The U.S. and the European Union took separate, tentative steps toward researching the complexities involved with deliberately interfering with the planet’s climate to temporarily offset the severity of human-caused global warming.
According to Axios, The moves demonstrate the growing interest in and concern about geoengineering as the world hurtles toward exceeding the Paris targets, and climate change leads to more extreme weather events worldwide.
Any geoengineering option, be it solar radiation management (SRM) or marine cloud brightening, would be a stopgap measure while countries work to cut greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and other sources.
Geoengineering could have unintended consequences that range from damaging ecosystems to causing droughts and other extreme weather events around the world.
This raises a host of political, ethical and legal questions that policymakers are only beginning to grapple with. The Biden administration quietly released a report on June 30 — just ahead of the July 4th holiday weekend — outlining a potential research program primarily focused on solar radiation management.
The report notes that it was mandated by Congress in a 2022 appropriations bill, and is not part of any Biden administration climate initiative.
“Importantly, the issuance of this report does not signal any Executive Branch policy decision(s) regarding SRM,” the report states.
Between the lines: The report was issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy after input from 10 federal agencies.
It outlines what could be involved in an SRM research program in the U.S. It indicates that even if the country chose not to pursue that path, the blueprint would prove instructive in case another country or private actors tries it.
Importantly, the report does not recommend comparing the risks of pursuing geoengineering with the benefits of simply not going that route.
Instead, it advocates a “risk-risk” approach, recognizing that SRM has its downsides — but so to does continued, worsening climate change. The White House identified one objective of a research program as being able to
