Majeure Philosophie, Politique, Économie (PPE)

The course offers to investigate questions of direct relevance for the society. It aims at raising the philosophical underpinnings and implications of current social debates (e.g. climate change, happiness and wellbeing, inequality).

For 2024/2025, the focus will be on climate change and engineering. Climate change represents one of the most pressing global challenges. Traditional responses include mitigation (reduction of CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation (protection of populations against specific changes, e.g. by building seawalls, switching to drought-resistant crops). Another response has recently gained traction among some scientists and decision makers: geoengineering or climate engineering, which could be defined as the voluntary alteration of the climate to slow/revert it, or lessen some of its adverse impacts.

While humans have tried throughout history to influence the climate by various means more or less efficient (e.g. rituals, cloud seeding, wildfires), geoengineering has been gaining momentum during the last decade due to the failure of nations to seriously commit to mitigation. Because governments have difficulties to coordinate and agree on sufficient carbon abatement for averting drastic changes, the possibility of modifying the climate through carbon dioxide removal (CDR) or solar radiation management (SRM) has become increasingly attractive.

The course’s aim is to introduce to the challenges caused by climate change and present the main technologies of CDR and SRM. The goal is to reach a fine-grained view of the multiplicity of issues raised by geoengineering techniques. At the end of the seminar, students should be able to:

• -   Understand the major political and ethical dimensions of climate change,
• -   Have a clear comprehension of the various CDR and SRM interventions and explain the differences between them,
•     Critically assess how the benefits, efficacy, risks/uncertainties of each technique,
• -   Present and discuss the key arguments for and against geoengineering research and deployment,
• -   Identify and evaluate the major questions in terms of global governance and justice posed by geoengineering.