Full Title: Climate Change, Climate Engineering R&D
Author(s): Lee Lane and James Eric Bickel
Publisher(s): Copenhagen Consensus Center
Publication Date: May 1, 2012
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
This paper seeks to answer a question that has been posed as part of the Copenhagen Consensus 2012 (CC12) exploration of global policy. That question is:
“If the global community wants to spend up to, say, $75 billion over the next four years to do most good for the world, which solutions would yield the greatest net benefits?”
To address this question, we agreed to update our Copenhagen Consensus 2009 (CC09) paper (Bickel and Lane 2010), hereafter BL10. That paper estimated the net benefit of a research and development (R&D) program to explore the safety and efficacy of climate engineering (CE). The current paper extends those estimates. BL10 considered two different CE approaches, solar radiation management (SRM) and air capture. In this paper, however, we restrict our attention to SRM. The paper is intended to be self-contained. The interested reader will, however, find many supporting details and further discussion in BL10.