From moral hazard to risk-response feedback
Open accessAbstract
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments (IPCC) Special Report on 1.5 °C of global warming is clear. Nearly all pathways that hold global warming well below 2 °C involve carbon removal (IPCC, 2015). In addition, solar geoengineering is being considered as a potential tool to offset warming, especially to limit temperature until negative emissions technologies are sufficiently matured (MacMartin et al., 2018). Despite this, there has been a reluctance to embrace carbon removal and solar geoengineering, partly due to the perception that these technologies represent what is widely termed a “moral hazard”: that geoengineering will prevent people from developing the will to change their personal consumption and push for changes in infrastructure (Robock et al., 2010), erode political will for emissions cuts (Keith, 2007), or otherwise stimulate increased carbon emissions at the social-system level of analysis (Bunzl, 2008). These debates over carbon removal and geoengineering echo earlier ones over climate adaptation. We argue that debates over “moral hazard” in many areas of climate policy are unhelpful and misleading. We also propose an alternative framework for dealing with the tradeoffs that motivate the appeal to “moral hazard,” which we call “risk-response feedback.”
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Comparing climate change and SAI is not just comparing two different sets of risks, but two separate Earth system states with different winners and losers.
“Ultimately, we are not just comparing two different sets of risks, but two separate Earth system states (Jebari et al., 2021) with different winners and losers.”
From A Fate Worse Than Warming? Stratospheric Aerosol Injection and Global Catastrophic Risk (2021) · cites this paper as Jebari et al., 2021
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- Authors
- Jebari, J., Táíwò, O. O., Andrews, T. M., Aquila, V., Beckage, B., Belaia, M., Clifford, M., Fuhrman, J., Keller, D. P., Mach, K. J., Morrow, D. R., Raimi, K. T., Visioni, D., Nicholson, S., & Trisos, C. H.
- Affiliations
- Georgetown University (US)
- University of Connecticut (US)
- American University (US)
- University of Vermont (US)
- Harvard University (US)
- University of Virginia (US)
- GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (DE)
- University of Miami (US)
- University of Michigan (US)
- Cornell University (US)
- University of Cape Town (ZA)
- Corresponding author
- Jebari, Joseph
- ORCID
- Venue
- Climate Risk Management
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2021
- Volume
- 33
- Pages
- 100324
- ISSN
- 2212-0963 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3165263183
- Cited by
- 55
- References
- 25
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 6
- FWCI
- 4.71
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Climate Risk Management (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (GEOMAR) (acceptedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- American University Research Archive
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Climate Change and Geoengineering
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Climate Change Policy and Economics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Sustainability and Climate Change Governance
- Keywords
- moral hazard, carbon dioxide removal, solar geoengineering, negative emissions technologies, climate policy, climate change adaptation, political will, emission reduction
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