Sustainable Climate Engineering Innovation and the Need for Accountability

Although still highly controversial, the idea that we can use technology to radically alter our environment in order to mitigate the challenges we now face is becoming an ever more discussed approach. The potential for cloud brightening, solar radiation management, and carbon capture technologies, among others, have been debated for a long time. These technologies, called climate engineering technologies, raise particular socio-political issues given that they have global impacts even if used on national or regional levels, and might lead to assymetric relations of power between developed countries, technocratic corporate elites at one side, and developing countries and vulnerable groups at the other. This chapter takes up a specific climate engineering technology, carbon capture, usage, and storage (CCUS), and highlights how this technology works and how its governance still needs normative political considerations to ensure that is aligned to more just societally outcomes. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework has been said to provide a first step for the development of criteria for climate engineering, but this chapter claims that such a framework still need considerable reflection on how to provide an inclusive approach to societal stakeholders and sustainable development. Therefore, firstly, this paper argues that both climate engineering innovation and the SDGs framework should be seen not as policy-neutral and objective sites, but as sites for politics, sites for ongoing debate and deliberation on their normative ends and governance. Then, this paper argues that in order to mitigate the particular issues implicated by climate engineering innovation, what is required is a more nuanced and multi-dimensional understanding of accountability. Given that climate engineering technologies like CCUS have the potential to ameliorate many of the climate issues and thus support the SDGs, there remains a lacuna of inserting such notions of sustainable development and globally impactful technologies within a normative political framework to ensure that proper responsibility is attributed. Thus, this paper provides a polysemic and multi-dimensional account of accountability that can serve as a theoretically informed basis for reflection on how to responsibly implement climate engineering innovation, in modalities that also align with more socially just approaches to sustainable development.