14.06.2019

# Media

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Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program (Blog): The Governance of Solar Geoengineering and Human Rights

"Human rights are often invoked for guiding policy development, especially internationally. Although this occurs in the case of solar geoengineering, it is uncommon to see much beyond a few vague phrases, such as pointing to the need to proceed consistently with human rights. How might human rights help shape the governance of solar geoengineering?"

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11.02.2019

# Media

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Climate Institute: Negative Emission Technologies: Silver Bullet or Ethically Ambiguous?

"This paper explores the potential of negative emission technologies (NETs) and highlights the difficulties associated with them. It argues that although these technologies are indeed impressive in theory, the reality shows that they are nowhere near ready to remove carbon at the scale required. This therefore leads to a level of moral ambiguity that could be detrimental to effective climate action. While continued research and development is imperative to global progress – and indeed, technology will be required in the future – the way the utility of NETs is presented threatens to produce an ethical dilemma."

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04.02.2019

# Calls & events

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Call for Abstracts: The Regulation of New Technologies

Deadline: 28. February 2019

"The Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (“TILT”) is organizing the second edition of the PhD Colloquium on "The Regulation of New Technologies" which will take place at Tilburg University on 20 June 2019. The organizers invite PhD researchers working on any of the themes covered by this Call for Papers (“CfP”) to submit an abstract of max. 300 words by 28 February 2019."

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04.02.2019

# New Publications

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Whyte, Kyle Powys (2019): Indigeneity in Geoengineering Discourses

Whyte, Kyle Powys (2019): Indigeneity in Geoengineering Discourses. Some Considerations. In: Ethics, Policy & Environment 20 (2), S. 1–19. DOI: 10.1080/21550085.2018.1562529.

"Indigenous peoples are referenced at various times in communication, debates, and academic and policy discussions on geoengineering (i.e. geoengineering discourses). The discourses I have in mind focus on ethical and justice issues pertaining to some geoengineering research and (potential) implementation. The issues include concerns about potential inequalities in the distribution of environmental risks, research ethics, and abuses of social power."

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11.12.2018

# Media

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FiveThirtyEight: We Have Ways To Stop Rogue Scientists. They Don’t Always Work.

"The same week that news of He’s experiments came out, the journal Nature ran a story about a team at Harvard that is planning the first real-world experiments in geoengineering — releasing particles of calcium carbonate into the high atmosphere over part of the southwestern United States. It’s part of a project to develop a way to block sunlight and hopefully reduce the global average temperature (but not by too much). The tests could start as early as next year."

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29.10.2018

# Media

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The Christian Science Monitor: Unintended consequences: Climate-hacking poses big ethical questions

"The idea of blotting out the sun, whether floated by Frédéric Bastiat or Montgomery Burns, has long stood as a metaphor for human arrogance."

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22.10.2018

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India Climate Dialogue: Geoengineering must be transparent to gain public trust

"The world remains on track for more than three degrees Celsius of average warming by 2100. That will trigger calls for drastic measures to combat a climate emergency, including carbon removal from the atmosphere or solar radiation management. Geoengineering in this form or any other urgently needs governance — and transparency lies at its heart."

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23.09.2018

# New Publications

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Blackstock, J.; et al. (2018): Geoengineering our climate? Ethics, politics and governance

Blackstock, J.; Low, S. (Hg.) (2019): Geoengineering our climate? Ethics, politics and governance. Abingdon, Oxon, New York, NY: Routledge (Science in society series). DOI: 9781849713733

"In this important book, a diverse collection of scholars, policymakers, and civil society representatives examine and reflect upon the global geoengineering debate they have helped shape. Opening with essays examining the historic origins of contemporary geoengineering ideas, the book goes on to explore the practical and ethical dilemmas geoengineering poses; the evolving geoengineering research agenda; the challenges geoengineering technologies present to current international legal and political frameworks; differing perceptions of geoengineering from around the world; and how geoengineering technologies might be governed if/as they begin to emerge from the lab into the real world."

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20.09.2018

# Media

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Nature: Don’t deploy negative emissions technologies without ethical analysis

"The IPCC report will confirm an open secret: in the light of growing emissions, targets for mitigating climate change increasingly depend on ‘negative emissions technologies’ that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Staying within 2 °C could mean extracting billions of tonnes of CO2 this century."

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20.09.2018

# New Publications

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Gardiner, S.; et al. (2018): The Tollgate Principles for the Governance of Geoengineering: Moving Beyond the Oxford Principles to an Ethically More Robust Approach

Gardiner, S.; Fragnière, A. (2018): The Tollgate Principles for the Governance of Geoengineering: Moving Beyond the Oxford Principles to an Ethically More Robust Approach. In: Ethics, Policy & Environment 21 (2), S. 143–174. DOI: 10.1080/21550085.2018.1509472.

"This article offers a constructive critique of the Oxford Principles for the governance of geoengineering and proposes an alternative set of principles, the Tollgate Principles, based on that critique. Our main concern is that, despite their many merits, the Oxford Principles remain largely instrumental and dominated by procedural considerations; therefore, they fail to lay the groundwork sufficiently for the more substantive ethical debate that is needed. The article aims to address this gap by making explicit many of the important ethical questions lurking in the background, especially around values such as justice, respect and legitimacy."

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