It means that researchers who care about openness and transparency might stop their activities, and the ones who continue might be less responsive to public concerns. They will be supported by funders that don't care about public opinion, and we might not hear about all the findings. If we don't succeed in phasing out fossil fuels, authoritarian regimes will be able to take the lead. If international institutions and philanthropies don't provide funds, scientists in developing countries will be less able to participate in research.
Public funding is needed for solar engineering research. This can help make certain things happen. It can allow the design of research programs where social scientists and governance scholars are integrated from the beginning, producing the critical type of interdisciplinary research this topic demands. Public funding can be used to encourage international scientific cooperation. A paper that looked at the impacts of solargeoengineering on crop yields included researchers from Norway, the US, South Korea, and China. We want to continue this kind of cooperation.
National funding agencies can structure research programs to examine the potential risks and benefits in a comprehensive way, making sure to give full attention to everything that could go wrong. Without this systematic approach, what gets published may be a trickle of studies showcasing only the best results. Is it a good study about crop yields? What did it miss? We need more studies, not less, and we need bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to assess them all together.
There is no scientist who is happy about the prospect of solar engineering. We need people who understand the science and governance issues. We may not like the results if we disincentivize people from developing that expertise.
It takes a long time to develop good science. We could find ourselves in a world that has made some progress on the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions, but not enough, if we put off research until the 2030s. We can suddenly hope to produce rigorous science that will help us understand solargeoengineering. The US should follow the recommendations of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee and fund a modest research program now.
Holly Jean Buck is an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo and author of Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough.
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