Many in the discourse on climate engineering agree that deployment of SRM technologies must be accompanied by stringent mitigation of GHG emissions. Thus, as long as deployment of SRM is not discarded from the table of options altogether, mitigation and SRM strategies must be pursued at the same time. This raises the question of if and how both strategies interact. More to the point, SRM research and/or deployment must not hamper mitigation efforts.
The aim of the paper is to investigate and substantiate the claim that climatic research on and deployment of large-scale SRM technologies will negatively affect mitigation of GHGs. I start by critically discussing the Royal Society’s portfolio perspective that assumes interactions between SRM and mitigation to be either negligible or positive. In a second step I lay out the intuitive plausibility of the trade-off argument. I then try to strengthen the plausibility of the argument by drawing on Stephen Gardiner’s perfect moral storm: I claim that the problems associated with SRM are structurally similar to those of climate change and, hence, reasons for not mitigating now will probably be reinforced once a SRM scheme or strategy is in place. In addition, I discuss some empirical evidence of negative trade-offs between mitigation and SRM.
I conclude that the scenario of climatic research on and deployment of SRM technologies negatively affecting mitigation is realistic. However, it is not possible to assign probabilities to different scenarios. It is therefore claimed that the trade-off argument should not be a reason against SRM (deployment and/or research). In contrast, I argue that in our current epistemic situation the trade-off argument should be taken seriously and briefly discuss what follows from regarding it as significant.
