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The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
Showing posts from category climate engineering.
  • Elizabeth L. Chalecki, The Internationalist

    An Internationalism that Protects: Why We Need to Reboot the Baruch Plan for Geoengineering

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    March 26, 2021  //  By Wilson Center Staff
    46819487294_a6b60c48e9_c

    The original version of this article, by Elizabeth L. Chalecki, appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations’ The Internationalist blog.

    New planet-changing geoengineering technology is available to help humanity combat an existential security threat. However, like atomic fission, this technology is not to be jumped at without caution.

    This year is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Baruch Plan. Almost no one knows this, or if they do, they probably don’t remember who Bernard Baruch was, or what his eponymous plan was for. But the Baruch Plan of 1946 was our first and last real attempt at world governance of nuclear weapons. Three-quarters of a century later, the ill-fated effort carries important lessons for addressing the crisis of climate change.

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  • “An Idea Born of Desperation”: Simon Nicholson on Solar Radiation Management

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    Friday Podcasts  //  December 4, 2020  //  By Cindy Zhou

    Nicholson&Dabelko Podcast Image Thumbnail (1)“If solar radiation management were done well—that is, the science is right, the engineering is right, and the policy and governance frameworks around all of the stuff work—then solar radiation management could be a really important, positive contribution to humanity’s responding to climate change,” says Simon Nicholson, associate professor at American University’s School of International Service and co-founder of the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment in this week’s Friday Podcast interview with ECSP senior advisor and Ohio University professor, Geoff Dabelko. “But, there are all kinds of risks associated with this endeavor.”

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  • Panelists Call for Creation of World Commission to Handle Solar Radiation Management

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    On the Beat  //  December 5, 2018  //  By Evan Barnard
    Great Lakes in Sunlight

    “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.”

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  • Engineering the Climate—or Deploying Disaster? Applying Just War Theory to Geoengineering

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    Guest Contributor  //  June 25, 2018  //  By Elizabeth L. Chalecki & Lisa Ferrari
    Space_lens

    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.

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  • Climate Engineering: Innovative Solution or Ethical Dilemma?

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    On the Beat  //  December 11, 2017  //  By Julianne Liebenguth
    Weather Balloon

    “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.

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  • Backdraft #8: Simon Nicholson on Climate Engineering

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    Backdraft podcast  //  Friday Podcasts  //  July 21, 2017  //  By Lauren Herzer Risi

    Podcast-thumb8-reducedWhen the Paris Agreement set an ambitious goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the negotiators put climate engineering on the table, says Simon Nicholson, professor at American University, in this week’s episode of Backdraft. Once the purview of science fiction, a majority of the models run by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) required large-scale use of climate engineering technologies to keep additional warming below 2 degrees.

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  • Consensus, Certainty, and Catastrophe: The Debate Over Ocean Iron Fertilization

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    Guest Contributor  //  May 3, 2017  //  By Kemi Fuentes-George
    Greenpeace

    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.”

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  • Jessica F. Green & Thomas N. Hale, Duck of Minerva

    Why IR Needs the Environment and the Environment Needs IR

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    April 13, 2017  //  By Wilson Center Staff

    The original version of this article, by Jessica F. Green and Thomas N. Hale, appeared on Duck of Minerva.

    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.

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