Licence to chill Building a legitimate authorisation process for commercial SRM operations

• Published in: Environmental law review Vol. 18; no. 1; pp. 25 - 40
• Main Author: Lockley, Andrew
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01-03-2016
• Subjects: Solar Radiation Management; carbon credits; Geoengineering; voluntary carbon market; voluntary carbon offsets
• ISSN: 1461-4529; 1740-5564
• DOI: 10.1177/1461452916630082

Solar Radiation Management (SRM) has been suggested as a technique to counteract some of the changes expected as a result of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).1 It has been suggested2 that SRM could be carried out by commercially motivated actors. This process has been envisaged as using the Voluntary Carbon Offset (VCO) market as a mechanism for monetising the SRM process, due to the secondary effects of SRM on the carbon cycle.3 Current VCO customers are typically businesses: those looking to be ‘carbon neutral’ or reselling offsets alongside high-carbon goods and services (for example, airlines). Other potential VCO customers include states, or philanthropists. In this short scoping paper we provide a broad overview the issues of regulation and legitimacy, as may be applicable to the activities of future commercial SRM actors. We discuss the need for a two-pronged regulatory approach, encompassing first legal and corporate regulation and second, scientific and technical regulation. In conclusion, we identify differing regulatory requirements, according to whether the intended effect on the climate system of the SRM industry, or of individual firms, can be regarded as de minimis. We additionally suggest the use of a two-tier marketplace structure in order to ensure regulatory demands can be efficiently and transparently enacted.