Profit-seeking solar geoengineering exemplifies broader risks of market-based climate governance

Abstract

Despite uncertainties about its feasibility and desirability, start-up companies seeking to profit from solar geoengineering have begun to emerge. One company is releasing balloons filled with sulfur dioxide to sell “cooling credits”, claiming that the cooling achieved when 1 g of SO₂ is released is equivalent to offsetting one ton of carbon dioxide for one year. Another aspires to deliver returns to investors from the development of a proprietary aerosol for dispersal in the stratosphere. Such for-profit solar geoengineering enterprises should not be understood merely as rogue opportunists. These proposals are not only scientifically questionable, and premature in the absence of effective governance, but they are a predictable consequence of neoliberal, market-driven climate governance. The structures and incentives of market-based climate policy - circumscribed by neoliberalism's emphasis on technological innovation, venture capital, and the marketization of environmental goods - have generated repeated efforts to profit from various forms of geoengineering. With a climate governance regime wherein private, for-profit actors significantly influence and weaken climate policy, de facto governance of solar geoengineering has emerged, dominated by actors linked to Silicon Valley funders and ideologies. Without more explicit efforts to curb the power of private sector actors, including commercial geoengineering bans and non-use provisions, pursuit of techno-market “solutions” could lead to both inadequate mitigation and increasingly risky reliance on geoengineering.