Gunderson, Ryan; Petersen, Brian; Stuart, Diana (2018): A Critical Examination of Geoengineering. Economic and Technological Rationality in Social Context (Sustainability, 10).

"Substantial emissions reductions, unlike geoengineering, are costly, rely more on social-structural than technical changes, and are at odds with the current social order. Because of this, geoengineering will increasingly be considered a core response to climate change. In light of Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory, the promotion of geoengineering as a market-friendly and high-tech strategy is shown to reflect a society that cannot set substantive aims through reason and transforms what should be considered means (technology and economic production) into ends themselves. Such a condition echoes the first-generation Frankfurt School’s central thesis: instrumental rationality remains irrational."

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Manoussi, Vassiliki; Shayegh, Soheil; Tavoni, Massimo (2017): Optimal Carbon Dioxide Removal in Face of Ocean Carbon Sink Feedback. Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) (Working Paper, 57.2017). Available online at http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/266288.

"Here, we provide an economic appraisal to assess the sensitivity of CDR and conventional abatement to CO2 outgassing from the oceans. We develop a theoretical framework to study the impact of the ocean-to-atmosphere transfer on the optimal mitigation strategies under different regimes that control the relationship between CO2 outgassing and the amount of CDR."

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"The potential of climate engineering to substitute or complement abatement of greenhouse gas emissions has been increasingly debated over the last years. The scientific assessment is driven to a large extent by assumptions regarding its effectiveness, costs, and impacts, all of which are profoundly uncertain. We investigate how this uncertainty about climate engineering affects the optimal abatement policy in the near term."

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Moreno-Cruz, Juan B.; Wagner, Gernot; Keith, David W. (2017): An Economic Anatomy of Optimal Climate Policy. (HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series, RWP17-028).

"This paper introduces geoengineering into an optimal control model of climate change economics. Together with mitigation and adaptation, carbon and solar geoengineering span the universe of possible climate policies. We show in the context of our model that: (i) a carbon tax is the optimal response to the unpriced carbon externality only if it equals the marginal cost of carbon geoengineering; (ii) the introduction of solar geoengineering leads to higher emissions yet lower temperatures, and, thus, increased welfare; and (iii) solar geoengineering, in effect, is a public goods version of adaptation that also lowers temperatures."

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