“Right now, it’s the Wild West in regard to governance with geoengineering,” said Paul Wapner, a professor at the School of International Service at American University at a recent panel about solar radiation management (SRM) at the Arizona State University’s Washington Center. According to the Governing Solar Radiation Management report which was the focus of the event, SRM, which theoretically would cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space, may be a viable last-resort option if climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts fail. Wapner said that “there’s a danger in SRM, there’s a danger in climate change. And, balancing those risks is part of the exercise and will continue to be part of the exercise.”

As the national security ramifications of climate change grow more pronounced, climate manipulation technologies, known as geoengineering, will become more attractive as a method of staving off climate-related security emergencies.  However, geoengineering technologies could disrupt the global ecological status quo, and could pose a potentially coercive (and very serious) threat to peace. Is it possible to obtain the potential benefits of these game-changing technologies, while avoiding spurring violence and conflict?  In a recent article in Strategic Studies Quarterly, we argue that just war theory—which defines the concepts of “right” and “wrong” in warfare—could provide ethical standards for security decision-makers as they consider whether or how geoengineering should be used to address the climate challenge.

“Climate engineering can be a way to build a better world,” said Katharine Mach, a senior research scientist at Stanford University during a recent virtual workshop on the promises and pitfalls of climate engineering held by the Institute on Science for Global Policy, in partnership with the Forum for Climate Geoengineering Assessment at American University, and the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University.

Almost three decades ago, at a conference at the Woods Hole Institute, oceanographer John Martin said with “a half a tanker of iron…I will give you the next ice age.”

The state of the global environment is terrible – and deteriorating. The globalization of industrial production and the consumptive habits of 7 billion people have created the Anthropocene, a geologic age in which the actions of humans are the primary determinant of the Earth’s natural systems. This shift creates a profound new form of environmental interdependence, of which climate change is only the most salient example.

At a time when the relative influence of the United States is decreasing, and the relative influence of states is decreasing, we need a retooling of the architecture of U.S. foreign policy. Just as “personnel is policy,” it is also true that “organization is policy.”