Blocking public transport systems, vandalising art, offices, SUVs, pipelines, and so on are attempts to impose direct and indirect costs on society that will continue and escalate until we comply with the activists’ demands. It is a Mafia-esque strategy of extortion by a small minority that is clearly directly opposed to liberal democratic principles and values - especially, the idea that decisions should be made in a way that respects the equal moral reality of other people (by counting up opinions) rather than by consulting your own feelings of righteousness. Moreover, its logic is clearly escalatory, since a rational government will only concede when the costs of compliance (several percentage points of GDP per year) are lower than the costs activists can impose.
Yet many people who do not themselves feel the call to join such coercive actions remain sympathetic to the reasoning of those who do. From a distance these activists may even be mistaken for heroes. The human mind’s innate attraction to story book reasoning (previously) makes us easily slip into assuming that those taking extraordinary actions to oppose an extraordinary challenge must be the good guys, the heroes of the story of climate change.
But that reasoning is flawed. It is not enough that the cause be worthy of heroic action. The action itself must be worthy of the cause.
I. The Climate Emergency Justifies Extreme Measures
Let me first lay out what I see as the justification for the anti-democratic behaviour of environmentalist activist groups like Extinction Rebellion.
Premise 1: The continuing acceleration of climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions poses a significant threat of extinction to humanity and the biosphere, which is the worst possible thing that could happen
Premise 2: Preventing the worst possible thing from happening is a higher duty that supersedes more mundane ‘lower’ moral obligations and values (such as respecting the law, other people’s interests and property, or democratic citizenship)
Premise 3: The extinction of life by climate change can be prevented by rich democratic governments enacting policies to achieve net-zero emissions more quickly
Premise 4: Coercion by activists is an effective way to make democratic governments enact the policies required to prevent the extinction of life
Conclusion: Anyone who believes Premises 1-4 has a duty to take actions to coerce democratic governments to enact adequate net-zero policies
Together with other moderate environmentalists I do not believe any of these premises are plausible. However, for now I will suppose the adequacy of all but one:
Premise 3: The extinction of life by climate change can be prevented by rich democratic governments enacting policies to achieve net-zero emissions more quickly
The justification for these activists’ self-appointed right and duty to inflict harms on society in order to coerce democratic governments to follow their demands depends on the effectiveness of those demands. This is something they don’t appear to have realised. It is not enough to demand that ‘something should be done’ about a problem. It is not even enough to demand that ‘For a really Big problem like climate change, something Big should be done’. That is storybook thinking.
If one actually looks at what these coercive activists are demanding from governments - the policies they are willing to commit moral crimes against democracy, etc to achieve - there is a clear lack of interest in effectiveness. Here, for example, are Extinction Rebellion’s 3 headline demand from governments:
Declare a climate emergency
Act now (?) to achieve Net Zero
Abandon liberal democracy on ‘climate and ecological justice’ issues for a system of carefully managed focus groups
Only one of these is about climate action, and it is extremely vague when you consider that this is supposed to be an emergency.
Perhaps this should not be surprising. Coercive climate activism can only really operate in liberal democracies, which tend to be rich and have a high tolerance for principled dissent. If they tried to coerce other kinds of government, like China’s or Turkey’s, they would quickly be murdered or imprisoned.
Unfortunately (?) the rich democracies have been reducing their greenhouse gas emissions for decades. Maybe they could go a bit faster, but it is hard to see that making much difference to the global outcome. The global greenhouse gas emissions generating future climate change now overwhelmingly come from countries that are not rich liberal democracies, and hence have little to do with the decisions of the governments that these activist groups have any hope of coercing.
Thus, even if groups like Extinction Rebellion somehow got everything they wanted from their governments they would still fail to achieve their official final goal of saving the world from climate change.
It is true that the governments of rich democracies could make additional indirect contributions to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is especially because a lot of the emissions by non-rich countries come from their high reliance on coal to support the expansion of electricity supply that accompanies economic development. Rich democracies can collectively support these countries’ right to development without supporting their right to base it on coal, and create various helpful (green technology diffusion) and coercive (carbon taxes on imports) policies to guide it in a direction that does less harm to the climate.
But of course these are not the kind of ‘actions’ that coercive climate protest groups have in mind. Also, it must be admitted that their effectiveness depends on the choices of other governments with their own differing motivations; and, even if they did fully succeed, they would merely slow the pace of growth of global emissions rather than reduce the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that ending climate change would require.
The problem then is this. Environmental activists believe they have a moral duty to break laws and the conventional moral values and principles of democratic citizenship in order to coerce their governments into taking effective actions to save humanity from the existential danger of climate change. But none of the actions they are demanding their governments do would actually be effective in achieving this goal. This is because they are focused on accelerating greenhouse gas reductions by a handful of countries that make up a fast declining share of emissions. Climate change mitigation is a global problem that cannot be solved by one or a few rich democracies. (Actually it cannot be ‘solved’ at all, only better or worse managed – see further.)
This means that climate activists’ own argument for their self-appointed duty to coerce democratic governments has failed. Even if they are correct that climate change is a ‘supreme emergency’ that justifies and requires taking immoral actions to prevent, the demands they are currently trying to impose on their fellow citizens cannot be justified by that principle. Their crimes against democracy are real. Their claims that their crimes will help save the world are implausible fantasies.
Coercive activism leaves us with the original problem of accelerating climate change, plus a new threat to the values and functioning of liberal democracy (to add to all the others we currently have).
2. The Right Thing to Demand is Solar Geoengineering
Even if the world were in existential danger that cannot justify coercing democratic governments to achieve net zero more quickly. Is there any demand that it could justify?
We are looking for something that meets 3 key requirements:
It is something that would actually save the world from the supposed existential danger posed by climate change
It is something that the governments of rich country democracies could actually achieve (alone or in cooperation with a few others)
It is something these governments would be unlikely to undertake without coercive (anti-democratic) pressure
I think there is something that meets all these requirements: solar geoengineering.
Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities cause a decrease in the amount of heat that escapes into space. The resulting temperature increases disrupt regional climate systems and cause all kinds of harms to human societies and ecosystems.
Significantly, reducing greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t reduce global temperature; it merely slows down the rate that it continues to increase. Carbon dioxide molecules in particular have a small warming effect each, but persist in the atmosphere for decades to centuries – so significant further global warming is already inevitable however successful we are at reducing global emissions in the coming decades. Actually stopping the temperature from rising would require a different kind of intervention, one that would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface or increase the amount of heat from the surface that escapes into space.
And so we come to geoengineering, specifically solar radiation modification. There are multiple plausible technologies that could pause or even reverse the rise in global temperature that drives climate change, and do so within months of implementation. (See further, this recent UNEP report.) The front runner – stratospheric aerosol injection – mimics the fairly well-understood effects of volcanic eruptions and would be quite cheap – $20 billion or so per year to lower temperature by 1ºC (a rounding error for global GDP or that of major economies). Its low cost and relative technological simplicity mean that many countries could even deploy it unilaterally, avoiding the global collective action problem which conventional climate change mitigation efforts have so far failed to overcome (previously), and to which activist groups like Extinction Rebellion have no answer. It is thus eminently achievable by the kind of governments that climate activists are most focused on coercing.
It is true that even the stratospheric aerosol injection approach is not yet well enough understood in terms either of its feasibility at global scale and extended time-periods, or of its unwanted side-effects, especially in terms of the degree and distribution of the climate disruptions it would inevitably create. A massive research programme is required to find ways to maximise its effectiveness while minimising and preparing for those side-effects. Some kind of international governance structure is also needed for the project’s accountability and hence legitimacy and security against (geo)political risk. Hence the estimated 10 years or so before it could responsibly be deployed.
Even if deployed responsibly the world would certainly pay a significant price for trying to geoengineer our way out of the immediate dangers of climate change. Is this a reason for climate activists to reject it?
Not if they truly believe that climate change presents humanity with a ‘supreme emergency’. Remember, this is supposed to justify suspending otherwise significant moral values and principles, which would seem to include principles like ‘do no harm’. Compare with the medically correct treatment of a patient with an aggressive cancer. Dosing them with toxic chemicals and radiation might well be the best thing we could do for them, and hence the right thing to do, despite the significant harms inflicted by such life-saving treatment. If the world will die anyway without intervention, then even dangerous and harmful interventions are justified. (There is at least no plausible danger of exchanging one existential risk for another: an advantage of most proposed solar radiation modification techniques is that they can quickly be turned down or off if the treatment turns out to be worse than the disease.)
Other reasons that climate activists might think they have to reject solar geoengineering fall to the same challenge. For example, the conservation movement’s traditional (ideological) commitment to reducing humanity’s interventions in the natural world. Or psychologistic claims about moral hazard: that the world will stop trying so hard to reduce greenhouse gas emissions once the pressure is off. Or the fact that other emissions related problems – particularly ocean acidification – will continue to get worse since they don’t operate through the temperature effect.
However plausible these concerns might be, they dwindle into insignificance when compared to the existential challenge that the activists themselves have identified. In a supreme emergency, this kind of climate activist declaims, the usual moral values and principles can and must be set aside. This surely applies to their own moral values and principles too. To oppose something that could actually save the world for such reasons would be an insupportable act of self-indulgence and hypocrisy.
Finally let us come back to the question of why climate activists should substitute geoengineering for their previous demands.
The inevitable harms of solar geoengineering create powerful disincentives for the governments of rich democracies to take up this enormous opportunity to save the world. Taking it on would be a massive responsibility that would absorb a huge share of their administrative and political resources. Pathologically risk-averse governments would find themselves on the hook for complaints and compensation claims from every country and group who think they have suffered a harm, while receiving little to no thanks for their service. And so on.
These political disincentives create a gap between what democratic governments know they ought to do, and what they will actually do. Here, finally, might be a constructive role for activists who believe that coercing governments to do what they think is right is justified and effective. (Climate activists could also try engaging their other – democratically virtuous – skills of persuasion to help build politically significant support for solar geoengineering among their fellow citizens.)
Thus, my conclusion: Any climate activist who genuinely believes that humanity’s existence is at risk from climate change ought to campaign for their government to develop feasible and responsibly deployable solar geoengineering technologies. If they believe further that the existential danger of climate change justifies anti-democratic efforts to coerce their government into doing ‘the right thing’, then geoengineering is that right thing. To demand anything less effective would be inconsistent with their claim that climate change is an existential threat.
3. Moderate Climate Change Activists Should Support Solar Geoengineering Too
In the previous sections I went along with the claim that climate change presented an existential risk to humanity and the world in order to follow through the implications of what such a 'supreme emergency' could plausibly justify.
But of course climate change is not really an existential threat to humanity, let alone life on planet Earth. Actual climate science - as synthesised in the IPCC’s reports - says nothing of the kind. It isn’t even as serious a threat to human civilisation as global nuclear war; a far more immediate danger that seems somehow to have fallen out of fashion to worry about, despite the return of geopolitical conflict between aggressively rearming nuclear powers.
The existentialist framing of climate change is irresponsible hyperbole: scientifically baseless but rhetorically effective doom-mongering. That its proponents have been so thoroughly side-lined by the policymakers of liberal democracies should be profoundly reassuring for those who still have faith in its institutions and values.
Nevertheless, climate change is obviously a very bad thing, and less of it is massively preferable to more - hence the almost universal inter-governmental agreement on reducing it (UNFCC; Kyoto Protocol; Paris Agreement; etc). Reductions in biodiversity, destruction of ecosystems, spread of tropical diseases, disruptions to agriculture, extreme weather events, sea level rise, etc are all very bad things. Many of these bad things will be experienced within the lives of those already born, who will be less prosperous and secure than they would have been.
One should note the counterfactual here: most people will still be much better off than we are right now. Humans are very technologically and politically innovative these days - especially the ones lucky enough to live in well-functioning states. We can afford the costs of adapting to climate change (migration; air-conditioning; sea-walls; GM drought resistant crops; etc) while still thriving socially and economically. (Just as North Americans and Western Europeans did during the height of the Cold War, when military spending hit 6.5% of GDP). We just won’t be as much richer as we could have been, and, for example, the world’s poor will have to suffer destitution for longer.
This more realistic picture of the actual harms threatened by climate change, more or less, is what I suppose more moderate ‘mainstream’ climate activists also see. I would now like to extend the case for campaigning for solar geoengineering to these more sensible, grounded activists. In this case there is no question of coercive actions to force governments and other institutions to follow our will. Moderate activists - by my definition - are model democratic citizens. They campaign to persuade their fellow citizens to together demand certain actions from their governments. For example, by publishing their claims and reasoning for all to see, engaging their friends and neighbours in conversation, and calling attention to their cause by public demonstrations.
In this case the dangerous single-mindedness of the existentialist climate activists recedes. Moderates can campaign for more than one thing at the same time: for the development of solar radiation modification technologies as an affordable device for buying more time for climate mitigation efforts to have their effect and for further international efforts to speed up those efforts. The picture becomes something like this:
The graph represents
Ideal complementary roles of responses to climate change. The vertical Y axis represents three different but roughly proportional variables. Emissions abatement is slow and cannot reduce greenhouse gas concentrations over time. CDR is also slow but can reduce them over time. Solar geoengineering would not affect greenhouse gas concentrations but could rapidly reduce climate change, such as by ‘shaving the peak’ of dangerous climate change. Adaptation does not affect climate change but can reduce impacts. (Reynolds 2019)
In this case, then, solar geoengineering represents one component in a package of measures that would together reduce the damage climate change would cause to humanity and the wider world. It buys time for the slower but crucial transformation of the global economy to run on far lower greenhouse gas emissions, and for the development and scaling up of affordable technologies for extracting the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (the other kind of geoengineering). If the goal is to keep the rise in global temperature since the industrial revolution below 1.5°C, then this is the only feasible way to do it.
This role of ‘buying time’ is particularly significant because of the huge costs of overshooting the 1.5°C goal, even temporarily. There would be irreversible damage to ecosystems; ice-sheets (sea levels would rise); and various climate-regulating mechanisms such as ocean currents and carbon sinks - some of which might go into reverse (IPCC Synthesis Report 2023, p 23, 87).
But there is another reason it is so crucial to buy time. The choice over solar geoengineering is not about if we should do it, but about who will do it and when.
There are lots of states that are not much concerned with the moral and legal implications of solar geoengineering, or with taking the time to understand its risks and limits properly before deploying it. If we wait for the challenges imposed by climate change to become more apparent, we are likely to see various such states - Russia, China, and the like - unilaterally deploying these relatively cheap and straightforward technologies to ‘solve’ their problems.
The world would be much better off if irresponsible regimes did not see the need for such reckless unilateral action. The way to prevent that is to prevent global temperature from spiking in the first place; and the way to do that is for governments who care far more than the average about international law and the rights and interests of future generations and people outside their borders to take the lead in developing these technologies; minimising the unwanted side-effects while maximising the global accountability of their governance. In other words, the world needs solar geoengineering; we need it led by the rich liberal democracies; and we need them to start right now.
Fortunately, rich liberal democracies have a lot of people highly concerned about climate change, and a lot of activists motivated to organise that concern into support for specific political demands of their governments.
4. Conclusion
Climate change is easily survivable but still terrible. The living world will be changed dramatically. Humans will suffer because many of the things we care about will be lost or damaged. Island states will disappear. Ecosystems will be broken and forests will die. Indigenous peoples will lose treasured ways of life. The world’s poor will see their suffering extended, and their poverty will also make them more vulnerable to the climactic disruptions. And so on.
Nevertheless there is hope. It is in fact well within humanity’s powers of organisation and technological innovation to greatly reduce these harms (though not to eliminate them). Environmental activists are the people who care enough about this issue to exert themselves to build the political consensus required to realise that hope. If only they would turn that enthusiasm towards things that would actually help.
Note: This is a substantially revised version of an essay previously published on 3 Quarks Daily. It is also published on my Substack
