The low-carbon risk society: Dilemmas of risk-risk tradeoffs in energy innovations, transitions, and climate policy.

As countries and communities grapple with climate change, they seek to rapidly decarbonize their economies and cultures. A low-carbon future will likely depend on more distributed solar energy, the electrification of mobility, and more efficient homes and buildings. But what emergent risks are evident within this low-carbon society? This exploratory study first reviews the existing literature to identify 75 risk-risk tradeoffs by their category, medium of distribution, and type. It builds on these 75 examples to apply a typology of Risk Offsets, Risk Substitution, Risk Transfer, and Risk Transformation. Based on extensive document analysis, it applies that typology to three low-carbon innovations: solar energy, battery electric vehicles, and building energy efficiency retrofits, identifying 36 distinct risk-risk tradeoffs in total. As such, the paper moves to discuss complexities and challenges in risk management. In doing so, it calls for a more refined risk assessment that better accounts for decision-making considerations such as the magnitude or probability of risk, size of population exposed, certainty in risk estimation, severity of adverse outcome, distributional considerations, and the timing of risk impacts. It also summarizes emergent research gaps. Risk management in the context of climate action becomes a three-dimensional chess game of weighing risk transmission, risk mediums, and risk categories.

Like diamonds in the sky? Public perceptions, governance, and information framing of solar geoengineering activities in Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Solar geoengineering (also known as solar radiation modification) is garnering more attention (and controversy) among media and policymakers in response to the impacts of climate change. Such debates have become more prominent following the first-ever field trials of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) in 2022. How the lay public perceives solar geoengineering remains unclear, however. We use nationally representative samples (N = 3013) in Mexico, United States, and United Kingdom to examine public perceptions of risks and benefits, support, and policy preferences. We also employ an information-framing design that presented individuals with media-style reports on SAI activities differing along three dimensions: location, actor, and scale and purpose. Support for SAI is found to be generally higher in Mexico; perceptions of risks and benefits do not differ between countries. Information about SAI activities has a limited effect. There is evidence that activities conducted by universities receive more support than those by start-up companies.

Public engagement for inclusive and sustainable governance of climate interventions.

The need for public engagement is increasingly evident as discussions intensify around emerging methods for carbon dioxide removal and controversial proposals around solar geoengineering. Based on 44 focus groups in 22 countries across the Global North and Global South (N = 323 participants), this article traces public preferences for a variety of bottom-up and top-down engagement practices ranging from information recipient to broad decision authority. Here, we show that engagement practices need to be responsive to local political cultures and socio-technical environments, while attending to the global dimensions and interconnectedness of the issues at stake. Establishing public engagement as a cornerstone of inclusive and sustainable governance of climate-intervention technologies requires (i) recognizing the diversity of forms and intensities of engaging, (ii) considering national contexts and modes of engagement, (iii) tailoring to technological idiosyncrasies, (iv) adopting power-sensitive practices, (v) accounting for publics' prior experience, (vi) establishing trust and procedural legitimacy and (vii) engaging with tensions and value disagreements.

Public perceptions on carbon removal from focus groups in 22 countries.

Carbon removal is emerging as a pillar of governmental and industry commitments toward achieving Net Zero targets. Drawing from 44 focus groups in 22 countries, we map technical and societal issues that a representative sample of publics raise on five major types of carbon removal (forests, soils, direct air capture, enhanced weathering, and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), and how these translate to preferences for governance actors, mechanisms, and rationales. We assess gaps and overlaps between a global range of public perceptions and how carbon removal is currently emerging in assessment, innovation, and decision-making. In conclusion, we outline key societal expectations for informing assessment and policy: prioritize public engagement as more than acceptance research; scrutiny and regulation of industry beyond incentivizing innovation; systemic coordination across sectors, levels, and borders; and prioritize underlying causes of climate change and interrelated governance issues.

Public perceptions and support of climate intervention technologies across the Global North and Global South.

Novel, potentially radical climate intervention technologies like carbon dioxide removal and solar geoengineering are attracting attention as the adverse impacts of climate change are increasingly felt. The ability of publics, particularly in the Global South, to participate in discussions about research, policy, and deployment is restricted amidst a lack of familiarity and engagement. Drawing on a large-scale, cross-country exercise of nationally representative surveys (N = 30,284) in 30 countries and 19 languages, this article establishes the first global baseline of public perceptions of climate-intervention technologies. Here, we show that Global South publics are significantly more favorable about potential benefits and express greater support for climate-intervention technologies. The younger age and level of climate urgency and vulnerability of these publics emerge as key explanatory variables, particularly for solar geoengineering. Conversely, Global South publics express greater concern that climate-intervention technologies could undermine climate-mitigation efforts, and that solar geoengineering could promote an unequal distribution of risks between poor and rich countries.

Actors, legitimacy, and governance challenges facing negative emissions and solar geoengineering technologies.

Institutional theory, behavioral science, sociology and even political science all emphasize the importance of actors in achieving social change. Despite this salience, the actors involved in researching, promoting, or deploying negative emissions and solar geoengineering technologies remain underexplored within the literature. In this study, based on a rigorous sample of semi-structured expert interviews (N = 125), we empirically explore the types of actors and groups associated with both negative emissions and solar geoengineering research and deployment. We investigate emergent knowledge networks and patterns of involvement across space and scale. We examine actors in terms of their support of, opposition to, or ambiguity regarding both types of climate interventions. We reveal incipient and perhaps unforeseen collections of actors; determine which sorts of actors are associated with different technology pathways to comprehend the locations of actor groups and potential patterns of elitism; and assess relative degrees of social acceptance, legitimacy, and governance.

Attention, sentiments and emotions towards emerging climate technologies on Twitter.

Public perception of emerging climate technologies, such as greenhouse gas removal (GGR) and solar radiation management (SRM), will strongly influence their future development and deployment. Studying perceptions of these technologies with traditional survey methods is challenging, because they are largely unknown to the public. Social media data provides a complementary line of evidence by allowing for retrospective analysis of how individuals share their unsolicited opinions. Our large-scale, comparative study of 1.5 million tweets covers 16 GGR and SRM technologies and uses state-of-the-art deep learning models to show how attention, and expressions of sentiment and emotion developed between 2006 and 2021. We find that in recent years, attention has shifted from general geoengineering themes to specific GGR methods. On the other hand, there is little attention to specific SRM technologies and they often coincide with conspiracy narratives. Sentiments and emotions in GGR tweets tend to be more positive, particularly for methods perceived to be natural, but are more negative when framed in the geoengineering context.

The political economy of net-zero transitions: Policy drivers, barriers, and justice benefits to decarbonization in eight carbon-neutral countries.

This study examines the political economy of decarbonization in eight countries over the period 2000 to 2021/2022 that have already achieved a national net-zero transition. These countries are Bhutan, Suriname, Panama, Guyana, Comoros, Gabon, Madagascar, and Niue. It utilizes an analytical method of a rich, interdisciplinary and systematized literature review integrated with thematic analysis. For each of these countries, the study examines the drivers and political motivation behind net-zero progress, including the timeline of events; the barriers and challenges that had to be overcome; and the benefits of decarbonization and its impacts on equity and justice. The main objectives of the study are to broaden the evidence base on low-carbon transitions beyond often and even overstudied countries that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democracies, or WEIRD countries, and to offer new empirical data on the strategy of energy policies in the real world, examining the first eight countries to achieve net-zero success in the modern era. It finds that all eight countries used a similar mix of nine policy interventions involving land use, renewable energy, and waste management. Common barriers included vulnerability to the effects of extreme climate events either in the form of natural disasters (i.e. landslides and floodings) or ecosystems degradation (i.e. ocean acidification, coastal erosion and forests loss). Despite these barriers, achieving net-zero emissions positively impacted marginalized communities by providing a more equitable distribution of climate benefits, mitigating adverse health effects and reducing social inequalities, particularly in low-income areas.

Conspiracy spillovers and geoengineering.

Geoengineering techniques such as solar radiation management (SRM) could be part of a future technology portfolio to limit global temperature change. However, there is public opposition to research and deployment of SRM technologies. We use 814,924 English-language tweets containing #geoengineering globally over 13 years (2009-2021) to explore public emotions, perceptions, and attitudes toward SRM using natural language processing, deep learning, and network analysis. We find that specific conspiracy theories influence public reactions toward geoengineering, especially regarding "chemtrails" (whereby airplanes allegedly spray poison or modify weather through contrails). Furthermore, conspiracies tend to spillover, shaping regional debates in the UK, USA, India, and Sweden and connecting with broader political considerations. We also find that positive emotions rise on both the global and country scales following events related to SRM governance, and negative and neutral emotions increase following SRM projects and announcements of experiments. Finally, we also find that online toxicity shapes the breadth of spillover effects, further influencing anti-SRM views.

Risk-risk governance in a low-carbon future: Exploring institutional, technological, and behavioral tradeoffs in climate geoengineering pathways.

Deliberations are underway to utilize increasingly radical technological options to help address climate change and stabilize the climatic system. Collectively, these options are often referred to as "climate geoengineering." Deployment of such options, however, can create wicked tradeoffs in governance and require adaptive forms of risk management. In this study, we utilize a large and novel set of qualitative expert interview data to more deeply and systematically explore the types of risk-risk tradeoffs that may emerge from the use of 20 different climate geoengineering options, 10 that focus on carbon dioxide or greenhouse gas removal, and 10 that focus on solar radiation management and reflecting sunlight. We specifically consider: What risks does the deployment of these options entail? What types of tradeoffs may emerge through their deployment? We apply a framework that clusters risk-risk tradeoffs into institutional and governance, technological and environmental, and behavioral and temporal dimensions. In doing so, we offer a more complete inventory of risk-risk tradeoffs than those currently available within the respective risk-assessment, energy-systems, and climate-change literatures, and we also point the way toward future research gaps concerning policy, deployment, and risk management.

Harnessing human and machine intelligence for planetary-level climate action.

The ongoing global race for bigger and better artificial intelligence (AI) systems is expected to have a profound societal and environmental impact by altering job markets, disrupting business models, and enabling new governance and societal welfare structures that can affect global consensus for climate action pathways. However, the current AI systems are trained on biased datasets that could destabilize political agencies impacting climate change mitigation and adaptation decisions and compromise social stability, potentially leading to societal tipping events. Thus, the appropriate design of a less biased AI system that reflects both direct and indirect effects on societies and planetary challenges is a question of paramount importance. In this paper, we tackle the question of data-centric knowledge generation for climate action in ways that minimize biased AI. We argue for the need to co-align a less biased AI with an epistemic web on planetary health challenges for more trustworthy decision-making. A human-in-the-loop AI can be designed to align with three goals. First, it can contribute to a planetary epistemic web that supports climate action. Second, it can directly enable mitigation and adaptation interventions through knowledge of social tipping elements. Finally, it can reduce the data injustices associated with AI pretraining datasets.

Decarbonization, population disruption and resource inventories in the global energy transition.

We develop a novel approach to analysing decarbonisation strategies by linking global resource inventories with demographic systems. Our 'mine-town systems' approach establishes an empirical basis for examining the spatial extent of the transition and demographic effects of changing energy systems. The research highlights an urgent need for targeted macro-level planning as global markets see a decline in thermal coal and a ramp up of other mining commodities. Our findings suggest that ramping up energy transition metals (ETM) could be more disruptive to demographic systems than ramping down coal. The data shows asymmetry in the distribution of risks: mine-town systems within the United States are most sensitive to coal phase-out, while systems in Australia and Canada are most sensitive to ETM phase-in. A complete phase-out of coal could disrupt demographic systems with a minimum of 33.5 million people, and another 115.7 million people if all available ETM projects enter production.

Examining the synergies and tradeoffs of net-zero climate protection with the Sustainable Development Goals.

This article discusses and illuminates the synergies and jeopardies or tradeoffs that exist between the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and net-zero or future climate protection options such as greenhouse gas removal (GGR) technologies and solar radiation management (SRM) deployment approaches, respectively. Through a large-scale expert-interview exercise (N = 125), the study finds firstly that numerous synergies and tradeoffs exist between GGR, SRM, and the SDGs. More specifically, we reveal that GGR deployment could enhance the attainment of 16 of the 17 SDGs, but this comes with possible tradeoffs with 12 of the SDGs. SRM deployment could not only enhance the attainment of 16 of the 17 SDGs, but also create possible tradeoffs with (a different) 12 SDGs. The findings further support the understanding of the complexity of SRM and GGR proposals and help policymakers and industrial pioneers understand, navigate, and benchmark between geoengineering approaches using sustainable development goals.

Industrial clusters for deep decarbonization.

Net-zero megaprojects in the UK offer promise and lessons.

Social media enables people-centric climate action in the hard-to-decarbonise building sector.

The building and construction sector accounts for around 39% of global carbon dioxide emissions and remains a hard-to-abate sector. We use a data-driven analysis of global high-level climate action on emissions reduction in the building sector using 256,717 English-language tweets across a 13-year time frame (2009-2021). Using natural language processing and network analysis, we show that public sentiments and emotions on social media are reactive to these climate policy actions. Between 2009-2012, discussions around green building-led emission reduction efforts were highly influential in shaping the online public perceptions of climate action. From 2013 to 2016, communication around low-carbon construction and energy efficiency significantly influenced the online narrative. More significant interactions on net-zero transition, climate tech, circular economy, mass timber housing and climate justice in 2017-2021 shaped the online climate action discourse. We find positive sentiments are more prominent and recurrent and comprise a larger share of the social media conversation. However, we also see a rise in negative sentiment by 30-40% following popular policy events like the IPCC report launches, the Paris Agreement and the EU Green Deal. With greater online engagement and information diffusion, social and environmental justice topics emerge in the online discourse. Continuing such shifts in online climate discourse is pivotal to a more just and people-centric transition in such hard-to-decarbonise sectors.

Determining our climate policy future: expert opinions about negative emissions and solar radiation management pathways.

Negative emissions technologies and solar radiation management techniques could contribute towards climate stability, either by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it permanently or reflecting sunlight away from the atmosphere. Despite concerns about them, such options are increasingly being discussed as crucial complements to traditional climate change mitigation and adaptation. Expectations around negative emissions and solar radiation management and their associated risks and costs shape public and private discussions of how society deals with the climate crisis. In this study, we rely on a large expert survey (N = 74) to critically examine the future potential of both negative emission options (e.g., carbon dioxide removal) and solar radiation management techniques. We designed a survey process that asked a pool of prominent experts questions about (i) the necessity of adopting negative emissions or solar radiation management options, (ii) the desirability of such options when ranked against each other, (iii) estimations of future efficacy in terms of temperature reductions achieved or gigatons of carbon removed, (iv) expectations about future scaling, commercialization, and deployment targets, and (v) potential risks and barriers. Unlike other elicitation processes where experts are more positive or have high expectations about novel options, our results are more critical and cautionary. We find that some options (notably afforestation and reforestation, ecosystem restoration, and soil carbon sequestration) are envisioned frequently as necessary, desirable, feasible, and affordable, with minimal risks and barriers (compared to other options). This contrasts with other options envisaged as unnecessary risky or costly, notably ocean alkalization or fertilization, space-based reflectors, high-altitude sunshades, and albedo management via clouds. Moreover, only the options of afforestation and reforestation and soil carbon sequestration are expected to be widely deployed before 2035, which raise very real concerns about climate and energy policy in the near- to mid-term.

The hidden costs of batteriesCharged James Morton Turner University of Washington Press, 2022. 256 pp.

Clean energy plans must include safer, more sustainable, worker-friendly power storage.

Equity, technological innovation and sustainable behaviour in a low-carbon future.

The world must ambitiously curtail greenhouse gas emissions to achieve climate stability. The literature often supposes that a low-carbon future will depend on a mix of technological innovation-improving the performance of new technologies and systems-as well as more sustainable behaviours such as travelling less or reducing waste. To what extent are low-carbon technologies, and their associated behaviours, currently equitable, and what are potential policy and research implications moving forward? In this Review, we examine how four innovations in technology and behaviour-improved cookstoves and heating, battery electric vehicles, household solar panels and food-sharing-create complications and force trade-offs on different equity dimensions. We draw from these cases to discuss a typology of inequity cutting across demographic (for example, gender, race and class), spatial (for example, urban and rural divides), interspecies (for example, human and non-human) and temporal (for example, future generations) vulnerabilities. Ultimately, the risk of inequity abounds in decarbonization pathways. Moreover, low-carbon innovations are not automatically just, equitable or even green. We show how such technologies and behaviours can both introduce new inequalities and reaffirm existing ones. We then discuss potential policy insights and leverage points to make future interventions more equitable and propose an integrated research agenda to supplement these policy efforts.