Johns Hopkins University’s Energy Policy & Climate program and the School of International Service at American University recently established the Washington Geoengineering Consortium (WGC) to provide a forum for stakeholders to engage in an ongoing discussion of climate change geoengineering. They held a roundtable discussion on the topic last week at Hopkins as part of the Hopkins EPC Forum series.

Up until recently, climate change geoengineering, de ned by the UK’s Royal Society as “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change,” was viewed as outside the mainstream, or as Professor David Victor has put it less charitably, “a freak show in otherwise serious discussions of climate science and policy.” However, the feckless response of the global community to climate change ensures that temperatures are likely to rise to levels during this century that could have potentially catastrophic implications for human institutions and ecosystems. This had led to increasingly serious consideration of the potential role of geoengineering as a potential means to avert a “climate emergency,” such as rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, or as a stopgap measure to buy time for effective emissions mitigation responses. This roundtable will examine the ethical, legal and political issues associated with climate change geoengineering research and development and potential deployment.

Moderator: Wil Burns
Associate Director, Energy Policy & Climate Program, Johns Hopkins University

Panelists
Lee Lane, Visiting Scholar, Hudson Institute
Michael MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs, Climate Institute, Washington, DC
Simon Nicholson, Assistant Professor of International Relations, School of International Service, American University

For the original article, please see Washington Geoengineering Consortium.