While the technical capacity for geo-engineering has been available for a least half a century already, rising international concerns over the impacts and potential impacts of anthropogenic climate change have fundamentally changed the position of this technology with respect to democratic political discourse. What was previously discussed mainly, if not exclusively, by technical experts, and usually ones involved in the strategic planning of military operations, has now become a topic for popular political discourse. Deployment of geo-engineering technologies strikes at the very heart of the existential question “what is the relationship between humans and their environment(s)?” and therewith places a deeply nderdetermined and existentially pressing problem before the global democratic polity for debate and decision. However, the democratic complexities of making decisions regarding how, where, when and why to deploy geo-engineering technology were not primary concerns when this technology was military. In addition, the de facto global character of such deployments means that the constituency with a vested interest in these decisions is international, so that the democratic theory concerning this underdetermined problem is itself inadequate. This paper will employ theory concerning (i) the politics of technology, (ii) federalism as a government structure and (iii) radical democracy as a political practice, in order to present procedural justice as an obligation of the democratic state and to postulate as to how it might be possible to ensure that decisions concerning future climate-change related deployment of geo-engineering technologies are both epistemologically robust and democratic.
