Mirror, mirror: fairness and justice in climate geoengineering
Creators: name: McLaren, Duncan
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2017
Subjects: Geoengineering
Justice
Social imaginary
Recognition
Climate engineering

description: Climate geoengineering seems an increasingly likely prospect as the gap
      between current mitigation action and that needed to avoid dangerous
      climate change remains substantial. Climate change raises fundamental
      questions of justice with respect to future generations, the poor and
      vulnerable in the contemporary world, and its relationship with processes
      of historically uneven development. The implications of geoengineering for
      prospects of justice in climate policy and politics are therefore
      critical. 
      
      This thesis examines ways in which geoengineering might contribute to or
      undermine climate justice. It illustrates the co-productive,
      indeterminate, and inherently moral nature of technologies such as those
      proposed for geoengineering. It particularly highlights interactions
      between proposals for geoengineering and the politics and practice of
      climate mitigation and climate risk management, and explores some of the
      implications of different conceptions of fairness and justice and of
      different social and political imaginaries. The thesis locates this
      exploration of justice concerns in a case for a relational care-based
      imaginary of the future, rather than in (neo)liberal administrative,
      risk-managerial imaginaries based on autonomous subjects. It also defends
      a plural approach to justice rooted in environmental justice scholarship,
      arguing for the consistent inclusion of understandings of restorative and
      corrective justice alongside distributional, procedural and recognitional
      justice.
      
      The body of the thesis consists of five papers. Paper 1 locates the threat
      (and moral concern) of mitigation being deterred by climate engineering in
      a common but problematic definition of climate change as an issue of
      ‘climate risk’ rather than one of climate justice. Paper 2 suggests that
      even though climate engineering modellers sometimes broaden the
      understanding of the goals of climate policy to questions of distribution
      they tend to deploy a risk-analysis imaginary which imposes culturally,
      politically and ideologically narrow constructions of justice on the
      debate. Paper 3 finds that, in contrast, deliberative publics draw on a
      much broader set of justice concepts with regard to the uncertainties of
      climate change and geoengineering (including the prospects of mitigation
      deterrence). Paper 4 explores ways in which discourses of climate
      geoengineering are rooted in an administrative, risk-management social
      imaginary and support the maintenance of (neo)liberal capitalist economies
      through ‘post-political’ framings that increase the risk of mitigation
      deterrence. Paper 5 offers some alternative imaginaries through an
      examination of ethics of repair in potentially analogous arenas with
      relevant experience and debate. It illustrates how ethics of care,
      integrity and legibility, and the integration of restorative justice,
      would radically reframe ways of thinking about or practicing
      geoengineering.
      
      To indicate a pathway towards such a reconfiguration of imaginaries, the
      thesis proposes a new synthesis of approaches to justice as recognition
      that develops and further politicizes the account applied in environmental
      justice scholarship, transforming political subjectivity. In turn this
      underpins a conclusion that climate geoengineering, as currently proposed
      and framed, is inherently unjust and unfair, primarily because of the ways
      in which it could be expected to act to sustain neo-liberal administrative
      imaginaries and politics. In the worst case many existing injustices would
      be maintained and exacerbated, while the risk of actually catastrophic
      climate change increased.