Volume 8, Issue 1 - Balancing the Risks: Managing Technology and Dangerous Climate Change

While risk is a fact of life, managing risk is complex. This is particularly true today in considering how to address climate change. We know that we must act, and act quickly, to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid dangerous climate change. Failure to act risks catastrophic climate impacts. We also know, however, that deploying technologies to significantly cut greenhouse gases will fundamentally change the way society produces and uses energy. Carbon capture and geologic sequestration (CCS) technology promises to provide deep emissions cuts, particularly from coal power generation, but deploying CCS creates risks of its own. This article first considers the risks associated with CCS, which involves capturing CO2 emissions from industrial sources and power plants, transporting the CO2 by pipeline, and injecting it underground for permanent sequestration. This article then suggests ways in which these risks can be minimized and managed and considers more broadly when or if CCS should be deployed or whether its use should be limited or rejected in favor of other solutions.

The difficulties encountered in accomplishing the drastic greenhouse gas emissions reductions necessary to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference with the Earth's climate system have led to incipient interest in geoengineering. Geoengineering proposals, such as the release of sulfur into the stratosphere in order to block sunlight, might serve as an emergency option should emissions reductions efforts fail, or even as a nonemergency policy alternative to emission reductions. This article examines the largely unexplored issue of geoengineering governance, namely, questions regarding who should decide whether geoengineering research or deployment should go forward, how such decisions should be made, and what mechanisms should be in place to address the risk of deployment by rogue actors. The article recommends that the international community begin to address geoengineering governance promptly through the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the bodies established by that agreement, and that geoengineering governance be treated as a series of adaptive management decisions to be reviewed periodically. Such an approach will allow the incorporation of new information into the decisionmaking process and promote the development of consensus and international norms with respect to geoengineering techniques.

Climate change will require innovative solutions – new energy technologies and new adaptation strategies. These innovations will inevitably pose risks, often in the form of possible harm to human welfare or the environment. Climate change itself involves uncertainties. Evaluating these risks and informing decision makers and members of the public will be challenging. An environmental impact statement does not dictate the substance of regulatory decisions but is at least supposed to force the agency to take a "hard look" at the relevant factors. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to codify this directive in the context of catastrophic risks, which generally have low probabilities but extreme consequences. The problem of how to handle potentially catastrophic risks has vexed the courts. Dam safety and nuclear power have been particularly fertile sources of disputes over risk assessment, and are used here as case studies. This article suggests six improvements in current NEPA practice.