The Non-Linearity of Cascades and Feedbacks Between The Biosphere and Society: Risk Ethics for a Climate Change Technofix

In light of the hysteresis and acceleration of the climate crisis, climate overshoot has only recently been acknowledged as inevitable. As the IPCC belatedly reports, current pledges are not even remotely on track to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (Anderson 2015, IPCC 2018). Further, no amount of future emissions reductions can suffice to avert climate overshoot. Hence, this presentation critically analyses the proposition that a climate change technofix – namely Negative Emission Technologies (NETs) – is the only potentially efficacious means to avert runaway climate change (Carton 2020, Reynolds 2015).

However, not only is the efficacy of NETs to reduce sufficient greenhouse gas concentrations highly dubious, but any such technofix requires gambling on a host of unknown unknowns – namely, the inexorable complexity of the Earth System, coupled with planetary-scale interventions in the crisis. Therein, this presentation explores the linkages between extreme climate and societal dynamics surrounding risk, offering a theoretical study from the fields of social sciences and humanities as to the non-linearity of cascades and feedbacks between the biosphere and society.

To do so, I put forth a critique of how normative ethics remains anchored in rigid positions of anachronistic risk aversion, given how any attempted climate technofix entails unprecedented realms of risk and uncertainty. Using the frameworks of the Environmental Humanities, and Science & Technology Studies, I critically engage with the risk ethics of imminent climate overshoot, in relation to the interventionist gambles proposed by NETs through Synthetic Biology and Climate Engineering. Given the scale of the unknown unknowns unleashed by the Anthropocene, I present gambling as the most apt analogy for both the absurdity (and denied imminence) of the existential predicament, as well as the sheer improbability that any technofix can be invented in a sufficiently short time and implemented on a sufficiently large scale.

Given the profound social, cultural and ethical dimensions that this entails, discussion will include an overview of outreach activities I have undertaken as a Chief Investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence in Synthetic Biology, including the At Risk in the Climate Crisis symposium and podcast series that I co-produced in 2021-22. Overall, in the context of the rapidly diminishing prospect for any efficacious environmental action, the presentation contemplates the unthinkable questions that our current situation demands we ask, and perhaps even try to answer.