Organising the unthinkable in times of crises: Will climate engineering become the weapon of last resort in the Anthropocene?

Abstract

In this article, we ask how the approaches of climate engineering – mostly highly technological approaches to address the challenge of global climate change – might be organised in the age of the Anthropocene. We understand the term ‘Anthropocene’ to be characterised by crisis, on one hand, and by promise, on the other. In particular, we aim to raise doubts on the dominant perspective on the organisation of climate engineering, which assumes these approaches to be regulated through legalistic means. Drawing an analogy to the early development stages of nuclear weapons, we point out that, instead of following a legalistic rationale, climate engineering organisation might pursue a logic of technical feasibility, political acceptance and bureaucratic momentum.

Keywords

Analogy Anthropocene carbon dioxide removal climate change climate engineering crisis geoengineering nuclear technology organisation solar radiation management

Introduction

‘Welcome to the Anthropocene!’ was the title of The Economist in May 2011. Crutzen and Stoermer introduced the term in 2000 (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000) to describe the notion that human activities are indeed changing the Earth system in such profound ways that we are entering a new geological epoch leaving the last 12,000 years of the Holocene behind us. Ever since, it has been debated in science and the media what exactly it is that we are entering into. The Anthropocene as a new era is characterised, on the one hand, by the notion of crisis, because humankind has never before so strongly and so detrimentally influenced the natural system. Clive Hamilton, for example, makes the convincing case that our current negative impact on the Earth system resembles a ‘rupture’ that is much more holistic than the sum of individual environmental crises (Hamilton, 2017: chapter 1). On the other hand, the Anthropocene implies a certain promise, as never before has humankind been more capable of shaping its own destiny, through technological tools which we ourselves have created. One set of technologies that is particularly interesting in this context is the group of climate engineering (CE) measures that are commonly differentiated into (solar) radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) (Shepherd et al., 2009: 1). While none of these approaches to deliberately alter the climate system on a large scale have been deployed so far, they become increasingly relevant as the climate system continuously deteriorates through human activity and the time to act decreases.

In this article, we are interested in how these technologies might be regulated, governed and organised. We argue that the dominant perspective on organising any form of CE activity is through international cooperation using existing or new fora of international law. However, although legal governance approaches certainly have their analytical and normative merits, it is not certain that they will prevail in the end. The reason for us to raise doubts about these mainstream attempts to organise CE to come into force can be summarised with the old Latin saying necessitas non habet legem (necessity has no law). In other words, the above-mentioned crisis element of the Anthropocene – and with it the sense of threat, urgency and uncertainty – might become so dominant that the expected legalistic rationality of organising CE might be side-lined to the advantage of other potentially promising approaches. Thus, when we talk of a crisis, we might enter a ‘state of exception’ where the stakes are at their highest while the normal course of events – and thus also the legalistic rationality – are suspended and only extraordinary measures are perceived to have any effect at all. We, therefore, argue that in the age of the Anthropocene, crisis talk could legitimise CE as an alleged ‘weapon of last resort’ which escapes the straitjacket of international law and regulation.

Making any serious judgement about whether this is a realistic scenario without giving way to simplistic conspiracy theories is anything but an easy task. We thus refrain from making any kind of deterministic prediction. What we can do, however, is to try to understand which alternative rationalities – aside from international legalistic or multilateral deliberative rationalities – could conceivably guide the organisation of CE in the Anthropocene characterised by notions of crisis and Promethean stewardship. We pursue this aim by asking two interlinked questions: First, how do moments of crisis talk legitimise research, experimentation and eventually even the deployment of a technological measure of last resort, and second, what forms of organisation are used in these specific moments of crisis? To answer these questions, we use an approach of analogy and analyse historical situations in which ‘crisis talk’ has been sufficient to provide legitimacy to thinking the otherwise unthinkable on a large scale.

The article proceeds as follows. After a short introduction into the subject matter of CE, we discuss the current mainstream ideas of organising any CE activities through classical means of international law and governance. In a second step, we discuss the notion of crisis as characteristic of the Anthropocene and show that a crisis framing of CE is prevalent both in scientific as well as media discussions of these technological approaches. In order to understand how such crisis talk might become powerful in influencing the organisation of CE, the third part of the article introduces the notion of analogies and explains why reasoning by analogy allows us to better understand the current situation. One specific analogy – the crisis that surrounded the organising research as well as the set-up of nuclear weapons – is introduced in more detail and the parallels with organising CE are explored in the fourth part. The conclusion sums up the argumentation and briefly contemplates what we can learn from this analogy for the future of organising the Anthropocene. Specifically, we argue that international legal regulation is not the necessary mode of organising emerging technologies. Instead, it is at least conceivable that the organisation of CE follows a similar path as that of nuclear weapons in the early stages of their development, namely a three-step rationality of technical feasibility, political acceptance and bureaucratic momentum. The similarities shared by the discussion of CE today and the early discussion of nuclear weapons indicate that it might be much more probable that CE turns out to be co-opted by bureaucratic structures than the dominant assumption of future legalistic organisation of CE suggests.

What is CE and how should it be organised?

Changing or influencing the weather has been an intention of most societies, but doing so on a large scale has only been possible with technological advancement after World War II. The notion of ‘fixing the sky’ has dominated much of Cold War thinking, for example, in attempts to weaponise the weather to turn it against the enemy (Fleming, 2010). But not only to combat a specific human enemy, also to combat adverse effects of human activity on the climate, diverse CE techniques were discussed as early as the 1960s and 1970s, both by the Soviet geoscientist Mikhail Ivanovitch Budyko and by Joseph O. Fletcher of the US RAND Corporation (Budyko, 1977; Fleming, 2010: 236, 239).

The approaches gained new salience in the later 2000s: For example, in his 2006 article, Nobel Prize laureate Paul Crutzen argues that research into SRM is warranted as attempts at mitigation ‘have been grossly unsuccessful’ (Crutzen, 2006: 211–12). Research into CE as the ‘deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment in order to counteract anthropogenic climate change’ (Shepherd et al., 2009: 1) has grown exponentially (Oldham et al., 2014: 5) and the topic has surfaced on the international climate politics agenda – albeit being treated very carefully (Heyward, 2013: 23). The current relevance of the issue is underlined by climate policy: the most recent Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) mentions CE technologies as ideas that have been brought forth as potential measures to address some climate change problems (see, e.g. IPCC, 2013: 23). The members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in their Paris Agreement decided to limit global warming to a maximum of 2°C above pre-industrial levels (UNFCCC, 2015) – a level which cannot be kept without negative emissions (Rockström et al., 2016). ‘The Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) informing policy-makers assume the large-scale use of negative-emission technologies’ (Anderson and Peters, 2016: 182; see also Larkin et al., 2018). Large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) could provide negative emissions. SRM could, likewise, contribute to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement (Horton et al., 2016).

CDR technologies aim at increasing the capacity of natural carbon sinks or creating new artificial sinks, thus reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Examples are the fertilisation of the world’s oceans with iron in order to enhance the uptake of CO₂ by phytoplankton, or the extraction of CO₂ from the air through chemicals to create carbon solids. SRM, in contrast, would deflect sunlight from the earth, for example through the injection of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere. This influences the global radiation budget, that is, the ratio between incoming and outgoing radiation. We are aware that these diverse approaches differ, in some instances greatly, concerning their physical impacts, side effects, scope, social and political implications, and various other characteristics (National Academy of Sciences, 2015). However, as it is the aim of this article to make a general argument about the organisation of the entire set, the general term will be used instead of more specific concepts. The claim that crisis talk increases the legitimacy of CE might be most straightforward for approaches such as aerosol injection, which arguably could be deployed quickly and effectively but is fraught with dangerous side effects. We claim that this is similarly true for other, less intrusive approaches such as direct air capture.

The scope of literature on the organisation and governance of these various approaches of CE spreads from analyses of existing governance structures with relevance for the geoengineering case (Hester, 2013; Humphreys, 2011; Huttunen et al., 2015; Parson, 2014; Proelss, 2012; Wirth, 2013) or examples of specific attempts to govern geoengineering (Banerjee, 2011; Macnaghten and Owen, 2011; Rayner et al., 2013) to concrete institutional recommendations, for example, the establishment of organisations, procedures or frameworks (Blackstock and Long, 2010; Lloyd and Oppenheimer, 2014; Long et al., 2012; Santillo and Johnston, 2010; Zürn and Schäfer, 2013). The dominant perspective common to all of these elaborations is that CE activity will and should be organised through legal means as all authors refer to legal means and/or multi-actor governance arrangements that primarily rely on deliberative processes (for more details on this perspective, see, e.g. Lin, 2013; Proelss, 2012; Reynolds, 2015; Smit, 2015). This implies the use of either general principles, like the precautionary principle and the principle of inter-generational equity, or existing international legal frameworks, like the London Convention and the Convention on Biological Diversity. Furthermore, specific treaty norms of the UNFCCC could be developed or non-state actors could set up rules like the Oxford Principles which are a form of academic self-regulation incorporating legal and non-legal means (Bodansky, 2013).

In the following, we do not question the underlying normative claim that CE should be organised this way. We argue, however, that the element of crisis that characterises the era of the Anthropocene could call some of the assumptions of how to organise CE technologies through international law into question. We will illustrate this claim by outlining an analogy to the case of a similarly challenging technology – namely nuclear technology – and making the argument that it was not the legalistic rationale that guided the organisation of the technology in its early stages.

The crisis talk of CE

The Anthropocene implies, on the one hand, an age of environmental crises with effects on political organisations and organising (see, e.g. the contributions in Pattberg and Zelli, 2016). On the other hand, the Anthropocene refers to the old promise of humankind being the master of its own destiny. The Anthropocene is thus not only the age of crisis but also the age of planetary stewardship (Steffen et al., 2011), or, to put it more critically, of an extreme eco-modernism that perceives the new epoch as ‘a sign of humankind’s ability to renovate and control nature’ (Hamilton, 2017: 23). Currently, nobody claims that CE technologies are ready for large-scale use but various scientists argue for more research into the possibilities of CE as a plan B or a weapon of last resort if other mitigation options fail (Caldeira and Keith, 2010; Launder and Thompson, 2008: 3841). CE technologies – although unthinkable until very recently – could therefore evolve into the main instrument of anthropogenic geopolitics where we remake the planet (Dalby, 2015). But how could crisis talk trigger research and the use of formerly unthinkable technological means?

The conceptual history of ‘crisis’ shows the peculiar rationality that is associated with such a diagnosis (Koselleck, 1982). The antique medical term κρίσις described the moment of the decision between a good or a bad ending during the course of a febrile illness. This decision is potentially made on a judgement of a ‘lesser evil’ legitimising the use of ‘extraordinary means’, for example, means that in a time of non-crisis would not have been considered legitimate. At the same time, non-crisis means – such as legalistic regulation – are side-lined. Political theorists like Carl Schmitt (2004 [1922]) claim that the right to declare a ‘state of exception’ lies at the core of politics and thus perceive decisionist aspects of crises as positive. Some have used Schmitt’s ideas to build more critical accounts of contemporary politics, noting that sovereignty today implies a permanent ‘state of exception’ (Agamben, 2005) and that the spread of cosmopolitanism after the Cold War can only be justified by ever more ‘emergencies’ (Calhoun, 2004). These contrasting views of the permanent state of exception – connoted positively as well as negatively – have, however, been questioned strongly by many (e.g. Huysmans, 2008) and we also argue that not all politics involve elements of a crisis and not every crisis justifies measures of last resort. But how can we identify possible tipping points?

To understand which crisis justifies measures of last resort and which does not, we turn to securitisation theory. The theory of securitisation offers a general account of how measures of last resort can become legitimised, that is, how a state of exception can be created through crisis talk (Balzacq, 2010; Buzan et al., 1998). According to this approach, ‘“security” is the move that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 23). Classic extraordinary measures are, for example, the dedication of large sums of money, military intervention or restrictive policy measures in order to avoid the spread of, for example, terrorism or illegal immigration. However, extraordinary measures can also be of a technological nature, such as the use of networks and databases to protect borders (Bigo, 2014: 216).

Accordingly, the defining criteria of ‘crisis talk’ as the term is used here compromise three characteristics: the existence of an objective threat to a valued referent object, a limited time frame to act (Brecher and Wilkenfeld, 1997; McClelland, 1961; McCormick, 1978), and a discursive frame which does not merely give an objective description of the situation, but is also the social construction of the situation which defines the character of the problem at hand, making some measures to address it more suitable than others. ‘Frames’ are here defined as ‘general organizing devices’ (Nisbet, 2010: 45) in communication. In a nutshell: whether we have a crisis that can trigger severe consequences or not is only to some extent an objective question, but rather depends on political contestation and discursive construction (Sillmann et al., 2015). Wittneben et al. (2012: 1439), similarly, consider discourse as a constitutive factor of how socioeconomic systems are being organised (see also Wright et al., 2013: 654).

Do we witness elements of a crisis talk in the field of CE? Certainly not in the general public discourse, as knowledge of CE is still very limited (Mercer et al., 2011: 4; Merk et al., 2015: 304). However, initial studies on the representation of CE in public media, such as national newspapers, have found that the issue is predominantly discussed in terms of ‘crisis’, ‘emergency’ and ‘catastrophe’ (Buck, 2013: 170; Nerlich and Jaspal, 2012: 135; Scholte et al., 2013: 6). While other terms like technology control (Luokkanen et al., 2014: 971; Porter and Hulme, 2013: 348) or economic costs versus economic benefits (Porter and Hulme, 2013: 348) also appear in media discussions on CE, crisis talk seems to be particularly relevant. For example, Luokkanen et al. (2014: 975) analyse the metaphors that are currently used in media reports about CE and find that those relating to ‘war’ and ‘fight’ top the list in the two influential papers The Guardian and The New York Times. While these are only snapshots of the current debate, they give an indication.

In the academic discourse, which arguably plays a special role concerning CE, as these approaches were first discussed in purely scientific circles (Bowden, 2010: 70), a diverse picture emerges: CE measures are debated in various frames, and these are, to some degree, critically reflected. Among others, CE measures have been discussed as a potential answer to a global climate in crisis (Gawel, 2014: 2; Michaelson, 2013: 82; Victor et al., 2009: 65). The idea that the global climate system is in a state of crisis has been observed a number of times in academic publications. Some warn of ‘unquantifiable change and potential disaster on a global scale for decades to come’ (Launder and Thompson, 2008: 3841), whereas others talk of an ‘imminent climate catastrophe’ (Lane et al., 2006: VI), or understand the climate to already be in a state of crisis or to move into that state in the near future (Caldeira and Keith, 2010; Lenton et al., 2008). Similarly, climate researcher James Hansen et al. (2016) warn that current projections of climate change will be ‘dangerous’ and lead to potentially several metres of sea level rise already within this century. Assessing 25 appraisals of CE in the academic literature, Bellamy et al. (2012: 15) find the notion of a ‘climate emergency’ to be the most prevalent frame. It thus seems fair to claim that in public as well as academic discourse the notion of crisis is at least emerging if not yet completely dominating.

Another frame which is similar to crisis talk but needs to be differentiated from it is the so-called ‘buying time’ argument as discussed, for example, by Rayner et al. (2013: 3). Unlike the idea of entering an immediate crisis, the ‘buying time’ frame presents CE as bridging the gap until emissions can be reduced to the amount necessary to achieve climate goals (Keith, 2013: 3). Both frames can reinforce each other and are hard to separate in reality. Both can also potentially legitimise CE approaches although in slightly different ways. The ‘buying time’ frame argues that CE is a bridging technology needed until mitigation efforts are under way and is thus stressing less the element of urgency. The ‘emergency argument’ is much more related to the notion of crisis talk that calls for immediate intervention.

The declaration of a crisis and the claim of CE as a potential immediate answer to the problem are facilitated by the notion that bureaucratic inertia result in a political deadlock (Blackstock et al., 2009; Victor, 2011). On the part of numerous social as well as natural scientists, a loss of faith in a political negotiation solution is communicated, which gained momentum after the Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC in Copenhagen in 2009 and has resurfaced even after the apparent success of COP 21 in Paris (Bawden, 2016). Crutzen (2006: 211–12) justified his re-opening the issue of CE by stating that political ‘attempts [at lowering emissions of greenhouse gases] have been grossly unsuccessful’. Burns (2013: 87) agrees that ‘it has become increasingly apparent that the world community lacks the political will to reduce emissions to a level that avoids extremely serious climatic impacts’.

To the twin problem of a physical climate crisis and a political decision-making crisis, CE, mainly CDR methods, has been brought forth as part of a potential solution even in political discussion (see, e.g. Committee on Climate Change (CCC), 2016: 9). In a nutshell: crisis talk is of interest here as it provides a potentially very strong justification for CE measures, but of course does not determine any action. To better understand how the ‘crisis talk’ of climate can, however, become powerful enough to lead to extraordinary measures, and how CE could be organised in that case, we compare the discussion and research of CE measures to historically similar situations through the use of analogies.

Understanding the implications of crisis talk for organisation: reasoning from analogy

An analogy exists when two objects, events, ideas and so on have enough in common but non-accidental properties to allow them to be compared in some, although not in all aspects (Weitzenfeld, 1984: 138). Analogies are highly common in the historical and social sciences (e.g. the ‘domestic analogy’, i.e. the comparison of international and national politics, or the ‘analogy of the tragedy of the commons’ in the study of common good problems). However, they are often criticised as being unscientific. In particular, positivistic approaches as, for example, represented by King, Keohane and Verba have been quite critical of analogies, arguing that valid inferences should be drawn from a comparative approach that proceeds deductively and that uses as many observation points as possible as the reasoning by analogy too easily leads to selection biases (King et al., 1994: 212–13).

Contrary to King et al., one can, however, argue that analogies allow us to generate relevant knowledge when we are confronted with new material that cannot yet be considered a closed case (Gentner et al., 1997: 4), in situations that are considered to be without precedent (Houghton, 1996: 525), and in cases in which one wants to explain the framing strategies leading to major policy change (Cornelissen et al., 2011: 10; Khong, 1992).¹

How can good analogies to CE be found? For this article the most important common and thus non-random properties derive from crisis talk as an ‘underlying common […] general law’ which is effective in both the case of interest and the analogical case (Bartha, 2013: section 3.2). Thus, criteria for case selection for analogous situations are the following:

Cases have to include objective and subjectively felt threats to the values of a community or society.

They include the articulation of a threat (in the form of explicit claims) that has resonated within the public realm (at least some acceptance of the claims) such that the events unfold in a discursive setting of distress, social and economic disruption, and uncertainty about the future that signifies a moment of imminent crisis.

Cases are characterised by the narrowing of the choice of possible options to the point where, on the one hand, ‘thinking the unthinkable’ has been perceived as legitimate by a large number of people and, on the other hand, people appear to be helpless, confronting fate.

Threats have been perceived to be of a global nature and the use of extraordinary means has been advocated and to some degree implemented.

Possible cases that could be explored as analogies to the case of CE as an answer to climate change are the ‘war on terror’ (Romanuik and Webb, 2015), the current debates on Internet surveillance and the protection of information rights (Kuehn, 2014), the refugee (Holmes and Castaneda, 2016) or the Euro crises (Dawson et al., 2016). Although it would probably be possible to learn from all of these, we focus on only one particularly interesting case, the development of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons and CE

A number of studies on the potential implications of CE development and deployment draw comparisons with the case of nuclear weapons, making a variety of arguments, for example about the influence of the respective technology on global political order (Keith, 2013: XI), the (assumed) danger of unilateral action (see Horton, 2013: 177), the potential regulation of the technology (Reynolds, 2014), the momentum of scientific development of emerging technologies (Kintisch, 2010: 17–18), the scales of testing and development (Hulme, 2014: 63), the uncertainties connected with the respective technologies (Huttunen et al., 2015: 2), the general approach to the human relationship to nature (Hamilton, 2014: 1) or the dilemma of using risky emerging technologies (Baum, 2014: 1). However, none of these systematically analyses the analogy of the discussion of CE and that of nuclear weapons during their development with the exception of Michaelson (1998) who links CE to the Manhattan project. The case is particularly useful for our purposes as it shares with the case of CE the two characteristics of the Anthropocene: Nuclear technology, on the one hand, offered a hitherto unknown capacity of destruction to humankind. Never before had it been possible to wreak havoc on our species and our environment on such as a scale, both temporal and spatial. On the other hand, the technology also offered promise: first, and foremost, the promise of cheap, clean, abundant energy for society; second, the hope that, once nuclear weapons were on the table, war as a whole might be abolished because of the constant threat of the bomb and the atrocious consequences, should this threat ever be realised (Rhodes, 2012: 312).

In the following, we only focus on the very first years of debate in the US from the discovery of nuclear fission in late 1938 to the use of the bombs in August 1945 (Reed, 2014). It was during this time when the notion became dominant that research and eventual deployment of nuclear weapons might be necessary only to avoid an even worse disaster (Jervis, 1989; Schelling, 1966), when only very few people were involved in the discussion of nuclear strategy (Brodie, 1966: 9) and when it was still an open question whether the nuclear bomb was just another weapon or whether it would completely change world politics (Kaplan, 1983). There is, however, no doubt that the potential military use of nuclear weapons was already at this time dominated by a perception of crisis, for example, the threat of the rather successful campaigns of the Nazi forces all over Europe and the potential threat that Nazi Germany could build such a weapon first (Reed, 2014: 5, 123, 152; Rhodes, 2004: 19).

Which ‘common properties’ can now be detected between the early years of nuclear weapons research and the current discussion on CE? We will focus on six commonalities and then discuss the existing differences: First, time is of the essence in both beating your enemy to developing nuclear capabilities and combatting climate change. In the former case, the urgency lay in both the development of the technological capacities to design a functioning bomb before Nazi Germany, and in securing the material necessary to build it. The first issue was all the more pressing given the fact that nuclear fission had been discovered in Nazi Germany in 1938 (Einstein, 2014: 122; Rhodes, 2004: 17). The second issue was brought to the attention of the President by economist Alexander Sachs, who suggested that

with the danger of a German invasion of Belgium, it was urgent that arrangement be made with the mining firm of Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, whose head office was in Brussels […]. (Reed, 2014: 123)

In the case of climate change, the projected rise in temperature and the resulting implications for the decades to come contribute to the notion of urgency to act. Thus, the later aggressive climate action starts, the lower the probability that the Paris goals can be met and dangerous climate change prevented (Sanderson et al., 2016).

Second, scientific uncertainties play a major role in the discussion on the development of both CE and nuclear capabilities, which makes both of them cases in which the nexus between policy-makers and scientists is very close. Historian Richard Rhodes (2004: 20) argues that, in the case of nuclear weapons, it was uncertain ‘whether or not such weapons were inventable […] [and] whether or not the enemy was capable of inventing them in time to affect the outcome of the war’. Similarly, there are aspects, consequences and implications of CE technologies that are not known, and some of these, especially the ‘unknown unknowns’ (Michaelson, 2013: 101), might not even be knowable through modelling, without field testing. Accordingly, both supporters of nuclear weapons as well as of CE strongly favour research in order to have a clear understanding of what the actual use would entail (Hamilton, 2013: 125). When, in the case of nuclear weapons, it was proven that it could be done, the crisis talk had imbued the technology with such a momentum that deployment followed, against the intentions of the researchers involved. In the case of CE, scientists such as Ken Caldeira and David Keith, both of whom are very visible in the CE discussion (Buck, 2013: 173; Oldham et al., 2014: 8), aim to ‘avoid global catastrophe’ (Caldeira and Keith, 2010: 57). They argue that ‘if SRM proves to be unworkable or to pose unacceptable environmental risk, the sooner scientists know this, the faster they can take these options off the table’ (Caldeira and Keith, 2010: 62). Thus in both cases, the argument is brought forth that it is necessary to prove that the technology is technically impossible, in order to free up resources to address the problem at hand in a different way. Whether it is then really up to the scientists to take the option ‘off the table’ is a different question.

Third, some knowledge about negative externalities exists in both cases already during early research into the respective technologies. Accordingly, both instruments are perceived as a ‘weapon of last resort’ and even their proponents argue that they should only be employed when all other options have failed. The negative implications of a belligerent military demonstration of nuclear power on global politics were discussed in the Franck Report of mid-1945 which correctly predicted that the use of nuclear weapons by the US would lead to an international arms race (Lanouette, 2004: 77; Reed, 2014: 370). Similarly, peace researcher Michael Brzoska et al. (2012: 191) warns that various CE methods could lead to the development of new conflicts and the exacerbation of existing ones. In both cases, possible unilateral deployment of the technology in question thus poses a threat to other nations as well as the global system. In addition, there is the perception of potentially detrimental developments for democratic decision-making (Heyward and Rayner, 2013: 20–21; Hulme, 2014: 136; Markusson et al., 2013: 281; Szerszynski et al., 2013: 2809). In the case of nuclear weapons, democratic governance was perceptively restricted through the creation of the Top Policy Group by President Roosevelt which excluded legislators from decision-making (Reed, 2014: 139), and by the strict application of secrecy measures to shield the Manhattan Project to develop the bomb from any and every intrusion (Lanouette, 2004: 73). These developments indicate that, even if negative externalities are known beforehand, the ‘unthinkable’ might still come to be used if crisis talk is prevalent.

Fourth, both the instruments – CE and nuclear weapons – face various governance challenges (see, e.g. Bellamy, 2016). In the case of nuclear weapons, one has to be reminded that still in 1944 an undecided debate went on in the US on whether the weapons should come under international legal control (Reed, 2014: 370). Whether and how potential CE deployment will be organised is an open question. Whereas some claim that SRM, for example, is contrary to international law (Winter, 2011), others argue that in times of a climate crisis, ‘the niceties of international law might be expendable’ (Hamilton, 2013: 152). A need for governance instruments is commonly acknowledged (Macnaghten and Szerszynski, 2013: 472), but so far no international convention exists that covers all forms of CE and the existing mechanisms are commonly deemed insufficient to cover all governance needs (Banerjee, 2011: 35; Humphreys, 2011: 115; Victor, 2008: 322; Wirth, 2013: 413).

Fifth, studies about nuclear weapons as well as about CE deployment make use of cost-benefit analysis: In both cases, the argument has been advanced that the costs of the extraordinary measures are low in comparison to the expected benefits and to the cost of alternative measures. In the case of nuclear deterrence, this has been important up to this day, as for example, current discussions in Iran or North Korea have shown. Similarly, some scientists have claimed that some CE approaches would be a cheap technology in comparison to most mitigation or low-carbon development options (Barrett, 2008), although various authors have raised doubts (Barrett et al., 2014; Klepper, 2012; Rickels et al., 2011). Current economic assessments of CE attempt to develop models which incorporate externalised costs (Harding and Moreno-Cruz, 2016). Nevertheless, various constituencies might push for this argument claiming that in the future, technological advances will make CE cheaper.

Finally, the exploration and set-up of nuclear weapons as well as the research on CE have developed or seem to be developing supportive constituencies. These, in the language of securitisation theory, can act as securitising actors: the ones who first start crisis talk by presenting a situation in terms of an existential threat (Buzan et al., 1998: 36). According to Rhodes, various scientists in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere worked on researching the technology in the 1930s, all the while attempting to convince policy-makers of the threat of Nazi Germany potentially possessing such a weapon. For example, in his letter to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939, Albert Einstein argues that research on nuclear technology should be supported as Germany could be expected to be working on the same issue (Einstein, 2014). This was picked up by political and military actors and carried on through the course of the US nuclear programme, even after it had become evident that ‘Germany had no atom bomb and was not likely to have one in any reasonable form’ (Rhodes, 2012: 607). Similarly, in the discussion of CE technologies, scientists are the most vocal group (Buck, 2013: 173). Various attempts have been made to locate the positions on CE research and development of individual scientists relative to each other (see, e.g. Hamilton, 2013: 136; Kintisch, 2010: 8–9), for example differentiating between a blue and a red team, the blue being supportive of CE, the red team opposing. Further defining the ‘blue team’, Kintisch identifies a ‘geoclique’ (Kintisch, 2010: 8), a group of knowledgeable scientists involved in the debate early on, ‘whose dominant influence in the geoengineering debate has been identified’ (Porter and Hulme, 2013: 343). Aside from individual scientists, other persons and institutions are part of the CE constituency. However, even those scientists that strongly push for researching CE and who call for going beyond modelling into experimentation are taking every effort possible to have an open public debate about the pros and cons of CE.² This brings us to the differences between CE research today and nuclear weapons research in the early 1940s.

First, the nature of the issue of what should actually be achieved differs considerably (avoiding war/defeat vs avoiding runaway climate change). In addition, in the case of nuclear weapons, the supposed ‘crisis’ was primarily framed in national terms, whereas the current ‘climate crisis’ is perceived as a global one. Also, the Manhattan Project was organised in a strict hierarchical fashion, whereas research in CE methods is much more ‘bottom-up’, mainly organised around research clusters (e.g. through financing by the Royal Society in the United Kingdom or the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in Germany). In addition, public engagement is sought actively in CE research (Bellamy and Lezaun, 2015, 2017; Corner and Pidgeon, 2010), while this was definitely not the case during the development of nuclear technology. However, it needs to be noted here that, because of a low level of public knowledge about CE, ‘designers and facilitators of public engagement events had to construct the topic of geoengineering from scratch, so to speak, for participants who were largely ignorant of the subject’ (Bellamy and Lezaun, 2017: 413), which stresses the relevance of framing for CE decision-making. This, in turn, might point to another difference between the two cases: Possibly, the low level of public knowledge is caused by a low concern – at least in those states that do not, yet, suffer from severe direct effects – for climate change – as opposed to public concern over Nazism and fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. Another difference is that, while in both cases, the technologies develop constituencies, the actor groups with vested interests are structurally very different in the two cases: In the case of CE, it consists mainly of the research community and a few industrialists. In the case of nuclear weapons, additionally to the research community, there are military and political planners involved very early on, and the influence of industrialists is much more systematic through the military-industrial complex. An involvement of military planners in CE development is difficult to imagine, as technologies other than CE might be perceived to have a larger strategic significance (e.g. cyber espionage). However, military attempts to manipulate the weather – if not the climate – are not unprecedented (see, e.g. Fleming, 2010: 179). Concerning the scientific community, Hamilton (2013: 125) notes that CE researchers are much more spread out and much less of a closed community than those researching nuclear weapons. And not only the actors active in the two discourses differ: While both discourses, the one on CE and the early discussion on nuclear technology, share the crisis frame, other frames appear only in one, but not the other. For example, the aforementioned ‘buying time’ frame appears prominently in the discussion of CE, but did not play any major role in the early discussion of nuclear weapons technology (although it did in later developments of deterrence theory). Finally, secrecy was an important characteristic of research into nuclear weapons (Groueff, 2004: 34; Norris, 2004: 65; Reed, 2014: 6), which is arguably not the case in CE research.

These differences, we claim, do not make our argument invalid: The bottom-up approach of CE research might change in the future if the climate issue becomes more relevant to various constituencies. Then, crisis talk might be picked up and used by actors outside of science according to their own organisational dynamics. Similarly, the level of awareness of climate change as a challenge might change in the developed world, for example if economically and politically important coastal cities in Canada, the United States or Europe start being affected by rising sea levels or further large-scale extreme weather events. The involvement of vested interests, also, can be subject to change as soon as the political climate around CE shifts. What effects the increase in public engagement and diversity of frames in the discussion will have remains to be seen. While there is no perfect analogy between the case of the development of nuclear technology and the current research into CE technologies, we find that there are still enough common properties to justify pointing out that development of hard-to-overcome inertia of CE is at least conceivable if the research and discussion on CE follows a similar route as that on nuclear technology did in the 1930s and 1940s. Let us explain why.

Discussion: the non-legalistic rationale of organising

The common properties, particularly pertaining to the crisis talk visible in both cases, are enough to be able to draw some conclusions from the former case to the latter and to make a statement about how CE might become organised in the age of the Anthropocene.

The rationale behind the early stages of nuclear weapons research and development was not an international legalistic one. Research into nuclear weapons was not regulated through international law until as late as the 1960s. And while there was some bilateral, mainly scientific cooperation between the United States and the United Kingdom, it never got to the stage of international law. Instead, the rationale of nuclear weapons development under the conditions of crisis talk was threefold: First, nuclear weapons technology was considered and presented as technically feasible. Second, because of the pending crisis, nuclear weapons technology became thinkable by policy-makers as an option to address the issue. Third, the technology thus legitimised created its own bureaucratic momentum when it was handed over to the military bureaucracy, which proceeded with it according to its own rules, decoupling it from the scientific base which had first initiated crisis talk.

The first step was facilitated by scientists like Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, who first argued for a US nuclear bomb research programme by claiming that this technology was physically possible (Rhodes, 2012: 306). The second step was concluded through the activities of both scientists and political actors. For example, the Einstein letter of 1939 was carried to President Roosevelt by economist Alexander Sachs, who argued in front of the President for a research programme on the grounds of ‘power production first, radioactive materials for medical use second and “bombs of hitherto unenvisaged potency and scope” third’ (Rhodes, 2012: 314). At this stage, then, the supportive constituencies in and outside of science became important. The crisis talk of a nuclear-armed Nazi Germany gained salience throughout the late 1930s, with Nazi successes all over Europe. In June 1940, the National Defence Research Council (NDRC) was founded, which ‘gave research in nuclear fission an articulate lobby within the executive branch’ (Rhodes, 2012: 338).

The third step, bureaucratic momentum, was initiated through President Roosevelt’s subsequent decision to commit US resources to research into nuclear weapons technology:

One man, Franklin Roosevelt, decided that commitment – secretly, without consulting Congress or courts. It seemed to be a military decision and he was Commander in Chief. (Rhodes, 2012: 379)

Thus, Roosevelt moved decision-making on nuclear weapons technology out of the reach of Congress in 1941, most of whom had no idea the project even existed (Reed, 2014: 148). Considerations of nuclear weapon decision-making were, from then on, restricted to a small group of individuals termed the ‘Top Policy Group’, which, aside from the President, Vice-President and Secretary of State, involved only researchers from the National Defence Research Council (NDRC) as well as the Army Chief of Staff (Rhodes, 2012: 378). As pointed out above, in 1942, the project, later known as the ‘Manhattan Project’, moved from executive to military oversight, when it was assigned to the army’s Corps of Engineers under the direction of Major General Leslie R. Groves (Reed, 2014: 148). Groueff (2004: 35) argues that ‘[t]he General was never given the extraordinary powers he used; he simply took them’. Complaints and unease on the side of the scientists involved in the project about the military structure and decision-making did nothing to influence this process. For example, Leo Szilard, in late 1942, drafted a memorandum criticising the lack of democracy in the decision-making of the project (Rhodes, 2012: 423). Further decision-making on nuclear weapons policy were restricted to the President and two small committees including high-level military, executive and science representatives from the project (Rhodes, 2012: 617). Various scientists involved in the project, among them Szilard, attempted to prevent the actual belligerent use of the bomb, arguing instead for a peaceful demonstration of its power (Rhodes, 2012: 637). As is well known, this was to no avail. After a few meetings of each of these committees, in August 1945, the nuclear bomb was dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in short order. Thus, even when the very scientists who first started the research into nuclear weapons argued against the actual use of the bomb, this did not change the course of events as the technology was now in the hands of a specific bureaucracy with its own rules of procedure, namely the military.

It is by no means certain that CE technology will go the same way as nuclear weapons technology did when it comes to organisation. However, as these two cases share important similarities – such as supportive constituencies inside and outside of science, scientific uncertainty in their early stages, and an aspect of time pressure – it is at least conceivable that the organisation of CE will follow the same rationale of technological feasibility, political acceptability (under conditions of crisis) and bureaucratic momentum.

As we have shown, for many scientists the technical feasibility of CE – or at last individual approaches under this umbrella term – is given, at least theoretically. For various CDR technologies, many practical issues are resolved also. We are currently entering the second stage, that in which political acceptability will be decided upon. It will thus be important how governments in the world position themselves towards CE and whether instances of crisis will be taken up by CE constituencies. An interesting development in this respect is, for example, the political dominance achieved by the Republican Party in the United States in the recent elections. It has been argued that, when climate change effects can no longer be ignored, this rather climate-sceptic industry-friendly party (Nicholson and Thompson, 2015) or at least the current Trump administration (Read, 2016) might put its weight behind an approach like CE which does not hinge on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. A subtler but in the long run potentially even more powerful development is the observation that negative emissions technologies are implicitly accounted for in the Paris Agreement (see Anderson and Peters, 2016; Larkin et al., 2018): CDR and potentially even SRM could become more and more politically acceptable by implicitly playing an ever larger role, as time progresses, in the achievability of climate goals.

At this very moment, it would be exaggerated to speak of a bureaucratic momentum for CE. But in case such a momentum evolves, we should remember that it might be quite detached from the opinions of scientists who first set off the discussion. Thus, the case of nuclear weapons development should serve as a reminder that the unthinkable can indeed become thinkable under specific circumstances, namely under conditions of crisis. And even the limits of the analogy between the two cases of CE and nuclear weapons technology can be insightful: For example, it allows us to see the relevance of the momentum provided by a large bureaucracy – like the military – for the development of a contested technology.

The question is whether there is bureaucratic interest that pushes for CE, very much like the military did in the case of nuclear weapons? At this point no such actor is on the horizon. It is conceivable, however, that those working in environmental ministries feel pressure that action is being delivered fast, particularly in those states which suffer from effects of anthropogenic climate change. Those working in planning, economic or financial departments might be attracted by the presumed cost-effectiveness of CE measures. However, as the two cases are not identical, it is by no means definite that CE will go the path nuclear weapons technology did and such bureaucratic momentum evolves.

Conclusion and outlook

In this article, we have addressed two questions: First, how do moments of crisis talk legitimise research, experimentation and eventually even the deployment of a technological measure of last resort and second, what forms of organisation are used in these specific moments of crisis. In answering the first question, we showed that technological measures of last resort, such as CE measures, can be legitimised by presenting them as an extraordinary measure necessary to address an existential threat to a valued referent object. In the case of CE technologies, global climate change is presented as an existential threat which is so severe and so urgent that CE becomes a theoretically feasible intervention. This frame is visible in the scientific and media discussion of CE, albeit increasingly accompanied by critical reflection in the discussion on the detrimental effect of this kind of talk (Markusson et al., 2013). However, if indicators of abrupt climate change or catastrophic climate events should materialise in the near future, it is conceivable that crisis talk will rise in significance again.

The second question addresses exactly this kind of scenario, asking which forms of organisation will be used in these circumstances. But as this has not materialised in the case of CE, this article attempted to address it through an analogy drawn between the early research stage of CE, in which we are now, and the early research and development of nuclear weapons technology. The analogy, while far from perfect, is nevertheless insightful: it indicates that, in situations of crisis, the expected organisation of CE through international legal regulation could be side-lined by a different rationale. In the case of nuclear weapons, this rationale was characterised by technical feasibility, political acceptance through crisis talk and bureaucratic momentum. This could be the case for CE as well, if crisis talk becomes powerful enough to create political acceptance of CE and if the technology is picked up by an actor which provides it with their own momentum. While it is not our intention to present a deterministic argument about what will happen, we find it important to keep in mind what could happen concerning the organisation of CE in the age of the Anthropocene. While the academic discussion and practical consideration of the organisation and governance of CE moves forward (Pasztor, 2017; Pasztor et al., 2016; Turkaly et al., 2017), we maintain that the possibility of CE taking the path described above should be carefully considered and, if necessary and desired, safeguards implemented.

It is evident that some scientists are pushing for research on CE, particularly SRM, with the intention of eventually deploying it, should this be deemed necessary. Others warn that the ‘interlinking of scientific uncertainty and political opportunism should caution against implementing SRM as a climate emergency measure’ (Sillmann et al., 2015: 292). The differences are still so strong that a replication of the nuclear story is unlikely on such short notice. In particular, there is also much less recognition within the general public that we are close to a crisis. This might change, however, once climate impacts become more severe and more widespread. Then, it is conceivable that the idea of CE measures as a way to curb climate crisis will be brought to the table – even if the actors who first discussed them in this context have by then distanced themselves from the idea. At this point, the expected regulation through international law could be side-lined on the grounds of the severity of the crisis and the slowness of international legislation and governance. Organising the Anthropocene might thus soon enter the next stage and it might not evolve within the ‘humble anthropocentrism’ Clive Hamilton calls for (Hamilton, 2017: 44). We thus should be highly critical of any bureaucratic momentum that attempts like CE could have. Only by knowing under which conditions CE will be organised, will we be able to eventually embed it in a legal governance framework that would allow us an open and democratic deliberation on whether to research, test and eventually deploy CE technologies.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biographies

Markus Lederer is head of the research group ‘International Relations’ at the Political Science Institute at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. His research focus is situated at the nexus of climate and development politics and is concentrated in particular on the role of developing countries in global climate politics and governance.

Judith Kreuter is research fellow at the research group ‘International Relations’. Her work is focused on the governance of and through technology as well as on the interaction between academia and politics. In her PhD project, she studies the academic discussion of Climate Engineering.

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