Experiment Earth

Responsible innovation in geoengineering

Jack Stilgoe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317909132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Entwicklungsökonomie

Experiments in geoengineering – intentionally manipulating the Earth's climate to reduce global warming – have become the focus of a vital debate about responsible science and innovation. Drawing on three years of sociological research working with scientists on one of the world's first major geoengineering projects, this book examines the politics of experimentation. Geoengineering provides a test case for rethinking the responsibilities of scientists and asking how science can take better care of the futures that it helps bring about.

This book gives students, researchers and the general reader interested in the place of science in contemporary society a compelling framework for future thinking and discussion.

1 Balloon debate

‘When we all stand in that field in Norfolk, all of the engineers will be jumping up and down because they’ve succeeded in doing something amazing, building the tallest structure anywhere on Earth, and all of the natural scientists will be saying “Oh shit, we’re a step closer to doing something bonkers”.’

(A scientist working on the SPICE project)

A helium-filled polythene balloon floats three metres off the ground, tethered to a steel platform. The idea is to use this balloon to lift a kilometre-long hose into the sky. Once the balloon is up, some water – no more than it would take to fill a child’s paddling pool – will be pumped up the hose and squirted out through a nozzle to form a fine mist. After a few test launches, the balloon will stay in the air for about five days, enough time for the engineers to observe how the apparatus withstands the wind: to see if the balloon dips, kites or spins and to see if the pipe twists, bends or wobbles.

There are two ways of looking at this experiment. From one perspective, it is a straightforward test of a combination of old, mundane technologies. The balloon is an 18-metre-long blimp, normally used at sporting events to hold TV cameras or advertising. It is not aiming that high. In the world of tethered balloons, the current altitude record is around five kilometres. The pump is from the sort of pressure washer that can be bought from a garden centre. The hose will be a longer version of the hydraulic hoses that carry fluids around a car. The small quantity of water means that it will probably evaporate before it hits the ground. The experiment will have no discernible effect on the environment.

The experiment has passed through two university ethics committees. The first responded that as the project did not involve animals or human subjects, it complied with ethical research standards. The second agreed, adding that the team’s plans to engage members of the local community around the test site were welcome.

Such experiments are never risk-free. The engineers’ own risk assessment points to a number of possible incidents. The balloon could deflate, perhaps because of a bird strike. High winds could drag the balloon back down to Earth. The winch could jam, leaving the balloon stuck in the sky. The tether could break free. (One of the engineers told me a story of a woman in California who had recently been pulled from her bicycle by a rogue rope from a hot-air balloon.)

It is important to bear these risks in mind, but such things are relatively well understood. Engineers have centuries of accumulated knowledge assessing and controlling risk. From a purely technical perspective, it is possible to conclude that nothing new is happening with this experiment. Few people outside the project are worried by the immediate risks. The non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and journalists who have taken an interest in this experiment are less concerned about the experiment going wrong than about it going right.

The second way of looking at this experiment is as ‘the first field test of a geoengineering technology in the UK’, to use the researchers’ own words. The experiment is part of a larger scientific project, known as SPICE. The playful acronym hides a serious motive – Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering. One of the aims of this research is to work out whether it is possible to put particles into the stratosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface. On the SPICE project’s website, there is a schematic of a much larger balloon attached to a hose more than 20 kilometres long, spraying out a reflective aerosol that has yet to be determined but is likely to be less benign than water. Such a contraption is unachievable using present materials, but the design could be seen as a statement of intent.

The accepted definition of ‘geoengineering’ (or ‘climate engineering’) is the ‘deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climatic system with the aim of reducing global warming’ (Royal Society 2009, p. ix), through either sucking carbon dioxide from the air or reflecting sunlight back into space. Less than a decade ago, this big idea was given short shrift by both policymakers and scientists. The last five years have seen a dramatic increase in scientific interest. In September 2013, geoengineering was pushed closer to the mainstream of climate policy with a mention in the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ (SPM) of the fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2013).

The SPICE team are among a small but growing number of scientists taking the idea of geoengineering seriously. This is not to say that the SPICE scientists are trying to hasten a geoengineered future. They have, in the main, entered this new field with ambivalence and trepidation. The idea of geoengineering seems to cross Rubicons and break taboos. Some of the scientists are concerned that manipulating a system as chaotic and poorly understood as the global climate is likely to be disastrous. They point to early results from computer models that suggest dramatic effects on local weather patterns if global sunlight is reduced. Others point to the political risks of taking seriously a technological fix that destabilises the fragile political consensus on tackling climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Alan Robock, a climatologist, has produced an influential summary of ‘reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea’ (Robock 2008). These concerns do not apply just to the use of any eventual technology. Given the potential downsides of this imagined technology, most scientists are at pains to emphasise that they would have no wish to deploy such a thing if it were developed. It is hard to find a geoengineering researcher who is in favour of doing geoengineering. But Robock and other scientists recognise that research on geoengineering may be a step onto a ‘slippery slope’, making technological development and deployment more likely (see also Jamieson 1996).

There are other reasons to be concerned about geoengineering that cannot be assessed by science but are no less important. If geoengineering of the type imagined by SPICE were to happen, it would represent a project of extraordinary hubris. It would concentrate power in the hands of very few people and claim mastery over a part of everyday life that we have until now been happy to admit is in some way out of our control. Even in our secular age, courts and insurance companies refer to extreme weather as an ‘act of God’. An engineered climate would mean someone taking responsibility for such things. It is therefore reasonable to ask if this is the sort of world in which we would want to live. Many would legitimately respond that regardless of what the science tells us about risks and benefits, they would rather not head in that direction. It is in this sense that high-profile commentators express repugnance at geoengineering. The broadcaster David Attenborough has called the idea ‘fascist’,¹ an accessible if overstated recognition of what I and others have described as the anti-democratic political constitution of geoengineering proposals (Szerszynski et al. 2013).

Geoengineering is an emerging technology. We do not know precisely what a successful geoengineering device or technique will look like or how it will work. For now, geoengineering brings together a set of diverse proposals and suggestions. These range from the fantastic (sunshades in space between the sun and the Earth) to the well established (growing more trees or burying carbon dioxide underground). A couple of proposed geoengineering techniques have become the subjects of serious research. In addition to considering stratospheric particles, scientists have begun to experiment with ocean iron fertilisation. This involves the seeding of oceans with iron particles to encourage the growth of algae that would absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and take it to the sea floor.

The experiment with the balloon is not attempting to do stratospheric particle injection, nor is it attempting to do climate engineering. But it is in some respects a ‘climate experiment’, as one journalist dubbed it.² A small group of campaigning NGOs issued a press release with the headline ‘Say No to the Trojan Hose!’ (ETC Group 2011). They wrote to the heads of the research councils and to government ministers, calling for the cancellation of an experiment that they saw as part of a rush to develop geoengineering.³ Other geoengineering researchers around the world also criticised the haste with which the experiment seemed to be proceeding.

Both views of this open-air experiment are, in a strict sense, correct. But they reflect very different ways of understanding science in society. The first sees science in splendid isolation. The second sees scientific research entangled in the multiple lines of debate that characterise the geoengineering issue. The experiment was consciously public. It was announced at a national science festival with press releases and PR support from the universities involved. It revealed some of the assumptions and interests of geoengineering research to a wider audience for the first time. It therefore allowed for public scrutiny. The experiment, and the controversy it generated, provided a valuable opportunity for sociological research but also for what Arie Rip calls ‘informal technology assessment’ by those outside the scientific community (Rip 1986).

Our interest in scientific experiments need not be limited to those that take place outside or involve outsiders. Geoengineering of the sort under investigation by SPICE began as a set of thought experiments exploring the possibility of replicating the ‘natural experiment’ of a volcanic eruption. These ideas are now being tested using experiments run on computer models of the climate. We should take an interest in scientific research whatever its form, particularly when it is tied to such a problematic technological vision. The SPICE project is about much more than a balloon. The questions raised by in vivo or in situ experimentation can be reflected back on experiments taking place in vitro or in silico.

Conventionally, we regard thought experiments as constrained only by the scientific imagination. But, as I describe in later chapters, there are limits, norms and taboos that govern what scientists consider important, desirable or even thinkable. The future of the planet may be written in the experiments that take place inside laboratories, as much as outside. The direction of geoengineering research is a function of conversations that happen in public as well as those that involve just scientists. As geoengineering researchers start to take seriously the possibility of engineering the climate, which may profoundly recast humanity’s relationship with the planet, we should look closely at dynamics of research, responsibility and governance.

This book is a sociology of geoengineering research. It draws on more than three years of interviews and interactions with the SPICE project and the wider geoengineering research community. It is about the tangle of issues in which geoengineering researchers find themselves. The book considers the various issues raised by geoengineering, focussing in particular on stratospheric particle injection, one of the subset of geoengineering proposals known as solar radiation management (SRM). It looks at how institutions and individuals have begun to make sense of solar geoengineering as it moves from the arena of science fiction into the arena of scientific research.

The book fits into the tradition of science and technology studies (STS), which is concerned with the social and political dimensions of science and engineering with a view to revealing the possibility of alternative directions. I am interested in the public nature of contentious science, its connections with emerging technologies and the negotiation of scientific responsibility. The publicness of geoengineering should make us pay attention not just to what is being done in the name of science, but also to how ideas of politics, ethics and ‘the public’ are being imagined. We should question the way that geoengineering is being framed as its complexities are made tractable through research and experimentation (cf. Bonneuil et al. 2008).

Governance beyond risk and ethics

The conclusions of recent STS studies of emerging technologies suggest the need for a rethink of the governance of science and innovation. We conventionally talk about the downsides of technology in terms of the risks or ethical dilemmas they create. The SPICE balloon debate was not really about either risk or ethics. STS research has revealed how this focus on the downstream impacts of technology can hide more fundamental upstream questions about the direction of innovation (Rayner and Cantor 1987; Wynne 2002).

With geoengineering, there is already plenty being said about risks. Scientists argue that observations of massive volcanic eruptions such as Mount Pinatubo in 1991 reveal both the cooling effect of particles in the stratosphere and the risks, particularly in the form of disruption to weather systems, when such an event happens.

Some see these risks as mountainous, even insurmountable. Others are more confident. For David Keith, currently the world’s most prominent geoengineering researcher, volcanic eruptions ‘give confidence that there is a strong empirical basis on which to assess these risks, and it is a reason to expect that the risks will be comparatively small’ (Keith 2013, p. 12).

My aim in this book is to draw attention away from risk assessment towards uncertainties: the things we don’t know, that we can’t calculate and that may remain incalculable. Keith states that when it comes to the risks of climate change, ‘we can’t estimate the uncertainty very well: we don’t know what we don’t know’ (Keith 2013, p. 31). The same applies to geoengineering. Keith admits that ‘the largest concern is not the risks we know but rather a sensible fear of the unknown-unknowns that may surprise us’ (Keith 2013, p. 70). For all this uncertainty, however, he is confident that science and engineering can find their way to a technology with ‘negligible direct side effects’ (Keith 2013, p. 110). Geoengineering researchers have begun taming some of these uncertainties and turning them into a research agenda. The assumption is that, as one paper claims, ‘many uncertainties could be reduced through a systematic program of theory and modeling’ (MacMynowski et al. 2011, pp. 5044–5045). STS research has demonstrated that in many areas, research creates more questions than answers, expanding our uncertainty (Nelkin 1979; Ravetz 1986). Uncertainty is just as important a part of science as knowledge is (Stocking 1998), and yet it is often hidden from public view. We can imagine that given the social and political complexities of geoengineering, the range of uncertainties is likely to be ever-expanding. Scientists should not pretend to completely know the risks and ethical challenges we face.

Science in society; science and society

This book is about the place of science, technology and innovation in the world. It is about ‘science in society’, but the conventional separation between ‘science’ and ‘society’ is one of many dichotomies challenged by my approach. Books like this are often categorised as ‘science and society’, as though these are worlds apart, or as ‘science in society’, as though science is a separate enclave. Despite the efforts of social scientists, the debate abo...