsch, Gert; Rehdanz, Katrin

doi:10.1080/14693062.2018.1494534

Cited by 48 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…In the carbon sinks debate, a key concern has long been that a focus on carbon removal will provide the justification for business‐as‐usual and thereby risks undermining ambitious climate action (FERN, 2001; Lövbrand, 2009). In the negative emissions discussion as well, there is widespread concern that NETs serve to mask the lack of effective mitigation action (Geden, 2015; Pielke, 2018) or contribute to legitimate the status quo through fossil fuel lock‐in, moral hazard or “mitigation deterrence,” that is, the undue substitution or delay of necessary emission reductions (Carton, 2019; Lenzi, 2018; Markusson, McLaren, & Tyfield, 2018; McLaren, Tyfield, Willis, Szerszynski, & Markusson, 2019; Merk, Pönitzsch, & Rehdanz, 2019; Preston, 2013). That carbon sinks were inserted in international policy discussions in an explicit effort to provide flexibility and low‐cost mitigation alternatives for carbon‐intensive economies is perhaps the clearest indication that these are not idle concerns.…”

Section: Social Imaginaries Of Carbon Removalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative emissions and the long history of carbon removal

Carton

Asiyanbi

Beck

et al. 2020

WIREs Climate Change

156

100

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Recent IPCC assessments highlight a key role for large-scale carbon removal in meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement. This focus on removal, also referred to as negative emissions, is suggestive of novel opportunities, risks, and challenges in addressing climate change, but tends to build on the narrow techno-economic framings that characterize integrated assessment modeling. While the discussion on negative emissions bears important parallels to a wider and older literature on carbon sequestration and carbon sinks, this earlier scholarship-particularly from the critical social sciences-is seldom engaged with by the negative emissions research community. In this article, we survey this "long history" of carbon removal and seek to draw out lessons for ongoing research and the emerging public debate on negative emissions. We argue that research and policy on negative emissions should proceed not just from projections of the future, but also from an acknowledgement of past controversies, successes and failures. In particular, our review calls attention to the irreducibly political character of carbon removal imaginaries and accounting practices and urges acknowledgement of past experiences with the implementation of (small-scale) carbon sequestration projects. Our review in this way highlights the importance of seeing continuity in the carbon removal discussion and calls for more engagement with existing social science scholarship on the subject. Acknowledging continuity and embracing an interdisciplinary research agenda on carbon removal are important aspects in making climate change mitigation research more responsible, and a precondition to avoid repeating past mistakes and failures.

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Section: Social Imaginaries Of Carbon Removalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative emissions and the long history of carbon removal

Carton

Asiyanbi

Beck

et al. 2020

WIREs Climate Change

156

100

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“…A range of complexities and areas of uncertainty associated with possible pathways for the development of GGR were articulated in the literature. Various studies highlighted that uncertainties associated with particular pathways are often hard to represent in integrated assessment models (IAMs)—in particular assumptions relating to social processes and the interactions between different physical, technical, and environmental processes (e.g., Merk, Pönitzsch, & Rehdanz, 2019; Otto, Frame, Otto, & Allen, 2015). Overestimates of the potential of BECCS and AR to deliver CO 2 removals may have consequences for mitigation policy and mask the wider implications of pursuing very ambitious GGR.…”

Section: What Are the Socio‐political Dimensions Of Beccs And Ar?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The literature highlights how ethical challenges may vary across different stages, from research to deployment and beyond (McLaren, 2012b; Preston, 2013). Prominent among these challenges is “moral hazard”, relating to risks imposed on current or future generations as a result of unanticipated consequences, over‐estimating potential effectiveness or delays in climate change mitigation (McLaren et al, 2016; Merk et al, 2019; Preston, 2013).…”

Section: What Are the Socio‐political Dimensions Of Beccs And Ar?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A central tension that pervades the social and political acceptability framing is the extent to which the feasibility of large‐scale GGR depends on overcoming policy barriers to commercial development and adoption, and relatedly, the extent to which social scientists should assume the scale‐up of BECCS and AR as a foregone conclusion. A range of articles in the corpus introduce ethical questions into such policy debates, highlighting the potential “moral hazard” associated with policy instruments that simply translate recorded negative emissions into tradable “offsets” (Markusson et al, 2017; Meadowcroft, 2013; Merk et al, 2019), that is, the risk of rolling back ongoing mitigation targets on the basis of projected future negative emissions. Here the potential for conflicts between barriers to acceptance of GGR pathways and barriers to deep mitigation arguably not only represent trade‐offs between divergent policy choices but also ethical and political conflicts between divergent modes of climate and energy governance (Bellamy & Healey, 2018; Cox, Pidgeon, Spence, & Thomas, 2018; Dooley & Kartha, 2018).…”

Section: Three Framings Of Ggr and Its Feasibilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Contested framings of greenhouse gas removal and its feasibility: Social and political dimensions

Waller

Rayner

Chilvers

et al. 2020

WIREs Climate Change

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Prospective approaches for large‐scale greenhouse gas removal (GGR) are now central to the post‐2020 international commitment to pursue efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C. However, the feasibility of large‐scale GGR has been repeatedly questioned. Most systematic analyses focus only on the physical, technical, and economic challenges of deploying it at scale. However, social and political dimensions will be just as important, if not more so, to how possible futures play out. We conduct one of the first reviews of the international peer‐reviewed literature pertaining to the social and political dimensions of large‐scale GGR, with a specific focus on two predominant approaches: Biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and afforestation/reforestation (AR). Our analysis of 78 studies proposes two important insights. First, it shows how six key social and political dimensions of GGR feasibility–namely economics and incentives; innovation; societal engagement; governance; complexity and uncertainty; and ethics, equity, and justice–are identifiable and are emphasized to varying degrees in the literature. Second, there are three contested ways in which BECCS and AR and their feasibility are being framed in the literature: (a) a techno‐economic framing; (b) a social and political acceptability framing; and (c) a responsible development framing. We suggest this third frame will, and indeed should, become increasingly pertinent to the assessment, innovation, and governance of climate futures. This article is categorized under: The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Policies, Instruments, Lifestyles, Behavior.

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“…There have been several studies which assess the views of solar geoengineering experts (Mercer, 2014;Merk et al, 2019;Winickoff et al, 2015), the views of climate experts on solar geoengineering (Bellamy & Healey, 2018;Dai et al, under review;Dannenberg & Zitzelsberger, 2019;Himmelsbach, 2018), and many studies of the public perceptions of solar geoengineering (Burns et al (2016) provide a recent review of this literature). However, only a few studies have applied expert assessments to assess solar geoengineering and identify research priorities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%