Doubling Down on Emissions Reductions

Abstract Especially in the public discourse, there seems to be a tendency to focus not on mitigation, but on the supplementary interventions – adaptation, negative emissions technologies, and solar radiation management – to tackle climate change. Arguably, this elicits a moral hazard, whereby reliance on the supplementary interventions results in mitigation deterrence. In this paper, I will argue that we should double down on urgent and ambitious emissions reductions to minimise our reliance on adaptation; reserve NETs for covering the most-difficult-to-abate and legacy emissions; and avoid SRM (or, in the worst case, minimise our reliance on it as a fallback). The reasons for this are that there are severe constraints to the potential of the supplementary interventions, and reliance on them results in a transfer of risks from today’s affluent decision-makers to poor, vulnerable, and future people, as well as non-human nature. I will take a fresh look at the moral hazard argument and argue that, interpreted as a structural process, it can be traced back to the dominant liberal-capitalist worldview: while ambitious decarbonisation challenges materialistic freedoms and the vested interests in a fossil-fuel based economy, the supplementary climate interventions leave the liberal-capitalist worldview virtually unchallenged. Finally, I highlight the large untapped potential of mitigation options and indicate areas for further research regarding mitigation. We should be aware that some mitigation options can also result in risk transfers, but these are not inherent to mitigation – in contrast to the supplementary interventions – and can thus be avoided.