Summary/Abstract
Many geoengineering projects have been proposed to address climate change, including both solar radiation management and carbon removal techniques. Some of these methods would introduce additional com- pounds into the atmosphere or the ocean. This poses a difficult conundrum: Is it permissible to remediate one pollutant by introducing a second pollutant into a system that has already been damaged, threatened, or altered? This paper frames this conundrum as the ‘‘Problem of Permissible Pollution.’’The paper explores the problem by taking up ocean fertilization and advancing an argument that rests on three moral claims. First, the authors observe that pollution is, in many respects, a context-dependent matter. This observation leads to an argument for a ‘‘justifiability criterion.’’ Second, the authors suggest that remediating actions must take into account the antecedent conditions that have given rise to their consideration. The authors call this second observation the ‘‘antecedent conditions criterion.’’ Finally, the authors observe that ocean fertilization, and other related geoengineering technologies, propose not strictly to clean up carbon emissions, but actually to move the universe to some future, unknown state. Given the introduced criteria, the authors impose a ‘‘future-state constraint’’. The paper concludes that ocean fertilization is not an acceptable solution for mitigating climate change. In attempting to shift the universe to a future state (a) geoengineering sidelines consideration of the antecedent conditions that have given rise to conditions that in many cases involve unjustified carbon emissions –and (b) it must appeal to an impossibly large set of affected parties.