Ethics of Geoengineering, Part 2

Part 2 of my Yale Forum series on the ethics of geoengineering is out. (Part 1 is here.) Here's one excerpt from philosopher Stephen Gardiner of U-Washington, writing about “whatever it takes-style emergency arguments” for geoengineering:

"It is ethically short-sighted (in the sense of “missing the bigger picture”) in so far as it arbitrarily marginalizes central moral issues such as how we got into this predicament, and why we are not seriously pursuing better ways out. It is also frequently morally schizophrenic (in the sense of being “a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements”) since it tends to bring on a form of creative myopia: it requires us to emphasize and endorse strong ethical concerns that we are otherwise unwilling to act on, and which would, if earnestly and coherently embraced, lead us to approach both climate policy in general and geoengineering in particular in very different ways."

The rest is here.