Chapter 3
The Ethics of Climate Engineering: A Review of Literature
3.1 Introduction
The arguments for and against climate engineering already coined in the existing literature provide the primary platforms upon which the attempts at advancing the debate is to begin with and hence an acquaintance with the existing literature on the ethics of climate engineering is envisaged in this chapter. What is the present status of the ethical assessment of climate engineering? What are the leading arguments advocating the desirability of the climate engineering technologies? What are the arguments – scientific, social, philosophical – that consider climate engineering to be ethically undesirable? What are the ethical and philosophical concerns to be further appropriated for a balanced advancement of the climate engineering debate? These are some of the lead questions that we would address in this chapter. With this end in view, this chapter is reserved for a review of the literature on the ethics of climate engineering. The search methodology for identifying the related literature is explained first. The results section then organizes the various arguments for and against climate engineering as discussed in the literature. The various dynamics of the overall debate landscape like the academic, scientific and regional distribution of the debate, the interdisciplinary setting of the overall debate, the dormant philosophical perspectivities in the arguments and the arguments that are overweighed or underdeveloped are the major focus of the discussion section.
3.2 Methodology
Two searches were done on Google Scholar on December 10 and 15, 2013. They covered academic literature as well as grey literature including peer-reviewed articles, magazine articles, news reports, conference papers, books, and book chapters. When different editions of the same paper were listed as journal article, online paper or conference presentation, priority was set for the peer-reviewed journal article in the selection process.
First Search: In the first search, searches were held with primary and secondary search words. The primary search words were “geoengineering” and its synonymous usages in the academic literature such as, “climate engineering”, and “planetary engineering.” They
were used as the primary search words because they represented the focal theme of the research. The literature also focuses on two subunits of climate engineering, namely, “Solar Radiation Management” and “Carbon Dioxide Removal.” Accordingly, these expressions were also used as primary search words.
The secondary search words are combination search words used along with primary search words. The main combination word is “ethics” and its variations, namely, “ethical”,
“ethically”, and “ethicists”. Terms that are semantically close to “ethics” such as “moral”,
“morality” and “value” are also included as combination words. These secondary search words were used as they reflected the focus of this research. In addition, specific terms such as “cost-benefit,” “governance”, “justice”, “equity”, “social”, “societal”, “uncertainty”, “risk”
and “harm” are also selected as secondary search words in combination with the primary search words for their specific importance in the discussion on the ethics of climate engineering as reflected in the literature.
In the first search, distinct searches were made along all combinations as listed in Table 1. The searches produced 160 hits altogether. Out of these 160 results, 40 citations and 33 overlapping entries were excluded. Due to the variety of secondary search words, which are semantically close, understandably, there was the overlap of papers for various combinations of search. Overlapping papers were excluded from selection. Some combinations did not produce any result. Care was taken to include only those papers dealing with the ethical aspects of climate engineering. This was done by skimming through the abstract of the papers from the first set of general selection based on the search words checking if the document focused on the ethics of climate engineering. The abstract of each of the remaining 87 papers was skimmed through to ensure that the documents really focused on the ethics of climate engineering. This resulted in the elimination of three more references.
As a norm, books on the ethics of climate engineering were selected in the first and second searches if only both the primary search words and their variations figured in the title of the book. This was to ensure that the focus of the book is directly on the ethics of climate engineering. Thus four books that did not meet this criterion were excluded. Thus, out of the 160 results 80 references were selected in the first search.
Table 1: First search
nefi t
nc e
l
Geoengi neering
14 6 2 2 0 0 5 1 1 1 20 3 1 3
Climate Enginee ring
2 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 6 1 1 0
Solar Radiatio n Manage ment
1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 1 0 0
Carbon Dioxide Remova l
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Planetar y Enginee ring
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Second search: In the first search, all the primary search words were combined with all the secondary search words in so far as they all occurred in the title. However, climate engineering being an emerging field and the focus of the research, ethics of climate engineering, being a very special area, this first search did not produce an adequate number of results for a comprehensive review. This prompted for a second search on the same database, Google Scholar.
While the first search concentrated exclusively on the title of the articles, the second search focused on the title, abstract, and keywords of the article, manually looking for the primary search word in the title of the article and the secondary search words in the abstract and keywords of the article. In the second search, the concept of abstract, where the secondary search words figure in, was understood in a broad sense. It included the abstracts
of peer-reviewed papers, the introduction to grey articles, which have no specific abstract, or the opening paragraph of the magazine papers, book-reviews, news reports, and conference papers.
In the second search, the primary search word was restricted exclusively to
‘geoengineering.’ The synonymous usages of the primary search word, namely, Climate Engineering, Solar Radiation Management, Carbon Dioxide Removal, and Planetary Engineering, were skipped in the second search. This exclusion was forced by the vast number of results (870) produced by the second search with geoengineering as the primary search word. As the range of the second search included the keywords and abstract too, to keep the research focused precisely to the ethics of climate engineering, it deemed necessary to limit the number of combination words too in the second search. The restriction imposed on the primary search words is paralleled by a similar restriction on the combination words too. To keep the review precisely to the ethics of climate engineering, the combination words were restricted to “ethics” and its directly synonymous usages. Therefore, the secondary search words used for the second search are “ethics”, “ethically”, “ethical”, “moral”,
“morality” and “value”. In other words, the terms pertaining to the sub-sets of ethics used in the first search, such as equity, justice, cost-benefit, social, societal, society, harm, uncertainty, and governance were excluded from the second search. However, the inclusion of these sub-sets of ethics as combination words in the first search could be justified, as it constituted the major focus or one of the major strands of discussion in the concerned articles, as suggested by their appearance in the title itself.
Accordingly, Google Scholar was searched for all the papers carrying geoengineering in the title. Each entry in the list of 870 results produced by the search was manually checked for the combination words such as ethics, ethically, ethicists, moral, morality, and value in the abstract or keywords of the article. As in the first search, care was taken in the second search too, to include only those papers treating the combination words in their ethical sense.
This was done by skimming through the abstract of the papers from the first set of general selection based on the search words checking if the document focused on the ethics of climate engineering. All the papers overlapping with the first search were discounted in the second search.
The second search had ‘geoengineering’ as the only primary search word, with restricted combinations as justified in the methodology. The search with geoengineering in
the title produced 870 results. 51 of these hits were found to be overlapping with the selections in the first search and they were skipped. The remaining 819 hits were individually skimmed through and each hit was checked for any of the combination words of ‘ethics’,
‘ethical’, ‘ethically’, ‘moral’ and value in the abstract, or keywords. According to the search, 10 papers were found with ethics in the abstract or keyword and 9 and 1 respectively for ethical and ethically. According to the search, three papers included ‘moral’ in the abstract or keyword while ‘morality’ found no inclusion. The combination word ‘value’ also figured in the abstract or keyword of two of the results. A total of 25 references met the inclusion criteria in the second search.
Table 3: Second search
(Primary Search Word in the Title and Secondary search words in the Abstract or Keywords)
Primary Search word Combination Words
Geoengineering Ethics
Ethical Ethically Moral Morality Value
Table 4: Results from second search Primary
Search Word Combinations
Ethics Ethical Ethically Moral Morality Value
Geoengineering 10 9 1 3 0 2
Snowballing: A careful examination of the set of documents yielded from the first and second searches showed that it still did not include some of the important papers, which are significantly used in the discussion on the ethics of climate engineering. Therefore, a further
search strategy relied on the snowballing method to add a number of necessary references to the results of the first and second searches. In this method, the bibliography of the documents resulting from the two searches was checked through. The papers extensively used by those authors including the reports of various formal bodies on climate engineering, which are of a canonical nature, were also added to the select entries. Thus further papers, discussing the ethics of climate engineering but excluded from the first and second searches, were included by employing the snowballing method. Employing the snowballing method, as justified in the methodology, an additional 33 references were selected. It took the total tally to 138.In summary, the searches resulted in 80 documents from the first search, 25 additional sources from the second search and 33 further references by snowballing, amounting to a total of 138 references.