International Climate Agreements under The Threat of Solar Geoengineering

David McEvoy, Matthew McGinty, Todd Cherry and Stephan Kroll

No 23-36, RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: The possibility of overshooting global emissions targets has triggered a public debate about the role solar geoengineering (SGE) - using technologies to reflect solar radiation away from Earth - may play in managing climate change. One major concern is that SGE technologies are relatively cheap, and could potentially be deployed by a single nation (the “free driver”) that could effectively control the global climate. Another concern is that SGE opportunities may alter countries’ incentives to cooperate on abatement. Here we develop a game-theoretic model to analyze how opportunities to deploy SGE impact global abatement and the effectiveness of international environmental agreements (IEAs) on climate change. We show that non-cooperative abatement levels may increase or decrease under the threat of SGE, depending on how damaging the free-driver’s level of deployment is on others. We also show the stability of IEAs that govern abatement is challenged by two competing strategic incentives. One is a familiar free-rider incentive, which is the benefit a country earns by leaving an agreement and lowering its abatement. The other incentive is the benefit a country earns by joining an agreement and increasing abatement in order to motivate the free-driver to reduce its level of deployment. We introduce the term anti-driver to describe this second incentive. Ultimately, we find that if the anti-driver incentives are high enough, the threat of SGE can expand both the depth (i.e., abatement level) and breadth (i.e., participation level) of stable IEAs compared to a world without SGE.

Date: 2023-09-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-gth and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rff.org/documents/4125/WP_23-36.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: International Climate Agreements under the Threat of Solar Geoengineering (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-23-36

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Resources for the Future ().