If a Climate Emergency is Possible, is Everything Permitted?

Professor Stephen Gardiner, Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of Human Dimensions of the Environment, University of Washington

In the face of escalating climate change, some scientists are pushing for a serious research program on a dramatic global ‘techno-fix’: the injection of sulphate particles into the stratosphere to block incoming sunlight. This approach to geoengineering - roughly, the ‘intentional manipulation of the planetary environment’ - is often justified by appeal to the threat of a climate emergency.

Professor Stephen Gardine argues that this argument threatens to be ethically short-sighted and to encourage creative myopia. It also underestimates what some opponents mean when they refer to sulfate injection as ‘a necessary evil’. As a result, even if the emergency argument is in some sense valid, it misses much of what is at stake in thinking about geoengineering, especially from an ethical point of view.

Responses by Professor Jim Falk, Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne School of Land and Environment and Lauren Rickards, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, at the University of Melbourne

A Sydney Ideas and Sydney Environment Institute on 29 July 2014 sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2014/professor_stephen_gardiner.shtml