The moral hazard argument against geoengineering makes no sense

A serious rebuttal of an unserious argument

Cooling the earth directly by pumping sea-salt particles into marine clouds (and other such techniques) is dangerous because it would take all the urgency off of efforts to decarbonize. Once temperatures are under control, polluters would take this as carte blanche to keep dumping more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere rather than cleaning up their act. Geoengineering is a false hope that will make the climate problem worse.

That, in a nutshell, is the moral hazard objection: the reason green groups most often give for opposing any discussion of climate repair techniques other than decarbonization. It’s not a very good argument — it’s muddled and contradictory on its own terms, but also just doesn’t make a lot of sense as an empirical description of the world. It’s so weak, I don’t think even the people who use it take it very seriously. Because it’s not so much an argument as a rationalization: the post-hoc reason greens give to try to put words to their opposition to proposals that offend them on a gut level.

I’m under no illusions that refuting this bad argument will change any minds — I know you can’t reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place. Still, the moral hazard argument is out there, so it’s worth getting clear on why it’s just so dumb.

When you think about it, there’s something quite bizarre about the structure of the argument: greenhouse gas emissions are bad, we’re told, because they cause global warming. But then scientists propose techniques that could reverse global warming despite elevated GHG concentrations. And then we’re told we shouldn’t use those techniques, because if you do then people won’t cut emissions, even though in that world cutting emissions would no longer be so pressing because the problem cutting emissions was trying to solve would already have been solved…by the technique you’re arguing against!

There is a very messed up thought pattern there, and more than a hint here that what’s really being objected to isn’t so much the effect (global warming) but the cause (industrial civilization.)

(This, I think, is the intuition in much right-wing rejection of environmentalism — the sense that it’s all a bit of a ruse, with greens using a bunch of mumbo-jumbo about the atmosphere to dress up a basic hostility to capitalism and abundance in scientific garb.)

The more sophisticated version of the moral hazard argument is slightly better, though still really pretty weak. Global warming is not the only adverse effect you get from burning fossil fuels — you also end up changing the chemistry of the oceans, acidifying them with what could be dire consequences for marine life. This is true.

But if we’re real, the vast bulk of the negative consequences expected from climate change stem directly from the global warming aspect of it. If the world faced an ocean acidification crisis alone, I’m pretty sure we could handle that…including through ocean alkalinization schemes that greens also hate (because they’re geoengineering!!) At any rate, rejecting a solution because it addresses only 95% of a problem rather 100% is…a peculiar way of thinking about public life.

So the moral hazard critiques make very little sense even just in logical terms, but there’s more.

As an empirical matter, the argument is built on a fantasy understanding of why we do or don’t emit GHGs, a fairytale land where, conveniently, it’s green scolding that’s holding the line against greenhouse gas emissions. In this world, if people suddenly feel less guilty about their carbon footprints, all bets are off — emissions will spike and we’ll be right back where we started.

But this is a Mickey Mouse version of the drivers of GHG emissions, wholly feels-based and absolutely without foundation. Look at the literature and you’ll find plenty of reasoned debates on the structural factors driving GHG emissions: GDP , the energy-intensity of GDP, the carbon-intensity of energy and population. These are the big, macro drivers of greenhouse gas emissions at the planetary level. Where populations are growing and overcoming poverty quickly, emissions rise. Where populations are stable or falling, and people are wealthy enough to afford complex low-carbon energy, they tend to fall gradually. How people feel about the climate permissibility of further emissions is obviously a topic climate activists find enthralling, but it explains pretty much nothing about how much GHG we emit.

The carbon intensity of $1,000 in GDP, measured in tons of CO₂ equivalent

The reality is that the Carbon Intensity of a unit of GDP has been falling at a relatively steady clip for a generation across the developed world. It was falling before climate change was a big concern, it kept falling through the era of denialism and snowballs in the U.S. senate chamber, and will keep falling into the future whether or not we apply climate repair technologies like Marine Cloud Brightening. The reason they continue to fall has a lot to do with improving energy efficiency across the economy, with the dematerialization of production, and other big macro trends. How good or bad we feel about emissions has exactly nothing to do with it. For chrissakes grow up.

Other arguments against climate repair techniques are weak, though probably not as weak as the moral hazard argument. Again, I’m convinced that these aren’t so much arguments that lead people to turn against these techniques: they’re rationalizations that people who’ve already rejected these techniques come up with to justify what their gut is telling them.

So this post will convince no one. Still, I feel it should exist.