Humans won't change their behaviors

The argument

This argument rests on an observation about revealed behaviour rather than about stated intent. Though people and governments have known about the negative consequences of climate change for decades, they have been reluctant to significantly alter their behaviours in ways that will avert climate catastrophes. Decades is long enough for the information problem to have been solved; what has not changed is the conduct. If awareness were the binding constraint, the pattern would already have broken. The evidence offered is the gap between commitment and result. Countries have signed agreements on climate change, such as the Paris Climate Accord, and global emissions are still on the rise. Signing, on this reading, is the cheap part: it costs a government nothing at the moment of signature, whereas the behaviour that would deliver on it is continuous, distributed and individually inconvenient. Significantly decreasing emissions would require massive lifestyle changes, ranging from how we travel around a city, to the food we eat, and how we power our homes — that is, changes to daily habits held by billions of people, each of whom bears the cost personally while the benefit is shared globally and arrives decades later. For that reason the argument holds that it is simply not feasible to expect people to enact those changes in time, especially when considering global trends, and that it is unrealistic to assume behaviour will shift quickly enough and dramatically enough to avert catastrophe. The conclusion is not that emissions reduction is unnecessary but that it is too slow to be relied on alone. Hence the case for geoengineering. Artificially reshaping the climate system would buy us a few decades at a reasonably inexpensive cost, which would allow a slower and more reasonably paced transition to clean energy. Geoengineering is presented here not as a substitute for cutting carbon but as the purchase of the time that cutting carbon evidently requires.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Geoengineering solutions provide people with an easy way out of climate change, so they could ultimately be detrimental to the goal of reducing carbon emissions and changing lifestyles. People are already slow to alter their behaviors in ways that could reduce the effects of climate change, and they are not alarmed about the potential consequences of climate change. Introducing geoengineering as a way to solve climate change would reduce the incentive to alter behavior, which is what really needs to happen to solve climate change.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Rising global emissions do not show that behaviour is fixed, since the trend is an aggregate over countries moving in opposite directions — several have cut emissions substantially while others grow — so what the premise reads as an unchangeable human trait is a distribution of policy outcomes. [Rejecting P2] The comparison is also mis-specified: solar geoengineering masks warming without touching the carbon concentration, so it leaves ocean acidification untouched and commits whoever begins it to continuing indefinitely, since stopping releases the suppressed warming at once — and "reasonably inexpensive" prices the deployment rather than the governance, monitoring and consequences that make it hard.