Gambling on unknown unknowns: Risk ethics for a climate change technofix

Abstract

In this article, we critically engage with the risk ethics of attempting to mitigate climate change via a technofix, namely Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) utilizing Synthetic Biology. Now that the IPCC has (belatedly) acknowledged climate overshoot as being inevitable, our dependency on NETs to avert runaway climate change has become critical. Given the scale of unknown unknowns at play when utilizing any such technofix, we present gambling as the most apt analogy to communicate the unprecedented realms of risk and uncertainty occasioned by any such action. Hence, we critique traditional normative ethics in order to illustrate how a germane climate ethics must face the largely uncertain and unpredictable risk that any climate change technofix would inevitably represent instead of advocating for outdated risk-averse positions. We conclude by showing that this approach is fundamental to developing impactful future ethics research on climate mitigation, and is required to mark a much-needed new direction for risk ethics in the Anthropocene.

Introducing the gamble of a climate change technofix

A year before the global architecture for climate change governance was crystallized in 1988, by way of the UN forming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Wallace Broecker, the eminent geochemist who first coined the term “global warming,” published a critical commentary in Nature. There, he remarked how existing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) releases amounted to “conducting a gigantic experiment” at the scale of the entire planet. And yet, he lamented, the experiment “goes on with little interference from any jurisdiction or nation” even though, “were it brought before any reasonable council for approval, it would be firmly rejected” (Broecker, 1987: 123).

Broecker’s request for “interference” was effectively heeded in 1988, when the UN issued the Protection of Global Climate for Present and Future Generations of Mankind mandate, framed, as it were, around preventing “dangerous anthropogenic interference” (United Nations, 1989; see also Lucas, 2021) with the global climate. However, Broecker had already seen through the myopic framing of risk, ethics, and risk ethics in climate change governance, when he remarked that “we play Russian roulette with climate, hoping that the future will hold no unpleasant surprises. No one knows what lies in the active chamber of the gun” (Broecker, 1987: 123).

More recently, a similar metaphor has been employed by economist William Nordhaus in his 2013 book The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World. There, he argues that we have entered the “Climate Casino,” referring to the “untended but perilous changes in the climate and earth systems” (Nordhaus, 2013: 3). Moreover, “these changes will lead to unforeseeable and probably dangerous consequences. We are rolling the climatic dice, the outcome will produce surprises, and some of them are likely to be perilous” (Nordhaus, 2013: 3–4). However, Nordhaus maintains the fallacy of those who declare that anthropogenic climate change has only recently acquired the status of a planetary-scale crisis, in that he erroneously claims “there is time to turn around and walk back out” of the Climate Casino (Nordhaus, 2013: 4). Instead, Broecker and other prescient scientists were already arguing in the 1980s that it was no longer possible to exit the Climate Casino (on this, see also Abrahamson, 1989; Hansen et al., 1981; Mathews, 1988). Additionally, in his seminal 1980 book Overshoot, sociologist William Catton showed that humankind (especially in the West) had exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth. Catton was already lamenting the then-overreliance on the “modern faith in science and technology as infallible solvers of any conceivable problem,” which he defined as “cargoism” (Catton, 1982: 186). Notwithstanding the validity of Catton’s critique, the current situation appears to present a climate change technofix as the only potentially efficacious means to avert runaway climate change. Although, contrary to Catton, there is scant “modern faith” that any technoscience has an infallible response that could genuinely “solve” the climate crisis at this point.

The loss of “faith” arises from having played “Russian roulette with climate” for such a long time that all the inactive chambers of the gun have surely been run through, leaving only the one with the deadly bullet. Given the abject failure to prevent the crisis, this article addresses the rapidly dwindling options remaining, which amount to gambling on the unknown unknowns of averting runaway climate change caused by “dangerous anthropogenic interference” via “dangerous anthropogenic intervention.” Now that the governance architecture crystallized in the 1980s has truly atrophied, we must examine what becomes of risk ethics when the only possible option for averting runaway climate change has been reduced to a climate change technofix. That is to say, current pledges are unquestionably not even remotely on track to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and, to make matters worse, current pledges are also not being met. Even the IPCC has belatedly acknowledged that climate overshoot is now inevitable (IPCC, 2018: 159). In tandem with this belated acknowledgment, the IPCC has also recently begun promoting Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) to remove GHGs, urging policymakers to evaluate the currently available options and integrate these into more effective and ambitious climate policies, alongside more ambitious emissions reduction. That is, the IPCC has now deemed NETs as “unavoidable” (IPCC, 2022: 36). Such NETs generally denote Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies such as Direct Air Capture (DAC) and Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), Stratospheric Aerosol Injections (SAI) and Enhanced Weathering, ¹ and, more recently, Synthetic Biology.

However, the efficacy of NETs to operate at scale, and within the timeframes available, is highly uncertain. As explained by Gail (2019), the former President of the American Meteorological Society, the current crisis involves both known unknowns, namely “things we know at a fundamental level but about which we seek greater certainty,” and unknown unknowns, namely those elements that are “largely unknowable because of the highly unpredictable nonlinear response to the warming of Earth’s complex and adaptive physical and ecological systems.” While the former refers to “how much Earth will eventually warm, how rapidly oceans will rise, where and when weather extremes and water shortages might occur, and whether potential tipping points (like the collapse of Antarctic ice sheets) will, in fact, occur,” the latter recalls “the many initially small environmental shifts that are potential consequences of the changing climate.”

In this context, and given that a climate technofix is the only, if nascent, mandate for risk ethics to engage with, here we critically appraise approaches to gambling on such unknown unknowns, meaning technoscientific interventions that aim to avert runaway climate change—viewed here with regard to the intrinsic unknowability of the climate system, the earth system of which it is a part, the planet to which that system belongs, and the cosmos that encompasses infinite and unfathomable complexity. After all, no intervention in the global climate, whether by way of mitigation or technofix, merely resides in the realm of known knowns or known unknowns. By their very nature, these unprecedented interventions invoke unknown unknowns. Therein, not only is the efficacy of NETs to reduce sufficient GHG concentrations highly dubious, but any such technofix requires gambling on a host of unknown unknowns—which refers to the inexorable complexity of the Earth System, coupled with planetary-scale interventions in the crisis. Hence, given the ever-increasing likelihood of attempts to implement NETs, we contend that the risk ethics of the climate crisis should engage with the (unknown unknown) risks posed both by the crisis, as well as proposed interventions to avert it. We argue that a germane climate ethics must engage with the unpredictable and uncertain risk that a climate change technofix will occasion, instead of advocating for outdated and now unviable risk-averse approaches.

Although it is impossible to ascertain all potential risks and consequences of a climate technofix, some of the proposed technologies, such as DAC, are far less likely to have unintended consequences than many others. However, the cost and energy required by DAC remain prohibitive, even if both are expected to decrease in the future (see Shayegh et al., 2021). Moreover, the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (2019) have used modeling to determine which of the currently available NETs are already sufficiently cheap and scalable to implement, including Terrestrial Carbon Removal and Sequestration, and BECCS. While these technologies are significantly cheaper than DAC or Carbon Mineralization, they pose other critical questions such as those of land use, transportation, viable infrastructure design, and undercutting food security. ² Hence, additional research in this field must be undertaken as it will be fundamental both in determining if and how to implement such NETs, and in assessing relatively underexplored options such as bioengineering. As such, here we focus on NETs using Synthetic Biology, namely NETs that operate by bioengineering customized organisms to reduce atmospheric GHGs, as we explain in more detail within the next section.

In opposition to the self-assured certainty that dominates climate change governance, critical humanities and social science research have emphasized the intrinsic unknowability not only of the Earth System, but also of the actual effects of all the proposed interventions in the crisis. Nigel Clark exemplified this stance in his landmark article “Volatile Worlds, Vulnerable Bodies: Confronting Abrupt Climate Change,” where he illustrates his engagement with “sudden threshold transitions in climate systems.” Faced with “confronting” such phenomena as the non-linearity and volatility of the climate system, Clark acquiesces to the idea that such risk ethics can only ever amount to a wager: “my gamble, with the usual provisos about decision-making under conditions of unknowability, is that we must front up to the past reality and future likelihood of crossing climate thresholds” (Clark, 2010: 33). While Clark writes with the critical self-reflexivity of a scholar benefiting from decades-long immersion across both the physical and social sciences, the same cannot be said for the atrophied climate governance that is routinely inveighed against in critical humanities and social science research (Carton, 2020; Ford et al., 2016; Preston, 2016).

As a case in point, the 21st Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC has enshrined a delusional attitude toward risk ethics and knowability that is utterly at odds with gambling on unknown unknowns. In response, ecological economist Clive Spash admonished how the Paris Agreement, derived at COP21, was merely a change of approach to the climate crisis “from prevention to risk management” (Spash, 2016: 929). Further, Spash inveighed against the notion that such risk could be managed, since the Agreement amounted to seeking salvation through “technological miracles” (Spash, 2016: 930). Similarly, climatologist Kevin Anderson also penned a commentary in Nature, lamenting how the Paris Agreement was premised on the delusion that NETs will be invented in time and implemented at sufficient scale to avert runaway climate change. For Anderson, the delusion “rests on the assumption that the world will successfully suck the carbon pollution it produces back from the atmosphere in the longer term” via NETs. While such “exotic Dr. Strangelove options were discussed only as last-ditch contingencies” until just a few years ago, now, he decries, “they are Plan A.” As a result, Anderson surmises that “the world has just gambled its future on the appearance in a puff of smoke of a carbon-sucking fairy godmother” (Anderson, 2015: 437).

While Anderson’s outrage is entirely apposite, it is not “the world” that set the stakes or decides how, when, where and what kind of gambling takes place—rather, it is the Global North Power Elite (Hickel and Slamersak, 2022), evoking the sinister image of the mad warmongers in Dr. Strangelove’s War Room. Except that, however abhorrent this elite is, their proposals for a climate technofix are now “Plan A,” and their ethos permeates the IPCC. As mentioned above, having belatedly acknowledged overshoot, whereby “warming would exceed 1.5°C, at least for a period of time,” the IPCC Global Warming of 1.5°C Special Report countered by stating that “practices and technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a global scale would be required to return warming to 1.5°C at a later date,” that is: NETs (IPCC, 2018: 159). Furthermore, in April 2022, 17 former heads of government, national ministers, directors of intergovernmental organizations, leaders of environmental groups, and academic experts formed The Climate Overshoot Commission, in recognition that short of “removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere” and “possibly cooling the planet by reflecting incoming sunlight” (Climate Overshoot Commission, 2022), the already-inevitable overshoot will catalyze runaway climate change. With regard the ethos of the Commission, economist Laurence Tubiana reasoned that “the best thing by far is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. . .But that’s not happening fast enough, so we have to map out other options. I see it as a kind of insurance policy” (Guerrero, 2022; see also Rickards, 2022). However, insurance is an industry predicated around the control and alleviation of calculable risk (i.e. known knowns and, to a much lesser extent, known unknowns), whereas the Commission is actually seeking to control unknown unknowns.

Since it is extremely unlikely that NETs can be implemented in time, and at sufficient scale, “the world” is now truly beholden to when and how such climate technofixes are attempted. In this context, our aim is not to provide ethical guidelines for policymakers or citizens, but rather to urge ethicists to fully engage with the inevitability of climate overshoot, and thus of any attempted climate change technofix. Indeed, this poses a veritable challenge to risk ethics, which may no longer restrict itself to the dangerous anthropogenic interference that gave rise to the climate crisis, but must instead turn toward the dangerous anthropogenic interventions of a climate change technofix. On this basis, we put forth a critique of how normative ethics remains anchored in rigid positions of anachronistic risk aversion, when faced with the fact that any attempted climate technofix entails unprecedented realms of risk and uncertainty that cannot be ignored. More specifically, we critically engage with the risk ethics of imminent climate overshoot, in relation to the interventionist gambles proposed by Climate Engineering and NETs through Synthetic Biology. We maintain that such critical engagement is crucial to ensure the relevance of ethics scholarship in current debates around any proposed intervention to mitigate climate change. A climate ethics that overlooks, or is ignorant of, the looming risks posed by any climate change technofix is an ethics unable to deal with the actual gravity and urgency of the issue being examined. In this respect, given the scale of the unknown unknowns unleashed by the Anthropocene, we present gambling as the most apt analogy for both the absurdity (and denied imminence) of the existential predicament, as well as the sheer improbability that any technofix can be invented in a sufficiently short time and implemented on a sufficiently large scale. Thus, risk ethics must concur that, within the current crisis, gambling on proposed climate technofixes can no longer be avoided—hence a sound ethical discourse must account for risk and uncertainty as fully-fledged and now inescapable elements of our existential predicament.

“You will have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company”: (Mis)understanding risk in the climate crisis

Ever since Ulrich Bech’s Risk Society hypothesis (Beck, 1992), critical social sciences have turned toward how industrial societies self-generate ecological risks that are illimitable. As Lesley Instone reasons, when turning Beck’s hypothesis toward the Anthropocene, “contemporary ecological crises are not questions about the destruction of nature, but rather ones of how modern society deals with self-generated uncertainties that are no longer limited by time or space” (Instone, 2015: 29). Therefore, dealing with risk and “self-generated uncertainties” should be central to any ethical analysis of the climate crisis and also any proposed mitigation. And, although risk emerges as a central element in the discourse around the climate crisis, existing risk ethics are inadequate to face, let alone assess, the planetary scale of the crisis. As historian Chakrabarty (2021) shows, such a planetary crisis constitutes a major upheaval of the human condition and the way we relate to the world, imposing climate change as a new “emerging reality” (as defined in Schönfeld, 2011: 132) that escapes traditional ethical canons and imposes risk as a fundamental existential factor. Technoscientific interventions designed to respond to the crisis, then, have to be assessed in light of this “new emerging reality” and its associated risks. However, climate risk analyses often fail to address “how the impacts of climate change will be shaped by human responses to it, which may worsen or alleviate the risks” (Beard et al., 2021: 3). Furthermore, such catastrophic risk far exceeds the plight of homo sapiens alone, or the destruction of greater nature, but rather constitutes an unprecedented threat to Cenozoic life by making the planet uninhabitable for countless species of animals and plants (Ceballos et al., 2017; Cowie et al., 2022; Rull, 2022).

It is against this prospect that ethical discourses continue to be dominated by risk aversion about the unintended consequences of technofixes such as NETs. Contrary to the dominant risk discourse, which continues to assume that the potential harms of technological developments are never morally justifiable, not even to oppose potentially greater harms of natural events, ³ we argue that risks arising from the costs of not averting runaway climate change are far more deleterious. As Doorn (2015: 355) reasons: “traditional ethical theories provide little guidance for situations in which we do not have prior knowledge of the consequences of our actions,” hence lacking those tools for dealing with risk and uncertainty—which in turn are a fully-fledged and inescapable component of our current existential predicament. Accordingly, Doorn (2015: 355) maintains that “risk ethics is currently so focused on technological risks, that it overlooks risks arising from natural and semi-natural hazards”—including climate change. Therefore, a radical shift in the ethical analysis of climate change is required, if ethics are to become even remotely commensurate with the crisis. That is, the risk ethics of climate technofixes ought to become anticipatory and embrace the deep and existential uncertainty of runaway climate change and of proposed intervention gambles—in contrast to normative moral rigidity that opposes any climate change technofix, in favor of the original “Plan A” (namely the mitigation plan advanced in the Paris Agreement), even when that pathway has been revealed as a delusion, as per Anderson’s outrage over that agreement.

To illustrate two of the foremost means of gambling on NETs, Climate Engineering proposes interventions such as spraying sulfur particles into the atmosphere to temporarily slow the rate of global warming, while Synthetic Biology entails bioengineering lifeforms such as trees, plants, algae, bacteria and/or microbes to draw down existing GHGs and prevent future emissions. ⁴ While the former has been subject to substantial scholarship on risk ethics (Halstead, 2018; Svoboda, 2017), NETs through Synthetic Biology is also worthy of critical analysis, due to the dearth of scholarship on topic (with the notable exceptions of Fulvi and Wodak, 2023; Piaggio et al., 2017; Preston, 2008; Wodak, 2020). One reason for this is that the field is nebulous: for some, it denotes a merely rebranded form of genetic engineering, and for others, extremely powerful technologies such as gene drives. Hence, here we rely on Calvert’s (2013) definition of synthetic biology as the application of engineering principles to biological life, in order to simplify nature and enhance human control of it—with the addition that synthetic biology is presented as a potentially game-changing NET due to its potential ability to drawdown existing GHGs and prevent future emissions through the bioengineering of trees, plants, algae, ferns and bacteria (DeLisi, 2019; DeLisi et al., 2020).

While Synthetic Biology is largely promissory concerning its application to the climate crisis, and may arguably remain so, the field nevertheless pursues synthetically designed organisms, which Jennifer Johung argues would constitute a major shift from “traditional” forms of life. Released into the global ecosystem, in an attempt to sequester GHGs, such lifeforms would open up a radically new phase of life on earth, characterized by deep uncertainty and unpredictability. Hence, Johung advocates for the domain to be explored beyond the narrow remit of scientists and engineers, bringing in artists and speculative designers, in order to provoke an ethical, societal and cultural “blueprint for the unknown” that deals with the “contextual, unpredictable, unknowable conditions of time and scale through which newly synthetic living forms endure” (Johung, 2016: 178). In accord with Johung, we argue that a sound ethical analysis of climate technofixes should deal with conditions of uncertainty and unknowability commensurate with the phenomenon of catastrophic planetary climate risk.

As Anderson invoked in his critique of the Paris Agreement, the risk ethics of a climate technofix are akin to being in Dr. Strangelove’s War Room. ⁵ A non-democratic and disproportionately powerful elite have self-assembled to make a life-or-death decision, the consequences of which potentially equal or exceed the current human-induced mass extinction of life on Earth as we currently know it (including, of course, homo sapiens) that these technofixes are proposing to prevent. The arsenal may be NETs rather than atomic bombs, but the arbitrary, absurd and militaristic nature of the intervention depicted in the film is much more accurate than the misleadingly benign contemporary notions of “techno-solutionism” (Ribeiro and Soromenho-Marques, 2022), “technological optimism” (Stephens and Markusson, 2018) and “cockpitism” (Hajer et al., 2015) being touted now to cloak the true stakes involved, which in turn recalls the ongoing relevance of Catton’s “cargoism” (Catton, 1982). As legal scholar Jay Michaelson argued, in one of the earliest articles to advocate for geoengineering, “in the post-Kyoto world, we need more than promises of emissions cuts and tradable permits. We need a Climate Change Manhattan Project”^⁠ (Michaelson, 1998: 81). While we do not advocate for any such “Manhattan Project,” nor support the military ethos of the industrial-scientific complex, we do argue that Dr. Strangelove makes for one of the most apposite, if also unlikely, bases from which to fully formulate a risk ethics for gambling on unknown unknowns: since we have pushed ourselves into the realms of the tragic and absurd, we can no longer complain if the only models left to work from are fittingly improbable.

The options of action or non-action presented here highlight not only how meager either prospect is, but also how ill-suited existing notions of ethics are for responding to the rupture generated by the climate crisis (Wodak, 2021). Applying normative human ethics in the midst of a cataclysm recalls the absurdity of the scene preceding Dr. Strangelove’s climax, when Major Mandrake desperately attempts to telephone the U.S. President to provide the code to withdraw the planes from their bombing mission. Colonel Guano thwarts Mandrake, as he suspects him of being an enemy soldier. Short of change to make the phone call, Mandrake begs Guano to shoot a Coca-Cola vending machine in order to get enough coins. In response to Guano’s reluctance, Mandrake implores:

Can you possibly imagine what is going to happen to you, your frame, outlook, way of life and everything, when they learn that you have obstructed a telephone call to the President of the United States? Can you imagine? Shoot it off! Shoot! With the gun! (Kubrick, 1964)

To which Guano finally agrees to shoot the vending machine, with the caveat that if Mandrake is unsuccessful, then he “will have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company” (Kubrick, 1964).

As an analogy for the risk ethics of a climate technofix, Guano still upholds an outdated normative ethics, claiming that a vending machine cannot be damaged in order to extract the money for the phone call, because “that’s private property” (Kubrick, 1964). And, to make matters worse, in the current crisis Mandrake would still be unable to stop the bombing mission: all he could do is warn the President about the upcoming and unavoidable risk and its all-pervasive extension. Nevertheless, such a phone call is still of literally vital importance: indeed, on the one hand acting on climate change by “dropping the bomb” of technofixes involves unprecedented and inevitable risk—presuming we want to at least attempt to salvage the situation. Yet on the other hand, objecting such action and refusing to reframe risk in accordance with the new emerging reality of climate change is even more irresponsible and deleterious. A “Captain Guano ethics,” then, would not only be unable to prevent the bomb from being dropped, but also incapable of developing an appropriate and contextual understanding of the risk—hence reiterating the bias that Doorn denounces.

Therefore, such momentous interventions in the Earth System, although aimed at mitigating human-induced global warming, actually amount to gambling through the use of hazardous and dubiously efficacious technofixes. Such a gambling approach is perfectly exemplified by the cultural trope of Dr. Strangelove. For instance, while climatologist James Hansen was testifying in July 1988 to the U.S. Congress about human-induced climate change already being in effect, oceanographer John Martin infamously proclaimed to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: “give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age” (Martin, 1988). This was based on his modeling that “with 300,000 tons of iron, the Southern Ocean phytoplankton could bloom and remove 2,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide.” Martin recalls first ushering in his proposal “more or less facetiously” by “putting on [his] best Dr. Strangelove accent” (Martin, 1988). The gamble, then, involves not only GHG emissions, but also proposed practices to mitigate the effects of such emissions.

Unsurprisingly, this gamble is the subject of strenuous analysis, given the stakes involved. Indeed, several scholars and organizations have advocated for research on NETs and CDR technologies to be conducted in ways that minimize risk and environmental harm (American Geophysical Union, 2022). For instance, in 2013 Steve Rayner and colleagues developed “the Oxford Principles”—according to which research on climate technologies should be regarded as a public good, and hence of benefit all of humankind, promote public participation in decision making, publicly disclose the results of conducted research, as well as allow for independent assessment of impacts and effective governance before deployment (Rayner et al., 2013). Yet, these technologies are “too slow, expensive, and technically uncertain to replace the need for rapid emissions reductions” (Morrow et al., 2020: 150), to the point that “precaution precludes us from betting it all on CDR’s panning out as the [Paris Agreement] models project” (Morrow et al., 2020: 152). Even if it were possible to develop a viable portfolio of technologies that follow the abovementioned ethical standards and risk minimization, it would still be impossible to know all relevant risks, or even to reduce them to the point where they would no longer constitute a gamble.

Further, many scholars opt to explore what could be achieved within normative global environmental governance, as opposed to the more radical standpoint of Clark, Broecker, or Anderson’s ilk. Geoscientist Stuart Haszeldine and colleagues produced one such landmark study, in their article “Negative Emissions Technologies and Carbon Capture and Storage to Achieve The Paris Agreement Commitments.” ⁶ Here they calculate that

There are about 10 NETs which could produce impact of more than 1000 [metric tons of CO₂ per year] reduction in emissions, if fully deployed. Most of these are still conceptual, or in the early pilot stage. To retain warming to within 1.5°C, large-scale deployment is needed within 10-20 years. Three of these NETs could potentially be made ready for rapid deployment in that timescale. (Haszeldine et al., 2018: 19–20).

This concern is echoed by biomedical scientist Charles DeLisi and colleagues, who argue that “the main challenge in fighting climate change can only be met by a combination of reduced [GHGs] emissions and carbon drawdown strategies; any deployment of [NETs] or any other drawdown strategy cannot be seen as a substitute for required reductions” (DeLisi et al., 2020: 6). Accordingly, we maintain that such an obvious yet undeniable argument cannot be left aside in any discussion concerning the risk ethics of seeking to avert runaway climate change via NETs. This key argument should orient the discourse on NETs, rather than hover in the background of some apocalyptic and science-fictional threat of a dystopian future.

However, discourse on climate technofixes is still dominated by the unintended consequences of NETs (Malik et al., 2020; Robock et al., 2008), and such gambling continues to be largely ignored by ethicists. Indeed, the ethical discourse around NETs mostly concerns their moral acceptability, rather than the inevitability of runaway climate change that will ensue without their efficacious implementation. Instead, DeLisi’s argument should frame debates about NETs, instead of being subject to obsolete moral scrutiny and risk aversion. And yet, current ethical debates on climate change mitigation fail to proceed beyond principle objections that prioritize the opposition to (hazardous) climate engineering research over the (difficult) minimization of climate risk.

In this sense, ethical discourse on the climate crisis rests on the dubious assumption that risks and benefits of mitigation practices should be assessed with a reasonable degree of certainty and accuracy (Biermann et al., 2022). Ethical analysis overwhelmingly relies on probabilistic models for determining the extent of risk mitigation policies that are “rationally communicable in the same way that societies have planned, for example, for industrial hazards and natural disasters in the past” (Skrimshire, 2009: 3). However, as Stefan Skrimshire shows:

Climate change discourse provides a number of scenarios that effectively challenge the usefulness of this calculable and broadly economic approach to acting upon environmental risks. Both the scale of the catastrophe considered (an end to life as we know it) and the complexity of the parameters of uncertainty involved in earth systems are unprecedented (Skrimshire, 2009: 3).

Accordingly, ethical approaches based on this risk calculation and management model are fundamentally “ill-equipped” (Skrimshire, 2009: 4) and unable to properly assess and deal with climate risk.

A similarly outdated standpoint motivates the argument that NETs are inherently bad and should not be permissible under any circumstances. As mentioned above, some ethicists maintain that NETs should be forbidden on the basis that their risks and benefits cannot be assessed with any reasonable degree of certainty. ⁷ In this respect, we argue that vetoing NETs completely represents a flawed first principle of the ill-equipped ethics that Skrimshire criticizes; therefore, since anthropogenic climate change led humanity to the brink of disaster—and since climate thresholds will inevitably be crossed in the immediate future—it is fundamentally important to retain fidelity to biophysical reality, including the fundamental uncertainties that characterize the immediate future. ⁸ In basic terms, because nothing is certain or even predictable with any workable degree of certainty beyond the crossing of those thresholds, simply banning NETs on the basis of unknown risks becomes illogical, since the outcome of every path, including the path of total inaction, is now fraught with equal risk. Accordingly, ethics research on climatic issues should not endorse an outdated risk aversion mindset, emphasizing the already well-known dangers and perils of proposed climate technofixes. Rather, we maintain that such research should deeply challenge interventions proposed to mitigate climate change—from DAC and CCS to bioengineering and geoengineering—not by critiquing their inherent riskiness, but by advocating for an implementation that is socially equitable, ⁹ and is beneficial for both the human and the more-than-human world. ¹⁰ In this way, ethics would be able to claim a non-secondary role in the debate around climate change mitigation and not leave the matter entirely in the hands of the Global North power elite in the Dr. Strangelove’s war room. We maintain that this is a significant and necessary shift to pave the way for more effective and impactful future risk ethics research in the face of a global crisis that has been allowed to supersede all safe or low-risk responses.

On this point, philosopher Martin Schönfeld is illuminating. He argues that climate change is not simply a phenomenon, but rather “an emerging reality” (Schönfeld, 2011: 132). As such, this “new reality constitutes a risk spectrum” (Schönfeld, 2011: 133) that is unprecedented and cannot be understood through the lens of traditional normative ethics. Indeed,

Climate change, through its diverse facets, manifold risks, and multiple dimensions, is an integrative reality. It puts all the traditional problems in a new place. It arises as the salient context for all of them. Thus, it is not an entry on the list; it is the new paper the old items are written on. To put it baldly, it is the list (Schönfeld, 2011: 133).

Hence, a commensurate climate ethics would transcend normative and moral rigidity. As Schönfeld (2011: 135) himself puts it, we should “doubt that ‘Plan A,’ is going to work,” echoing Anderson’s use of the same expression to critically refer to mitigation practices based on the UNFCC accords about pledges to reduce GHG emissions. Indeed, “Plan A” is based on “normative perspectives and conceptual tools that contributed to the climate crisis in the first place, such as discounting against the future, cost-benefit analysis, and other utilitarian market devices” (Schönfeld, 2011: 134). Therefore, Schönfeld continues, a “Plan B” is needed, breaking from the old normative ethics and providing a “chance for philosophy [and ethics] to reinvent [themselves], as the rational inquiry of being-at-the-limit, sustained by world wisdom and the vision of civil evolution” (Schönfeld, 2011: 134).

In this respect, while maintaining a robust skepticism toward the efficacy of proposed climate technofixes—namely the “Plan A” that Anderson inveighs against—Schönfeld urges ethicists and philosophers to uphold a different approach to the new reality that anthropogenic climate change has brought about. Therefore, “Plan B” refers not to an ethics that opposes and rejects technofixes by principle, but rather one that develops commensurate conceptual tools to understand and deal with the existential risks and uncertainties that climate change and its technofixes will bring. Accordingly, what is needed is “the reconciliation of information, the understanding of data, and the integration of events in context. Analysis is not needed now; synthesis is” (Schönfeld, 2011: 135). To put it simply, attempting to develop an analysis of the risks of technofixes without placing these risks in the novel planetary context generated by anthropogenic climate change amounts to an artificial separation of elements that is not reflected by empirical reality.

It is precisely this point that traditional normative and “ill-equipped” ethics are unable to grasp: once in the Dr. Strangelove War Room, moral objections that were valid outside the room are rendered null and void. In short, even if we have only poor, high-risk options to choose from, ethics must engage with those choices fully before they are monopolized by individuals and institutions with zero ethical engagement or concern, represented here by the war room. In that room, the choice is only to gamble and resort to the now-Plan A option to use NETs and embrace the subsequent existential uncertainty. However, the gamble indubitably requires a “Plan B ethics,” namely new conceptual tools for facing the unprecedented existential challenges posed both by the climate crisis and any technofix. In other words, in our predicament Mandrake exemplifies the risk ethics of attempting to develop a climate technofix. Instead, Guano represents the ill-founded ethical discourse, which foregrounds threats to the stability of nature and evolution via inappropriate risk calculation models, while backgrounding the greater existential risk of mass extinction, as occasioned by climate overshoot.

In response to Guano’s outdated normative ethics, and in accord with Schönfeld’s argument, we concur with Jesse Reynold’s rationale that “restricting or prohibiting climate engineering research would likely do net harm, [and] would not be feasible and might be unethical” (Reynolds, 2015: 186). To clarify, we are arguing for blind or uncritical climate technofixes in order to attempt to avert runaway climate change. Rather, given the now-acknowledged inevitability of climate overshoot, and that NETs are highly likely to be implemented in the near future, ethics must face the extent of risk and unknown unknowns that a climate technofix will inevitably entail. In other words, we contend that risk ethics must break from past normative standpoints and embrace the idea that, although there can be no certainty about the risks and the effects of climate change mitigation, ethics must take up climate risk and uncertainty, as these are now inescapable elements of the human predicament. We will expand on this latter point in the next section.

From averting to facing risk

Beyond war games, with their restricted audience of military personnel, there are no real means of probing what lay citizenry could, would, or should do, with regard to the risk ethics of a climate technofix. The subject has however been broached, albeit obliquely, in psychology. For instance, Talbot Andrews and colleagues conducted a psychological experiment in which participants were asked to play a so-called “climate change economic game,” whose aim was to investigate decision-making in relation to climate change mitigation and associated risks. Drawing on risk-sensitive decision theory, according to which “risk preferences are sensitive to context” (Andrews et al., 2018: 890), they sought to demonstrate that individuals are willing to invest in “high-risk high-reward” technologies for climate change mitigation—such as NETs—rather than in “low-risk low-reward” technologies—such as solar or wind power. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that individuals were willing to invest in risky technologies, when such technologies may be the only efficacious means to avert runaway climate change. Their study showed that, the higher the stakes, the higher the risk participants are willing to take to avert climate change.

Using a ‘classic example,’ they state that

if a bird needs 200 calories to survive the night, she should prefer a foraging patch that guarantees 200 calories over a risky patch that delivers 400 but only half the time — the bird should be risk averse. But if the bird needs 400 calories, the only possible patch that can meet her needs is the risky one — the bird should become risk seeking (Andrews et al., 2018: 890).

Similarly, their study affirms a willingness to be risk seeking when one’s own survival is at stake. Further, the study maps this psychological mindset onto the climate crisis, to argue that gambling through a climate technofix is preferable to the prevailing “low-risk low-reward” approach (mitigation), as it has neither sufficient risk or “reward” in the form of averting runaway climate change. With regard to our argument, these findings mean that ethics can no longer be risk averse and refrain from embracing uncertainty, nor can it rely on sufficient and reliable knowledge of a risk benefit analysis; rather, ethics must face the inescapable necessity of resorting to proposed interventions that are inherently risk seeking, and in a manner that is commensurate with the actual state and scale of the crisis—just as psychology, creative arts ¹¹ and other disciplines are already doing.

Sociologist Jens Zinn makes a compelling contribution on this point. Investigating how our understanding and management of nature and risk has recently changed, he highlights that the growing responsibility that humans have toward nature and biodiversity entails a specific environmental risk-taking, as risk is a necessary component of contemporary Western societies. ¹² As Zinn himself puts it,

the notion of nature has changed from something that is naturally given and can be (freely) exploited, to being at-risk and in need of protection against technological and economic developments, to eventually considering nature as requiring active shaping and thereby necessitating risky decision-making or risk-taking under conditions of uncertainty (Zinn, 2016: 385).

What is noteworthy here is that Zinn’s sociological discourse clearly connects responsibility and environmental risk-taking, whereas this connection is firmly rejected by traditional normative ethics—according to which, responsibility involves caution, analysis, calculation and risk aversion. ¹³

If, on the one hand, this requires ethics to radically break from previous traditions that are no longer able to respond to the key challenges of our times, then on the other hand this move should also be read as a necessary step ahead enabling us to face the (not-so) new emerging reality of climate change and its mitigation. Indeed, at this point, a gambling approach seems inevitable: without that gamble, the already incredibly tenuous prospects for multitudes of species—humans included—to survive to the end of this century, let alone beyond it, are reduced to almost zero, by the Sixth Extinction Event that is already unfolding. ¹⁴ Such a gamble, however, involves unprecedented risks and a deep sense of existential uncertainty. Once again, Synthetic Biology serves as a good example of the relationship between risk-seeking and uncertainty: creating bioengineered organisms may be a decisive element in averting climate change by reducing atmospheric GHGs, but they must by necessity invoke evolutionary processes that by their very nature exceed all capacities for human control and domineering. ¹⁵

Indeed, given that such high-risk gambling is still preferable to allowing anthropogenic climate change to keep unfolding unabated, ethical discourse must fall into line with the actual, rather than the desirable, options available. These amount to two principal pathways, both of which are utterly without peer in terms of the consequences they entail. The risk-taking pathway is one of hubris: to seismically interfere with natural evolution on a planetary scale—in a directed, targeted way, since it could be argued that we have already done so, in an undirected and entirely opportunistic manner. In contrast, the risk-averse pathway is one of humility, based on acquiescence to how human agency could never, or should never, attempt to control the Earth System. While humility may accord with virtue ethics, this pathway condemns homo sapiens and millions of other species to extinction, by way of climate overshoot catalyzing exponential climate change. As ethicist Clive Hamilton argues in Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene:

Humankind is now confronted with a momentous decision: to attempt to exert more control so as to subdue the Earth with greater technological power – the express purpose of some forms of geoengineering – or to draw back and practice meekness, with all of the social consequences that would follow (Hamilton, 2017: 15). ^⁠

This is an accurate assessment, except for the major caveat that “social consequences” should actually read “Sixth Mass Extinction,” an omission that once again highlights the clear inadequacy of the aforementioned normative risk analyses and risk aversion.

Thus, ethics must become ambitious and similarly far-reaching, in order to be able to deal with the world-to-come, instead of remaining calibrated to the world-that-was. Indeed, the new reality dictated by climatic changes cannot remotely be grasped by anachronistic normative standpoints and risk-benefit analyses; rather, ethics now has the task of engaging with the reality of the predicament, namely to conceive risk and uncertainty as fundamental elements of life on the planet. Such conceptions have gained increasing traction in the Environmental Humanities, exemplified by Instone’s remarks, in her essay “Risking Attachment in the Anthropocene,” that humanity is undoubtedly heading toward “a complex, hybrid and multi-species world where uncertainty reigns” (Instone, 2015: 29).

Amidst all the pre-existing uncertainty, which has only been exacerbated by the rupture of biogeochemical cycles that constitutes the Anthropocene, further novelty is added to the imbroglio, due to that fact that some of these “multi-species” may well be synthetically designed by humans. This will further increase the uncertainty surrounding the results of specific human interventions on planetary ecosystems. Hence, what is at stake is neither a matter of principle nor a specific calculation of risks and benefits. Moreover, given those stakes, what is needed to face climate crisis is not the ethics of risk, which aims to analyze risk in all its deconstructed components and then advocate for a notionally informed decision as to what risks are ethically acceptable. On the contrary, what is needed is a fully-fledged risk ethics, namely an ethics that is based on risk, where risk and uncertainty are inescapable starting (and ending) points upon which its discourse should be built.

In terms of what this would entail, we can turn once again to the Dr. Strangelove analogy: ethics should not—as we have already stated—be animated by Guano’s normative concern to preserve private property, when such preservation amounts to actively preventing the President from stopping a nuclear holocaust. In a context where Guano’s normative ethics do not hold, and where it is actually impossible to accurately calculate the exact extent and consequences of any such risk, such normativity is not only obstinate, but also dangerous, because it amounts to the prevention of vital measures that are needed to face an extraordinarily volatile high-risk situation. Hence, we maintain that accepting and facing the risks and intrinsic unknowability of a technofix gamble is necessary for ethics not only to move forward and attempt to mitigate the crisis, but also to not leave such mitigation exclusively in the hands of an ethically disengaged, individualist and powerful elite, represented here by the warmongers in the Dr. Strangelove’s war room.

Conclusion

One of the most profound insights of paleoclimatology has been the unearthing of the full extent to which this planet is capable of and prone to undergoing sudden, non-linear and chaotic shifts in climate. As Clark gently remonstrated the readership of Theory, Culture & Society back in 2010, it is not so much that such climatic thresholds are rife in the past, but that others will probably be crossed in the immediate future (Clark, 2010). Once again, this means that the relative stability of the Holocene is gone, and that the climate crisis is not a sheer and occasional incident, but rather a radically different new form of reality characterized by deep existential risk and uncertainty. This new form of reality is also irreversible, meaning that the world-that-was will no longer exist, together with the normative structures that belonged to it. Instead, risk and uncertainty are increasingly becoming essential components of both human and more-than-human life. In other words, in order for future climates to be remotely habitable for multitudes of currently-existing lifeforms, we need to take a risk and gamble on unknown scenarios, whose consequences cannot be entirely predicted or foreseen. This obviously implies a radical form of existential uncertainty that cannot be avoided, unless we resign ourselves to extinction due to anthropogenic climate change.

Therefore, just as we have no choice but to take a risk and gamble on unknown future scenarios, ethical discourse should have no choice but to face and reflect this reality by properly dealing with uncertainty. As Clark puts it, “all interventions in Earth systems are matters of trial and error. [. . . Hence,] efforts to deflect or modulate disaster, in this sense, can be expected to precipitate new disasters” (Clark, 2014: 34). Accordingly, ethics should also become “a matter of risky experimentation and urgent improvisation” (Clark, 2014: 34), in order to keep pace with (new) factual reality. Indeed, in relation to global warming mitigation practices, it is impossible to gather sufficient knowledge to know that “intervention X will result in desired result Y,” or to affirm that “tipping point B will be triggered in year C if emissions reach amount D.” Accordingly, acknowledging the inevitability of risky anthropogenic interventions—and subsequently abandoning outdated normative and risk-averse moral standpoints—is fundamental for developing an effective and impactful future ethics research on climate mitigation. This, we have argued, is required to mark a much-needed new direction for risk ethics in the era of climate change. This is also the kernel of what Chakrabarty (2009: 221) has defined an “emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change.” In doing so, he emphasizes how climate change constitutes that “new emerging reality” to which we referred above (borrowing Schonfeld, 2011), and one which constitutes a radical and irreversible modification of life and the world as we know it. In other words, since the immediate future will pose unprecedented existential challenges to humanity, ethics should rise to those challenges and abandon outdated conceptual tools. Indeed, there is now no doubt that uncertainty will be an essential and inescapable element of the immediate future; hence, ethics must embrace the principle of uncertainty and make it the foundation of its discourse around climate crisis and its mitigation practices, precisely in order to face the unprecedented risks and challenges that have already been posed to humankind.

In closing, although the efficacy and justice of the proposed technofixes to the climate crisis are questionable—and the positive effects of those technofixes are all-too-frequently overestimated—gambling on their efficacy appears to be our last-ditch option. To put it differently, just as Broecker acknowledged, back in 1987, that the “gigantic experiment” of massive and unregulated GHG emissions did not encounter the opposition of governments or ethics committees, it is now necessary to direct ethics toward a climate technofix. An intended “gigantic experiment” of “dangerous anthropogenic interference” has been running amok for decades longer than that acknowledged by the IPCC. In response, and utter desperation, the unintended “gigantic experiment” of “dangerous anthropogenic interference” now looms large. It is, shamefully, regrettably, and disgustingly, Dr Strangelove par excellence (Hamilton, 2010). Further paraphrasing Broecker, the West started the Russian roulette game with our climate well over two centuries ago, and it is now impossible for the world-at-large to withdraw from this game. Hence, the world-at-large has no choice but to gamble on unknown unknowns when deciding whether the active chamber of the gun has any prospect of being emptied—that is, without emptying Earth of all its current inhabitants.