Making informed future decisions about solar radiation modification (SRM; also known as solar geoengineering)-approaches such as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) that would cool the climate by reflecting sunlight-requires projections of the climate response and associated human and ecosystem impacts. These projections, in turn, will rely on simulations with global climate models. As with climate-change projections, these simulations need to adequately span a range of possible futures, describing different choices, such as start date and temperature target, as well as risks, such as termination or interruptions. SRM modeling simulations to date typically consider only a single scenario, often with some unrealistic or arbitrarily chosen elements (such as starting deployment in 2020), and have often been chosen based on scientific rather than policy-relevant considerations (e.g., choosing quite substantial cooling specifically to achieve a bigger response). This limits the ability to compare risks both between SRM and non-SRM scenarios and between different SRM scenarios. To address this gap, we begin by outlining some general considerations on scenario design for SRM. We then describe a specific set of scenarios to capture a range of possible policy choices and uncertainties and present corresponding SAI simulations intended for broad community use.

As the climate crisis intensifies, there is growing interest in policies that might supplement emissions reduction and adaptation, such as carbon removal systems and solar radiation modification. One newly prominent class of proposed interventions, which we call radical adaptation, would aim to stabilize Antarctic ice sheets, the loss of which threatens significant sea-level rise worldwide. Ice-sheet stabilization does not fit neatly within the conventional taxonomy of climate responses. Like adaptation, it would target the consequences of climate change, not the causes. But it would do so through spatially concentrated, high-leverage developments to reduce harms worldwide, rather than by separate actions in thousands of threatened coastal regions. These interventions further would have to be researched, assessed, and executed in the unique geopolitical, legal, and administrative context of Antarctica.This Article examines how radical adaptation might interact with the governance and geopolitics of the Antarctic Treaty System. It argues that early research into ice-sheet stabilization could readily proceed under the present system. Operational deployment would require substantial governance changes, but these may be less extreme than they initially appear and may even benefit Antarctic governance more broadly. Researching and developing ice-sheet stabilization could provide an avenue to sustain the System’s core values of peace, science, and environmental protection, while also strengthening its global legitimacy. The governance challenges under the Antarctic Treaty System are substantial, but they are ultimately surmountable.

Author(s): Parson, Edward A. | Abstract: One of the fundamental critiques against twentieth century experiments in central economic planning, and the main reason for their failures, was the inability of humandirected planning systems to manage the data gathering, analysis, computation, and control necessary to direct the vast complexity of production, allocation, and exchange decisions that make up a modern economy. Rapid recent advances in AI, data, and related technological capabilities have re-opened that old question, and provoked vigorous speculation about the feasibility, benefits, and threats of an AI-directed economy. This paper presents a thought experiment about how this might work, based on assuming a powerful AI agent (whimsically named “Max”) with no binding computational or algorithmic limits on its (his) ability to do the task. The paper’s novel contribution is to make this hitherto under-specified question more concrete and specific. It reasons concretely through how such a system might work under explicit assumptions about contextual conditions; what benefits it might offer relative to present market and mixed-market arrangements; what novel requirements or constraints it would present; what threats and challenges it would pose, and how it inflects long-standing understandings of foundational questions about state, society, and human liberty.As with smaller-scale regulatory interventions, the concrete implementation of comprehensive central planning can be abstracted as intervening via controlling either quantities or prices. The paper argues that quantity-based approaches would be fundamentally impaired by problems of principal-agent relations and incentives, which hobbled historical planning systems and would persist under arbitrary computational advances. Price-based approaches, as proposed by Oskar Lange, do not necessarily suffer from the same disabilities. More promising than either, however, would be a variant in which Max manages a comprehensive system of price modifications added to emergent market outcomes, equivalent to a comprehensive economy-wide system of Pigovian taxes and subsidies. Such a system, “Pigovian Max,” could in principle realize the information efficiency benefits and liberty interests of decentralized market outcomes, while also comprehensively correcting externalities and controlling inefficient concentration of market power and associated rent-seeking behavior. It could also, under certain additional assumptions, offer the prospect of taxation without deadweight loss, by taking all taxes from inframarginal rents.Having outlined the basic approach and these potential benefits, the paper discusses several challenges and potential risks presented by such a system. These include Max’s need for data and the potential costs of providing it; the granularity or aggregation of Max’s determinations; the problem of maintaining variety and innovation in an economy directed by Max; the implications of Max for the welfare of human workers, the meaning and extent of property rights, and associated liberty interests; the definition of social welfare that determines Max’s objective function, its compatibility with democratic control, and the resultant stability of the boundary between the state and the economy; and finally, the relationship of Max to AI-enabled trends already underway, with implications for the feasibility of Max being developed and adopted, and the associated risks. In view of the depth and difficulty of these questions, the discussion of each is necessarily preliminary and speculative.

Author(s): Parson, Edward; Re, Richard; Solow-Niederman, Alicia; Zeide, Elana | Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly various methods of machine learning (ML), has achieved landmark advances over the past few years in applications as diverse as playing complex games, language processing, speech recognition and synthesis, image identification, and facial recognition. These breakthroughs have brought a surge of popular, journalistic, and policy attention to the field, including both excitement about anticipated advances and the benefits they promise, and concern about societal impacts and risks – potentially arising through whatever combination of accident, malicious or reckless use, or just social and political disruption from the scale and rapidity of change.

For the last several years, California has considered the idea of recognizing, within its greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program, offsets generated by foreign states and provinces through reduced tropical forest destruction and degradation and related conservation and sustainability efforts, known as REDD . During their deliberations on the issue, state policymakers have heard arguments from stakeholders in favor of crediting REDD offsets, and those against. After years of planning and cooperative efforts undertaken with states in Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere, California is still determining whether to embrace REDD offsets. The most salient and potentially persuasive arguments in favor stem from the opportunity to influence and reduce international forest-related emissions contributing to climate change, while simultaneously reducing the costs imposed by the state’s climate change law. The state is still grappling, however, with serious questions about the effectiveness of REDD in addressing climate change, as well as the impacts of REDD on other social and environmental objectives. The suitability of the state’s cap-and-trade program as a tool for reducing emissions outside the state, given the co-benefits that accrue to local communities from in-state reductions, remains another key area of debate. The outcome of this policy discussion will depend on interrelated questions of program design, future offset supply and demand, and the weight given to the importance of prioritizing in-state emissions reductions and co-benefits.

Whether regulating mutual funds or chemical manufacturers, government's policy decisions depend on information possessed by industry. But it is not in any industry's interests to share information that will lead to costly regulations. So how do government regulators secure needed information from industry? Since information disclosed by any firm cannot be retrieved and can be used to regulate the entire sector, industry faces a collective action problem in maintaining silence. While collective silence is easy to maintain if all firms' interests are aligned, their payoffs for disclosure can vary due to heterogeneous effects of regulation and heterogeneous beliefs about the regulator's expected actions with or without any given information. The regulator's strategy is therefore to resist or break down industry's collective silence, either by (1) exploiting asymmetries in firms' interests in disclosure, or (2) selectively rewarding or punishing individual firms to create incentives for disclosure. Both of these strategies work best when pursued informally, in less visible ways, since other firms can be expected to inflict retribution on any squealer. Although informal relationships have been long deplored due to the risk of regulatory bias or capture, our analysis shows how they can be beneficial to government in playing the information game. This has important implications for regulatory procedure. Since total transparency would detract from government's ability to secure valuable information, administrative law needs to balance between the competing needs of transparency to prevent abuse and opacity to facilitate information exchange.

The last several years have witnessed a significant evolution in what society wants to know about global environmental risks such as climate change, ozone depletion, and biodiversity loss. Until recently, most scientific assessments of such risks focused on the anatomy of conceivable environmental changes themselves, while devoting relatively little attention to the ecosystems and societies the changes might endanger. Recently, however, questions about the vulnerability of social and ecological systems are emerging as a central focus of policy-driven assessments of global environmental risks. Meeting the growing demand for a deeper and more useful understanding of vulnerability to global change will require a dual strategy in which initiatives targeted on immediate assessment needs and research opportunities complement and feed into a longer term program for enhancing relevant knowledge bases …

Recent work in carbon management (CM)--the separation and sequestration of carbon from fossil-fuel combustion to reduce atmospheric COemissions--has raised estimates of sequestration capacities and lowered estimates of costs, so that CM may offer substantial abatement possibilities more cheaply than nonfossil energy. CM9s seeming technological and economic attractiveness has major implications for the political economy of abatement and the design of abatement policies. CM also carries novel environmental risks and raises serious intergenerational equity issues, which urgently require assessment.

Annals of the New York Academy of SciencesVolume 790, Issue 1 p. 201-210 Comments by Review Panel ANTONIA BRYSON, ANTONIA BRYSON Deputy Commissioner, New York City Department of Environmental Protection 59-17 Junction Boulevard Corona, New York 11368-5107Search for more papers by this authorJEANNE FOX, JEANNE FOX Regional Administrator U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 226 Federal Plaza New York, New York 10278Search for more papers by this authorPHILIP JESSUP, PHILIP JESSUP International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives City Hall, East Tower, 8th Floor Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5H 2N2Search for more papers by this authorRITA MEYNINGER, RITA MEYNINGER Regional Director Federal Emergency Management Agency 26 Federal Plaza, Room 1337 New York, New York 10278Search for more papers by this authorEDWARD A. PARSON, EDWARD A. PARSON Department of Public Policy John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University 79 JFK Street Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138Search for more papers by this authorRAYMOND R. RUGGIERI, RAYMOND R. RUGGIERI Director, New York Metropolitan Transportation Council One World Trade Center, Suite 82E New York, New York 10048Search for more papers by this author ANTONIA BRYSON, ANTONIA BRYSON Deputy Commissioner, New York City Department of Environmental Protection 59-17 Junction Boulevard Corona, New York 11368-5107Search for more papers by this authorJEANNE FOX, JEANNE FOX Regional Administrator U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 226 Federal Plaza New York, New York 10278Search for more papers by this authorPHILIP JESSUP, PHILIP JESSUP International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives City Hall, East Tower, 8th Floor Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5H 2N2Search for more papers by this authorRITA MEYNINGER, RITA MEYNINGER Regional Director Federal Emergency Management Agency 26 Federal Plaza, Room 1337 New York, New York 10278Search for more papers by this authorEDWARD A. PARSON, EDWARD A. PARSON Department of Public Policy John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University 79 JFK Street Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138Search for more papers by this authorRAYMOND R. RUGGIERI, RAYMOND R. RUGGIERI Director, New York Metropolitan Transportation Council One World Trade Center, Suite 82E New York, New York 10048Search for more papers by this author First published: June 1996 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1996.tb32482.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume790, Issue1The Baked Apple?June 1996Pages 201-210 RelatedInformation

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