Dr Wouter Peeters, Associate Professor of Global Ethics, warns of the moral hazard of relying on technology to fix the climate rather than decarbonisation.
When people talk about climate solutions today, the conversation is no longer just about cutting emissions. Instead, we hear more and more about adapting to climate change, removing carbon from the atmosphere, or even engineering the climate to cool the planet. These ideas can sound innovative and reassuring – but are they safe substitutes for reducing emissions?
Unfortunately, they are not. The truth is simple but uncomfortable: there is no realistic or just alternative to rapid and deep emissions reductions. Treating other climate responses as replacements for mitigation creates serious risks – especially for vulnerable people and future generations.
Progress on climate change has been slow in the previous decades. Too slow. Because of this, attention in climate policy and the public debate is shifting toward adaptation (living with climate impacts), negative emissions technologies (which remove carbon from the atmosphere), and even solar radiation management (reflecting sunlight to cool the Earth).
However, this shift is a dangerous distraction. It makes climate failure seem inevitable – and once we assume failure, we start planning for it instead of preventing it. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more we rely on backup plans, the weaker our commitment to cutting emissions may become. We will need these backup plans, but we should make sure to keep our reliance on them as low as possible by rapidly and deeply cutting emissions.
Each of the climate responses has serious limits:
Adaptation is necessary, because some climate change is already unavoidable. But it cannot protect us from all harms. As global warming is increasing, the impacts will become larger, and we simply won’t be able to adapt to all of these. Worse, adaptation shifts responsibility from polluters to victims, forcing those who did the least to cause the problem to carry the costs of living with it.
Negative emissions technologies are often presented as future saviours. But they require enormous land, energy, and water resources and are very unlikely to work at the scale needed. Betting on them allows today’s leaders to delay climate action while pushing technological risks onto future generations.
Solar radiation management is even riskier. It could cool the planet temporarily, but it would not fix ocean acidification and could disrupt rainfall and ecosystems in unpredictable ways. It would also not reduce the buildup of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Therefore, it would require permanent maintenance: stopping could cause rapid and catastrophic warming. It also raises huge governance questions: who controls the global thermostat?
The real danger is not that people become lazy because they believe in technology. It’s that political and economic systems prefer solutions that don’t challenge fossil fuel use or consumption. Technologies that promise to fix the climate without changing lifestyles or power structures are politically attractive – even if they are unreliable, unfeasible or unjust.
This creates a structural moral hazard and the self-fulfilling prophecy mentioned above: overreliance on the backup plans may decrease our commitment to decarbonisation, which in turn will require us to rely more on the backup plans. Especially important is that this would transfer the risks from today’s rich and polluting decision-makers and onto the global poor, future generations, and non-human nature, who are not responsible for causing climate change and do not have any say in today’s decision-making.
Cutting emissions is not risk-free. Poorly planned renewable energy projects can harm communities or ecosystems. For example, mining for minerals needed in batteries could harm the local environment and local communities. Rapid transitions can also burden poorer households. But these harms are not inherent to mitigation – they depend on how policies are designed. Unlike the risks of the backup plans, the risks of certain mitigation strategies can be anticipated, regulated, and corrected.
There are also massive, untapped opportunities which are feasible today, such as reducing energy demand, improving efficiency, changing transport and food systems, and scaling renewable energy.
The bottom line is that there is no responsible Plan B that replaces rapid and deep decarbonisation. Adaptation, negative emissions technologies, and solar radiation management may play limited supporting roles – but relying too much on them instead of reducing emissions is risky, unjust, and dangerous in the long run.
Climate failure is not inevitable. It is a political choice. And the safest, fairest choice we still have is to double down on emissions reductions now.
Read Dr Peeters' policy paper on the need to double down on emissions reductions.
Associate Professor in Global Ethics
Biographical and contact information for Dr Wouter Peeters, Associate Professor in Global Ethics, Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham.
