Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS CLIMATE CHANGE: THE QUICK FIX? TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Frances Cairncross Producer: Chris Bowlby Editor: Hugh Levinson BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 31.07.08 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 03.08.08 2130-2200 CD Number: Duration: Taking part in order of appearance: Scott Barrett Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University David Victor Professor of Law Director of programme on energy and sustainable development, Stanford University Sir David King Director of Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University Former UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser Robin Webster Energy Campaigner, Friends of the Earth Brian Launder Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Manchester Julian Morris Executive Director of International Policy Network CAIRNCROSS: If the world is getting warmer, should we deliberately try to make it cooler again? Not long ago, the very idea of giant geo- engineering projects to alter the climate would have belonged to the realm of science fiction. BARRETT: I mean it’s the most audacious thing you could imagine really, to engineer changes in the earth’s climate. But when you look at it from a different perspective, it’s not quite so outrageous. CAIRNCROSS: That’s Scott Barrett, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. But what are the technologies that have such power to shock? Listen to David Victor, a professor of law and Director of Stanford University’s programme on energy and sustainable development. VICTOR: I think it’s a bit science fiction and it’s a bit kind of nascent reality. The idea behind geo-engineering is to intervene directly in the climate system on a very large scale, planetary scale, to do things such as injecting sulphate particles into the stratosphere, which would make the earth more reflective; and if you send just a percent or so of the sunlight away from the earth, then that could offset in a crude way the effects of global warming. As people have looked at the option, they’ve come up with lots of different ideas. For example, they’ve thought about engineering particles that would go into the stratosphere that would be much more effective and much cheaper than sulphate particles; they’ve thought about making the oceans cloudier by spraying seawater into the lower atmosphere; they’ve thought about transforming whole areas of land from dark cover, which absorbs a lot of sunlight, to lighter cover which reflects more of the sunlight away. And I think the scientific community is still struggling with the different options here, but a growing number of people are looking at these and coming up with new schemes. CAIRNCROSS: So here is an audacious set of ideas, but ideas that are on the march. And some surprising people are at least prepared to take seriously what David Victor calls their “nascent reality”. Take Professor Sir David King, formerly the British Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser and now Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University. KING: My position on geo-engineering is very simple. There is no current proposal that has clear validity at the moment, but I think we’re faced with such an enormous problem that we need to do all the research we can to see if there are any geo-engineering proposals which work through to the marketplace. CAIRNCROSS: Or take Robin Webster, an energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth. WEBSTER: The science is changing on climate change. Increasingly, science is coming out saying that we do have to make some fairly radical changes both to our energy system - to the way we produce energy, the way we use energy - but also some of the technical fixes which are out there in terms of technical fixes which for example could suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. We should be looking at those as well. CAIRNCROSS: So some people who might previously have been diehard opponents of a technical fix for climate change now seem cautiously prepared at least to consider it as part of the solution. But why should we countenance technologies that try to change the climate instead of changing what we’re doing to the climate? Brian Launder is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Manchester and is editing a volume of papers on geo-engineering for the Royal Society. LAUNDER: If we look at the CO2 concentration records, they just are not falling in the way that had been foreseen seven or eight years ago. People are realising that it’s a problem we haven’t licked. To use - as is increasingly used - the analogy of the Second World War, we’re not yet at 1938, but we are approaching a point where governments around the world, in the developed sectors of the world, will realise that we must do the research that will enable us, if it’s necessary, to put in place these measures - perhaps only temporary measures, but nevertheless measures - to counter global warming. SEGUE: VICTOR: There’s all this evidence accumulating that global warming is going to be a lot worse than people originally thought and governments, frankly, haven’t done very much to control the emissions. And so you put that together and people are looking at much uglier and more difficult options than they used to be considering and this is one of them. CAIRNCROSS: Stanford’s David Victor. As he says, views of climate change seem to have darkened recently. More people with expert understanding of the science appear to believe that the world is indeed careering towards an international crisis, just as it did - to use Brian Launder’s phrase - in 1938. We’re not succeeding with the policy of mitigation - of reducing the global output of greenhouse gases. Indeed, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere is continuing to rise. And with China now overtaking the United States as the world’s largest emitter of climate changing gases, the task of restraint looks increasingly difficult. But when David Victor talks of “uglier options”, what does he have in mind? VICTOR: We don’t know enough about the atmosphere and the oceans and the way the system’s going to respond to know with any precision how a geo-engineering system would operate in practice, what the side effects might be. There’s some evidence from the computer models that geo-engineering might offset some of the warming, but would change weather patterns or change precipitation. So I think ultimately you’re going to have to test some systems in the atmosphere. It turns out that nature on its own provides at least a partial test of geo-engineering systems when volcanoes erupt, and so one of the things we might do is develop a much better capability to monitor how the atmosphere responds when future volcanoes blow. And that can provide a partial test and give us some confidence that different kinds of geo-engineering systems might work or at least understand the side effects better. ARCHIVE: BBC TV NEWS REPORT: A column of molten rock, boiling mud and volcanic ash shoots thousands of feet in the air as Mount Pinatubo continues to erupt after six hundred years lying dormant. CAIRNCROSS: It was the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in South East Asia in 1991 that showed geo-engineers one way to alter the climate intentionally. Paul Crutzen, a Nobel laureate with a long history of work on environmental problems, noticed how the eruption projected sulphur up into the atmosphere, and how that sulphur spread around the globe. Here he is talking on BBC television last year. CRUTZEN: Pinatubo is a test case because we have the information, we know how much sulphur dioxide was injected in the stratosphere, where it was injected, what happened to the sulphur dioxide. After the injection at high altitude, it started to move around the globe with the air motions - first in East West direction but also with time in North South direction. So after about a year, the initial input of pollutants in the stratosphere by the volcano had spread rather evenly around the globe. CAIRNCROSS: Those pollutants then seem to have contributed to a cooling of the earth by blocking some of the sun’s warming. If global warming becomes catastrophic, Professor Crutzen has proposed trying to replicate this effect. He suggests using rockets to send a million tons of sulphur twenty-five kilometres up into the stratosphere. He admits the danger of side effects such as acid rain and damage to the ozone layer, but he argues that these risks are bearable to prevent global warming of more than two or three degrees. This is just one possible approach. As Sir David King points out, there are other kinds of ambitious schemes that aim to pump carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or out of the ocean. KING: The different forms of geo-engineering would be to remove it from the oceans, by which I mean precipitate carbon dioxide out of the oceans. It’s present there because it dissolves into the ocean as carbonic acid, so potentially we could precipitate it into rock form and we would need to see how we could manage that. The alternative is to take it out of the atmosphere, so a second form of geo-engineering. And a third would be to reflect sunlight away from the planet’s surface so as to stop warming. I think these are the three major categories. CAIRNCROSS: Are any of them remotely feasible today? KING: None of them is even close to feasibility at the moment, but I think the important thing is that the funding ought to be there to enable further research to take place. I’ve got my favourite schemes and I’ve got my schemes that I think are unlikely to work, but I … CAIRNCROSS: Which is which? Which are the favourite schemes? KING: Well here’s the nature of the problem, in my view. Whatever we do, we’ve got to avoid unintended circumstances, so the unintended consequences that can emerge for example from putting trillions of mirrors or lenses up into space around the planet could completely transform our climate in a way that we had never intended. The unintended consequence of blooming algae in the oceans may be that we have a very deleterious effect on ocean life. So there are all sorts of unintended consequences when we’re dealing with something of this magnitude. This is the rabbits in Australia problem. CAIRNCROSS: The hapless farmer who released rabbits into the wild in Australia in the 1850s said that they “could do little harm and might provide a touch of home.” Instead they’ve been an environmental catastrophe. But at least, with rabbits, it would have been possible to conduct a controlled experiment to discover the dangers. With geo- engineering, it’s hard to imagine that possibility. And reversing geo- engineering that went wrong would be vastly more difficult and expensive than stamping out Australia’s pesky rabbits. But how should we evaluate these “known unknowns” - the certain knowledge that geo- engineering would involve taking measures that will have unforeseeable consequences? Scott Barrett: BARRETT: In a fundamental way, geo-engineering will mean doing something that previously we weren’t doing. It will introduce new risks. I do however think it’s very important that we evaluate geo-engineering on the same basis that we evaluate all our other options. You know one of our important options for addressing climate fundamentally would be nuclear power, and that raises new risks, that poses challenges for proliferation, for long-term storage and so on. And, unfortunately, we’re moving into this territory where we have no easy options, and so from that perspective I think we shouldn’t take geo-engineering off the table. CAIRNCROSS: Whichever way we turn, policies to tackle climate change seem to have either obvious drawbacks or unintended consequences - or both. Robin Webster. WEBSTER: We’ve got to always think is this going to make our problems worse? What are going to be all the consequences? We’ve seen this with the debate over bio-fuels. Everybody says great, you know we can keep going the way we’re going now, but we can just get the energy from a different source. But then the expansion of bio-fuels is driving more forest destruction, actually leading to more greenhouse gas emissions, so this idea that there’s a very easy technological fix really isn’t proven. CAIRNCROSS: Other alternative energy sources may also cause unexpected environmental damage. Wind farms may kill birds. Wave power may accidentally harm fish. And as for nuclear plants, easily the world’s largest source of non-fossil fuel energy, they create hazardous waste. Sooner or later, we will have to balance one kind of environmental risk against another. If the gloomier scientists are right, and global warming suddenly accelerates, we may have to choose between the partly unknown risks that it will bring and the equally uncertain implications of intervening directly in the climate. How long can we wait to take such decisions? Brian Launder: LAUNDER: It’s no good the world suddenly waking up in twenty-five years time and say this is a crisis, we must do something about it. There’s a good ten - depending upon the type of scheme - between ten and twenty years development work needed. It will take ten years to sort out which are really the best schemes to propose. We’re too early on. We can see the potentials, but they’ve not been evaluated; and if we don’t evaluate them, we won’t have anything that we can bring into place in 2030, say, when suddenly the world is at a crisis point. CAIRNCROSS: So some scientists are becoming anxious to start serious work in this under researched field, and yet others hang back. Relatively few scientists seem to be working on geo-engineering of this sort - and some of those who have made pronouncements about it in the past then seem to have grown nervous. When Paul Crutzen put forward his proposals for sending sulphur into the atmosphere, other academics urged him not to publish on the grounds that his very distinction would give authority to the idea. And Professor Crutzen has since become more reticent. Companies are also squeamish about geo-engineering. When we asked the chief scientist at a large energy company for an interview, he was happy - but his press office was not. What about governments? Are they yet willing to have public discussions on deliberate attempts to engineer an altered climate? Sir David King has been closely involved with international climate negotiations over the years. KING: My discussions with other countries have all been around the science of climate change and then managing to reduce the impacts of climate change through reducing greenhouse gas emissions. CAIRNCROSS: So you haven’t talked to other countries at all, including your period as Chief Scientific Adviser, about geo- engineering as a way of mitigating the consequences of climate change? KING: No, precisely. And, as a matter of fact, whenever geo- engineering has been raised as an issue, I have pushed it into the background because there is no validated procedure and I don’t believe that there is anything even on the horizon. CAIRNCROSS: But shouldn’t governments be talking about this? Surely keeping silent is wrong? KING: No, you’re quite right, governments should be talking about it. I do believe it is right for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which of course will be having a very big meeting in Copenhagen at the end of next year, I do believe the Copenhagen meeting needs to address the validation procedure. But at the same time, this really is a relatively minor issue compared with decarbonising economies. In other words, we need to make sure that there is control and validation over any of these procedures, but at the same time let’s not take attention away from the major issue of removing our dependence on fossil fuels. CAIRNCROSS: Are you afraid that if we did do this research, it would take attention away from decarbonising the world’s economies? KING: There’s no doubt in my mind that some interlocutors are using the potential of technologies in this area as a means of saying therefore we can go on business as usual on greenhouse gas emissions. If we simply imagine the magnitude of the problem, if we look at the billions of tons of carbon dioxide that we are currently, our civilization, adding to the atmosphere year on year - about nine billion tons per annum - that’s a vast amount of carbon dioxide. So any one of these geo- engineering solutions that we look at is puny by comparison with that. CAIRNCROSS: And there’s the rub. Those who most fear the consequences of climate change are also terrified that discussion of geo-engineering might have a disastrous effect on international efforts to stop global warming at its source. Robin Webster of Friends of the Earth. WEBSTER: At the moment what we’re seeing is politicians getting together and a recognition that climate change is an issue and a moving towards some targets, but those targets are not nearly ambitious enough for where we really need to be going and we really need the political tension to be focused on really radical changes, really radical changes in our economy, really radical shifts towards more energy efficiency and more renewables and much stronger targets. And that’s where we need the political attention to be. So that’s for example where the fear might be, if you start thinking you know we can press one techno fix button and that’s going to fix everything. CAIRNCROSS: So the dilemma, as environmentalists see it, is as follows. We may need geo-engineering as an insurance policy against unexpectedly rapid climate change, but if we undertake the research that’s needed to try to spot and to address undesirable side effects, we risk taking the pressure off governments to tackle the source of the problem. But is that really a reasonable fear? Scott Barrett: BARRETT: I think that’s one of the reasons why scientists have been reluctant to speak about geo-engineering, particularly in public. What they’re worried about is that if the idea of geo-engineering attains some level of credibility, that the pressure on governments to act to address climate change fundamentally will reduce. On the other hand, it’s absolutely clear that geo-engineering has barely been mentioned in the last twenty years and during all that time the world has utterly failed to reduce emissions in any kind of serious way. So it’s hard for me to understand how discussion about geo-engineering would make that situation even worse. In fact, I think not talking about it first of all is not feasible - how do you censor information like that? - but also it’s not desirable because we may actually want to have this tool available in the future. CAIRNCROSS: So Scott Barrett thinks that some research may be done in any case, even if it’s not done in Britain or the United States. Countries such as China and India have growing scientific capability. In future, they may undertake research on the feasibility of geo- engineering. If that is right, what’s our best course? Julian Morris is Executive Director of International Policy Network, a think tank that has often sounded sceptical about climate change and that believes profoundly in the power of the market economy. MORRIS: Investments in geo-engineering research are almost certainly the biggest bang for the buck that one could get in terms of addressing catastrophic climate change - a much, much bigger return than for example trying to control carbon emissions at the moment. In fact diverting money into controlling carbon emissions and away from geo-engineering is probably morally irresponsible. CAIRNCROSS: Lots of environmentalists would find that very difficult to swallow. They would surely see geo-engineering as an attempt to fight pollution with more pollution? MORRIS: If we want to address the threat of climate change, then we should look at what the implications of climate change are and address those implications. The best evidence we have to date is that climate change will occur gradually and human societies will likely be able to adapt at relatively low cost. If that doesn’t happen - in other words if climate change occurs more rapidly than we expect it to - then we need a cost effective strategy for addressing that. The most plausible cost effective strategy that’s been suggested is geo-engineering, so we should be looking as an absolute priority, a global priority, at such geo- engineering solutions. CAIRNCROSS: So which risk do we prefer? The risk that effective geo-engineering research might discourage people from the tough task of cutting their carbon dioxide emissions? Or the risk that their failure might lead to a sudden and unmanageable climate catastrophe? Global warming is all about hard choices, to which often there is no easy answer, merely several difficult ones. And there’s another characteristic of geo-engineering that makes it a particularly difficult issue for the international community to manage. Stanford’s law professor, David Victor: VICTOR: What’s interesting about the geo-engineering option is that it turns all of the normal politics and economics of the climate problem completely upside down. So when you think about controlling the emissions that caused global warming in the first place, you need treaties and other international agreements because the objective is to get lots of different countries to cooperate, each making a contribution to the global effort. With geo-engineering, it’s pretty much exactly the opposite problem. What you’re trying to do is to restrain countries from running off and doing something crazy on their own. One country with space lift or heavy aircraft could go off and do a lot of geo-engineering on their own. Right now, today, I’d say that maybe a dozen countries could engage in some kind of significant geo-engineering on their own. In a decade, with some investment, that number could grow to twenty. And so when you think through the politics of this, the treaty option’s very difficult to use because in the first place we don’t really know exactly what could be done and should be done with geo-engineering. It’s very hard to negotiate treaties when you don’t know exactly which direction you’re headed. CAIRNCROSS: If we go back to the idea of one country going it alone, can you sketch out for me a plausible scenario of how that might actually happen? VICTOR: I think a lot of countries are realising that they have much more at stake with global warming than they originally thought. Consider China. The Chinese are learning that their coastlines and many of their water supplies are at risk. The dangers may be even greater than they’d originally thought. And you could imagine future Chinese policymakers looking around the world and seeing that the countries in the rich parts of the world had not done very much to control their emissions, that the developing countries were developing and their emissions were growing rapidly, and yet this climate problem is getting out of control. And you could imagine the Chinese thinking about deployment of aerosols in the stratosphere or maybe a regional scheme to offset some of the effects of climate change in their neighbourhood. CAIRNCROSS: Now you’ve talked in some of the things you’ve written about a Greenfinger - a rogue individual, as I understand it, who might go off and do this. VICTOR: Well the idea behind the Greenfinger was to underscore that the amount of money and capability needed to deploy some of the geo- engineering options being discussed today is very, very small. It’s almost zero. Compared certainly with the cost of controlling the emissions that caused global warming in the first place, the cost of most of the geo-engineering options is trivial. People have looked at options such as flying aircraft in the upper atmosphere and ejecting particles from the aircraft or having small rockets, launching the rockets into the stratosphere and injecting particles in the stratosphere. Somebody might decide that the effects of climate change are so horrific and that governments have proved so incapable of doing this on their own that they could go off and buy the aircraft and buy the rockets and just start doing some geo-engineering off their own island. CAIRNCROSS: Clearly the James Bond film of the future will be about a sinister figure who aims to impose rocket-borne particles on the stratosphere of a frightened planet. But let’s put Greenfinger aside for the moment. What do we do about governments? Hardly anyone has begun to think seriously about the implications of a technology that, as David Victor so ingeniously puts it, turns the politics and economics of climate change on its head. One exception is Julian Morris: MORRIS: There’s good international law on the implications of one country taking action to shoot emissions into the upper atmosphere. In fact there’s a treaty on outer space which could be applied here, which creates a strict liability on any country that causes damage through for example space hardware falling back to the earth. That treaty I think could be extended to apply to the upper atmosphere very easily. In other words, were there to be adverse consequences of action taken by one country in an attempt to control the climate, then other countries that were adversely affected would be entitled to compensation. So that should act as a way of preventing, in some measure at least, countries acting unilaterally to try and implement a geo-engineering strategy. CAIRNCROSS: But India for example suffering a giant famine and desperate to do something about climate change, and with quite a lot of space technology, might not worry too much about having to pay compensation in the future if what it was worried about was the present. Is international law really strong enough to deal with this sort of problem? MORRIS: It seems to me that there is no alternative. In the face of an existential threat, I’m not sure that any action of the international community could do anything to stop a country trying to prevent an existential threat in that way. CAIRNCROSS: Are governments talking about all this yet? Has it really come up the political agenda? MORRIS: At the moment the discussion of geo-engineering is mostly at academic level. I think that there is increasing interest in certain countries to discuss alternative ways of addressing climate change, but it hasn’t gone up the diplomatic agenda - mainly because the key countries driving the discussion of climate change seem to be absolutely obsessed with the supposed solution of controlling carbon emissions. However, having said that, I think that it’s plausible that countries like India and China may well drive this up the agenda because they can see that it is going to be more cost effective for them, and indeed for the world, to look at geo-engineering as an alternative. CAIRNCROSS: If they do, international climate negotiations will take a whole new turn. The agenda will no longer be under the control of the West. It will be the developing countries, which already take a different line in the debate from the rich world, that have their fingers on the world’s thermostat. That will lead to a very different discussion from the one that took place at the recent meeting of the Group of Eight in Tokyo. Scott Barrett has spent much of the past decade thinking about how to structure successful international agreements on climate change. How does he now see the prospects? BARRETT: The problem is that as things unfold, we’re going to be facing a world in which there are risk-risk tradeoffs. We can on the one hand not interfere with the climate system and experience what may be catastrophic and abrupt climate change, or we can, at least when the prospects of that kind of change appear likely, we can turn to this technology. I don’t think we’re going to want to use it as a first choice. I think it’s going to be in the end - if it’ll be used, and I think the chances are likely that it will eventually be used, for better or worse - I think that we’ll be using it in circumstances in which the risks of not using it are seen to be higher than the risks of using it. CAIRNCROSS: If those are the consequences of climate change, we have no choice. We need to be sure that whoever takes the lead on a planetary experiment of this sort has the greatest possible understanding of the risks and the likely side effects. The best way to reach wise decisions is to have as much information as possible. The sooner governments start thinking rigorously about geo-engineering, the better.