Anticipating Possible Moral Hazards Undermines Climate Change Mitigation

• In Event: Climate Change Politics: The View from Junior Scholars

Abstract

While geoengineering will likely be necessary to prevent major climate change related damages, it will only be successful if used in conjunction with other mitigation efforts. However, geoengineering is often touted as a total solution to the climate change problem. This creates a potential for a “moral hazard”: If citizens think that moon-shot geoengineering efforts will fix the problem, there is little incentive for them to support more piecemeal (but still necessary) mitigation efforts. While a large body of work has raised concerns about the possibility of moral hazard caused by geoengineering, experimental studies have failed to find behavioral evidence that people engage in a moral hazard in response to geoengineering. Here, we created a series of economic games where players in groups have to stop a simulated, oncoming climate disaster. One player takes the role of “policymaker,” and decides whether to implement geoengineering. The rest take the role of “citizens” who decide how much to contribute to more piecemeal mitigation efforts. We extend existing research first by replicating that people do not decrease their support for other climate change mitigation strategies in response to the use of geoengineering. Second, we show that people are concerned that others will engage in moral hazard, and when taking the role of policymakers, they preemptively do not use geoengineering to avoid this possibility. Taken together, our results show that moral hazard anticipation undermines climate change mitigation, rather than the moral hazard itself.

Authors

• Talbot M Andrews, University of Connecticut

• Andrew Delton, Stony Brook University

• Reuben Kline, SUNY, Stony Brook University