Climate Geoengineering Free Riders?

Geoengineering is the controversial idea of altering the earth in some way to offset human harms to the climate. Some fear it could make us complacent about the real solution: Reducing fossil fuel use.

“Can $500 Million Save This Glacier” was the title of a recent New York Times article. British glaciologist John Moore attended a 2016 meeting where he learned about a Greenland glacier called Jakobshavn with global significance. (Sermeq Kujalleq in the Greenlandic language.)

It is a UNESCO World Heritage site for the spectacular views of calving icebergs falling from the glacier face. The calving is facilitated by warm water welling up from almost 1,000 feet below the surface. Moore also learned that this process risks causing a collapse of the glacier into the ocean, contributing to global sea level rise.

Deep below the surface this warm water flows over a kind of sill or ridge on the ocean floor. He realized it might be possible to build that ridge higher and reduce the warm water flow, saving the glacier from imminent collapse.

Moore looked into the actual logistics of doing such a project. It seems to be feasible, at a prospective cost of about $500 Million. A wealthy sponsor has helped fund his research. But building such a project would need funding that only national governments could provide.

It is not clear that the native Greenlanders would approve of the project. Jakobshavn is a major tourist attraction. But even if they did, who would pay for it?

This raises the bigger issue of Free Riders. Rising sea levels due to the Climate Crisis threaten coastal cities with flooding on a massive scale. Trillions of dollars are ultimately at stake, depending how high the sea level rises. A geoengineering project like the one Moore proposes would save far more money than it would cost. But it would be easy for countries to let someone else pay for it and just go along for a free ride with the benefit.

This is a form of Market Failure I have written about in the past. We see this with every aspect of the Climate Crisis. We might be able to extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere to avert disaster. But what incentive is there for anyone to pay for this expensive operation?

I found a possible solution in my research. Yale economics professor William Nordhaus published a paper in 2015: “Climate Clubs: Overcoming Free-riding in International Climate Policy.” In 2018 he shared a Nobel Prize in Economics for this work.

His proposal? A “Climate Club.” Countries could voluntarily join the Climate Club if they were willing to make substantial contributions to projects that reduced the Climate Crisis threat. In return, they would get more favorable trade relations with others in the Club. He showed that it did not take very large economic incentives to leverage large levels of spending.

One sticky challenge: So-called “free trade” organizations and treaties. The case can easily be made that trade is not “free” if a country is a Free Rider, taking advantage of the spending by another country. But this will take a consensus understanding of this reality.

Another dimension of this problem is whether a country like Greenland, which had little to do with causing the Climate Crisis, should have to make fiscal sacrifices to save the planet.

We have a similar situation in the case of the Amazon Rainforest; home to 10 percent of the world’s biodiversity, as well as about a quarter of all of the carbon currently sequestered in living things on Earth. The Amazon is a global treasure. Yet we ask the Amazon countries to sacrifice their economic growth to save this treasure.

In both cases, perhaps the rest of the world owes them money to make these sacrifices?

Moore has also been scouting out other possible glacial geoengineering sites. Notably, a much larger one called the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, which is predicted to collapse along one of several imminent timelines. No one country has rights to Antarctica – a situation whose competing piecemeal treaties make a coordinated approach more complicated. The cost of a Thwaites remediation would be perhaps $50 billion, but the benefit would be far larger than in Greenland’s Jakobshavn solution.

It all comes down to solving the Free Rider problem.