CGG Project Working Package 1Summary Short Report Paper - Draft

CGG Project Working Package 1Summary Short Report Paper - Draft

Framing, ambivalence and choice inthe debate over geoengineering: Lessons for knowing and governing climate change

Introduction: The framing and governance of geoengineering

In its seminal 2009 report entitled Geoengineering the Climate, the Royal Societyadvanced its now widely-cited definition of geoengineering, as “deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system, in order to moderate global warming” (2009: ix).The Report went on to specify two broad categories of geoengineering, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM). Understood in these terms, geoengineering has sinceremained the subject of intense debate involving scientists, policy-makers and wider publics, both within the UK and beyond. Amongst other things, these debates concern the range of possible technologies that should be labelled as examples of geoengineering, the extent to which the consequences of deploying those technologies might be fully discernable in advance, and the position that these interventions should occupy in relation to existing and future climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. Such is the complexity of these debates that Lord Rees, president of the Royal Society when its 2009 report was published, recently went as far as to label geoengineering “an utter political nightmare” (Jha, 2013).From the perspective of a social-scientific analysis of geoengineering, this debate servesas an excellent arenawithin which to scrutinise the dynamics that operate between the discursive process of ‘framing’ the issues at stake and the range of policy options for climate change governance.This is, indeed, the central aim of a diverse programme of research conducted under the ESRC- and AHRC-fundedClimate Geoengineering Governance project (CGG), and upon which the arguments made by this paper are substantially founded.

Frames, from a social-scientific perspective, can be thought of most simply as “schemata of interpretation” (Goffman, 1974: 21) that have both an ontological and a normative component. Within policy controversies they effectively “link causal accounts of policy problems to particular proposals for action, and so link accounts of ‘is’ and ‘ought’” (Rein and Schön, in Fischer and Forester 1993: 11). Importantly, frames do not simply float in the air, but are actively constructed through purposeful (if not always deliberate) acts of ‘framing’, defined here as “selecting, organizing, interpreting, and making sense of a complex reality so as to provide guideposts for knowing, analysing, persuading and acting”(Rein and Schön, 1991: 263;see also Benford and Snow, 2000; Entman, 1993). Multiple framings of geoengineering co-exist in current discussions, each serving not only to prescribe and justify a specific, particular set of technological interventions in the global climate system, butalso to advocate the establishment of a particular set ofwider institutional arrangements to complement those interventions – whether regulatory, social, legal or political.

Against this backdrop, this short paper seeks to put across two main messages to all stakeholders involved inon-going debates over geoengineering, and indeed overclimate changewrit large. Firstly, it argues that all attempts to establish and stabilise a coherent, authoritative‘framing’ of geoengineering – whether undertaken by scientists, policy-makers, or wider publics – will inevitably be obstructed by insurmountable and intractable ambiguities and ambivalences, on a number of levels. This point applies equally firmly to debates about the nature and boundaries of geoengineering – as an ostensibly discrete category of hypothetical interventions in the global climate system - as it does to debates about the relationship between geoengineering and other aspects of the wider climate change question (for instance concerning mitigation, adaptation, definitions ofacceptable risk and liability, andeven issues relating to security).In light of this point, the paper’s second message then takes the form of a strong recommendation for all protagonists in debates over geoengineering to embracethe topic as an opportunity for collective reflection onfundamental questions than cannot berestricted to a mere cost-benefit analysis of discrete geoengineering options. These questions relate neither just to climate change, nor even simply to wider the governance of science and technology, but to the orchestration of the very processes and means by which we define problems and identify solutions in our world, as an increasingly globalised society.Particularly when cast against the backdrop provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) currentFifth Assessment Report (AR5), the paper can be read as a battle-cry from the social sciences for a more open acknowledgement of, and indeed engagement with, a series of major unquestioned assumptions and contradictions that permeate existing approaches to the science and governance of climate change as a whole.

Geoengineering: A minefield of ambiguity and ambivalence

“There may be a pressure for 'panic measures'… being fatalistic about continuing dependence on fossil fuels, but combating its effects by some form of geoengineering"

- Lord Rees, Ex-President of the Royal Society, 11th September 2013

“The recurrent mirage of a silver bullet solution to climate change is often a sign of despair at world leaders' unwillingness to seriously tackle CO2 emissions”

- Doug Parr, Chief Scientist of Greenpeace, 11th September 2013

As the official report of an IPCC expert meeting on geoengineering itself readily admits, debates about“geoengineering in both academic and public contexts have sometimes convoluted characteristics from different techniques in ways that have unhelpfully confused discussions” (Edenhoferet al., 2012: 2).It is true, for instance,that most would accept a basic distinction between geoengineering techniques that seek to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and techniques that seek to modify the earth’s shortwave radiative budget. The specific technologies that are accepted as belonging within each of these two categories, however, do not emerge automatically. In their analysis of geoengineeringimaginaries , as measured by the constellation of topics in Wikipedia, Nils Markusson and colleagues find that geoengineering is constructed to include solar radiation management techniques, ocean iron fertilization and weather modification, but not land-based sequestration methods (Markusson et al., forthcoming).Yetin 2009 the Royal Society included ‘land-use management to protect or enhance carbon sinks’ and ‘the use of biomass as a carbon neutral energy source’ in its review of geoengineering methods oriented towards removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Especially when it comes to Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) then, distinguishing between geoengineering initiatives and conventional climate change mitigation techniques (such as the cultivation of biomass for energy production) is not as simple as it might first seem. Indeed, such definitional ambiguities echo those from within the wider geoengineering literature discussed by Bellamy et al. (2012) and argued as possible reason to abandon the term by Heyward (2013).

Disagreement, moreover,goes far beyond mere definitional issues, in that multiple, incompatible framings of the position that geoengineering should occupy within wider attempts to tackle climate change are also clearly discernible. The two quotes presented at the outset of this section offer an especially clear illustration of this. The first quotation, in reflecting the two dominant problem frames in geoengineering assessment:‘insufficient mitigation’ and ‘climate emergency’ (Bellamy et al., 2012), highlights a view in which geoengineering is best seen as a useful back-up option in the eventuality that mitigation efforts should fail. Conversely, the second quotationupholds a view in which geoengineering serves predominantly as a dangerous distraction from averting such a failure in the first place. In both cases actors cite geoengineering as a discursive label to help carve out space on the climate change agenda for an item that is discrete from on-going mitigation or adaptation efforts. Yet the political motivations for aiming to achieve this could hardly be more different. On the one hand, therefore, the label of geoengineering can be used to denote any hypothetical intervention in the global climate system that would otherwise be dismissed by policy-makers as too risky or outlandish for serious consideration. In this way the deployment of the term helps to ensure that as diverse a range of policy options as possible are made available in the fight against climate change.Indeed, to borrow the words of one expert interviewed as part of research conducted by Rose Cairns for CGG (forthcoming), this first view effectively holds that “the real utility of geoengineering [is] being so extreme as a concept that it actually provokes imagination.” Harnessing that imagination in one or another direction within the current debate on climate change governance is, however, not in the power of any particular actor.

On the other hand however, the discursive label of geoengineering could equally proveuseful as a means ofdetracting attention from other climate change policy options (the so-called ‘moral hazard’), serving as a justification for ignoring the allegedly intractable problems faced by climate change mitigation initiatives and thereby defending the interests of those who already benefit from a ‘carbon-based society’. Despite the contradictory implications of these views, in both cases the very establishment of the term geoengineering can be understood as a political device that is deployed by actors seeking to steer climate change policy in particular, desired directions.The effect of these discursive interventions on the public understanding of climate change and concrete remediation policies remains to be seen in practice, whilst early research suggests that such intervention may, in fact, galvanise mitigation efforts (NERC, 2010).

This contradiction - between viewing geoengineering as an opportunity to diversify and open up climate change policy or to shift it away from mitigation and onto new, more innovative terrain –represents only one aspect of the complexity that is inherent to on-going debates.Even where the discursive label of geoengineering isdeployed within a framing that has a clear, strategic political orientation, ambivalenceis still usually evident on a number of levels.In his analysis of official reports and position papers on geoengineering, Markusson (2013)points for instanceto several tensions internal to particular and fairly coherent framing - in relation, for instance, to questions about the fundamental aims of climate change policy (should geoengineering be used to re-balance the climate, or to create a new, somehow more desirable one?), its novelty (can any meaningfulqualitative distinction be drawn between it and older weather modification techniques?), andthe way that geoengineering research ought to be governed (should policy-makers simply wait for science to independently supply technological solutions that are ‘ready-to-go’, or should they be providing strict terms of reference outlining how those scientists should go about their work, even now?).For all of these reasons and more, almost all actors involved in debates over geoengineering – including both those who confidently assert its worth as a silver bullet and those who forcefully dismiss it as a dangerous distraction – havestruggled to articulate a genuinely coherent normative position on the technology.

Despite the apparently clear pro- and anti-geoengineering nature of the two quotes provided at the outset of this section then, ambivalences such as those which Markusson (forthcoming) highlights serve to complicate the terrain of this on-going debate substantially. In-depth research carried out by CGG on the understandings of geoengineering prevalent among relevant experts (Cairns, forthcoming), underpinned by the use of Q-methodology and in-depth semi-structured interviews, suggests the difficulty of reducing the debate to any straightforward dichotomy of ‘pro’ vs. ‘anti’ positions. Based on the input of 35 participants from a range of disciplinary and institutional backgrounds in the UK, the US, Canada and Japan, Cairns’ study used a factor analysis of Q-sort data (the sort itself comprised 48 statements about geoengineering, dealing with numerous aspects of the issue) to derive no fewer than four distinct framings of the technology. Here attempts to articulate a coherent normative position on geoengineering areobstructed not just by ambivalencewithin framings, but also ambiguityacross them; in short, “a variety of divergent – but equally reasonable – framing assumptions” co-exist in the debate, and cannot be adjudicated between using any ostensibly objective criteria (Stirling, 2003: 45).Two of the framings identified, labelled “We are the planetary maintenance engineers” and “Geoengineering is a political project”, do encapsulate starkly oppositional viewpoints that might respectively be caricatured as optimistic and sceptical of geoengineering’s potential. Yet two more ambivalent framings were also identified, entitled “At the very least we need more research” and “Let’s focus on carbon”. Notably, both of these framings problematise the very idea of a simple definition of geoengineering as a non-differentiated category, instead drawing attention to grey areas surrounding its possible use as a descriptor of attempts to alter other large natural systems, of economic and social changes as well as technological interventions, and even of activitiesaimed at altering the global climate for reasons other than merely seeking to counteract climate change. Participants who subscribed to these more ambivalent framings of geoengineering, unlike those who subscribed to broadly ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ positions, openly acknowledge the ambiguitiesof existing definitions of geoengineering, and take their cue about what should happen next directly from that. Yet, with the “at the very least we need more research” advocates aiming to break the term down into clearer, more discrete component parts, and the “let’s focus on carbon” advocates citing ambiguity as evidence of the need to approach climate change governance in a more rounded and all-encompassing manner, it seems clear that the open acknowledgement of ambiguity alone is far from sufficient to actually overcome and resolve it.

Beyond definitional issues, further areas of ambiguity that emerged from this Q-sortstudy concern the extent to which human mastery and control of the climate system (and, by extension, of nature more generally) was regarded as a realistic proposition, of how strictly geoengineering research should be governed (and if such research could be decoupled from inevitable deployment in the real world), and of the dilemma of pinning down exactly what would constitute a climate ‘emergency’ (warranting the rapid roll-out of geoengineering solutions to rising global temperatures).Moreover, since they were derived from a semi-professional clique of ‘experts’, the range of viewpoints expressedacross these four framings are certain not to account forall those whichwould be elicited by a full, ‘public’ geoengineering debate. Corner et al.’s (2013) recent work on public perceptions of geoengineering, for instance, reveals that the concept of ‘messing with nature’ can often serve as a focal point for wider citizen concerns, raising questions about reversibility and tipping points that none of the four framings identified by Cairns (forthcoming) confronts head-on.

The public consultations conducted so far on geoengineering-related issues suggest a few lessons on how different framings of the issues at hand generate distinct patterns of public debate.Initial consultation exercises, such as those conducted under the auspices of NERC’s ‘Experiment Earth’ initiative, focused on defining the criteria of a ‘climate emergency’ and discussing the benefits and drawbacks of distinct ‘geoengineering technologies’ (NERC, 2010). A finding that emerges from this and subsequent experiences of public consultation is thata focus on ‘climate catastrophe’ short-circuits public debate and leads to over-determined outcomes – rather than emergency scenarios ‘focusing the mind’ of the citizenry, so to speak, they polarize the discussion and force participants to fall back on predetermined value positions; and in the process may artificially improve the ‘acceptability’ of geoengineering (Corneret al., 2011). Similarly, the use of a ‘climate emergency’ frame in online public survey work by Mercer et al. (2011) is what underpins apparent public support for research into SRM geoengineering.

Further experiments in public deliberation, such as the public engagement exercise on stratospheric aerosol technologies conducted in the context of the SPICE project (Pidgeonet al., 2013), have tended to deploy a more tentative, risk-based framing, and to embed the questions pertaining to geoengineering within a broader discussion of mitigation and adaptation efforts (see also Corner et al., 2013). Others have introduced additional framings, including environmental civil society perspectives and geopolitical histories of weather and climate modification (MacnaghtenSzersynski, 2013). Whilst such framings were deployed with the expressed intention of ‘opening up’ policy deliberation, their direction inevitably ‘closes down’ and excludes other possible problem frames (Stirling, 2008; Bellamy et al., 2012). Most recently, research has sought to address these and other issues of closure in framing geoengineering through the use of hybrid participatory analytic-deliberative methods that overtly open up to diverse public, stakeholder and expert participant-defined framings andperspectives (Bellamy et al., 2013; Bellamy et al., 2013, submitted).

The trend, at least for the moment, is towards frames for public deliberation that refrain from expert-led definitions of geoengineering, or from reifying concrete technological options and subjecting them to a straightforward pro-con assessment, and focus instead on using the ambivalences at the centre of the debate to explore core choices and values at the heart of the concept of climate engineering.Overall then, empirical research carried out under the Climate Geoengineering Governance project indicates that specific definitions and classifications of geoengineering remain “fluid and contested” (Markusson et al., forthcoming), and that multiple, incommensurable framings of the technology exist. And yet there are early signs of possible closure in geoengineering appraisals (Bellamy et al., 2012), even if the entrenchment of positions and discursive options is obviously less pronouncedthan in debates over the use of recombinant DNA technology in food production, for instance, where often a single set of framing assumptions and conditions has been assembled around which all actors are willing to mobilise (whether that be to articulatesupport or opposition).In light of these findings then, the next section of the paper moves on to think through what these apparently intractable ambiguities and ambivalences mean for debates over geoengineering and climate change itself.

Discussion: Geoengineering, climate change and the need for collective reflection

At least for now, geoengineering is probably best characterised as a “quasi-stable meta-label” (Porter and Hulme, 2013) around which multiple, conflicting framings and arguments have coalesced. The sheer number of ambivalences and ambiguities that have been identified by research carried out under the Climate Geoengineering Governance project raise profound questions not just about geoengineering itself, but about the very ways in which humans collectively produce knowledge about, and then seek to intervene in, the world around us. The section’s central aim thus goes beyond offering critical reflections on the substance of debates over geoengineering, to tentatively mark out ways in which the very structure of that debate is itself symptomatic of deeper assumptions and contradictions in current approaches to the broader issue of climate change.