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The fact that even a full-scale deployment of stratospheric aerosols seems incredibly cheap goes hand-in-hand with some incredible economics.¹⁵ “Not if, but when” is the logical conclusion. But there’s one more step worth discussing. If it is indeed so cheap and easy, why hasn’t it happened already?

That’s akin to the joke about two Chicago economists walking down the street and spotting a $20 bill on the ground. Turns one to the other: “Hey, why aren’t you picking it up?” Says the other: “It can’t be real. If it were, somebody else would have picked it up already.”

Of course, there are plenty of reasons why markets aren’t – can’t be – as efficient as the simplistic, stereotypical “Chicago-style” economics model might suggest. If they were, there wouldn’t be a need for the very business schools that are the academic homes of many of these economists. Nor would there be a need for the management consultancies staffed by graduates of said schools. The Swedes these days are handing out Nobel Prizes to “behavioral” economists for good reason. I put “behavioral” in quotes because, in the end, it’s just good economics. Making demonstrably false assumptions of perfect “rationality” isn’t. Still, it is worth investigating why solar geoengineering hasn’t yet been deployed, especially since it is so cheap.

In short, there seems to be plenty of sand in the free driver’s gears. The list of possible explanations is long and often very rational. One such explanation is that politicians might fear opposition from deep greens, environmentalists vehemently opposed to the technology. A slightly different flavor of this argument is that pro-solar geoengineering politicians might first want to signal to environmentalists that they are committed to decarbonization. Or, to up the rationality ante even further, politicians might want to pursue solar geoengineering, but they fear that it cannot be effectively governed at the international level – always a good assumption – and, hence, shy away.

All of these explanations are consistent with the apparent conundrum of too little action. They have all appeared in peer-reviewed solar geoengineering literature, my own academic writings included.¹⁶ They might all just be one too rational. It’s not as though the free-driver hypothesis states that solar geoengineering happens instantaneously and automatically. That’s taking the “rational” Chicago-style explanation quite a bit too literally.

No, Mikhail Budyko, when introducing the idea of stratospheric aerosol injection in 1974, should not have led to it right then and there, nor should have the English translation of his book in 1977.¹⁷ Paul Crutzen and Ralph Cicerone might have lifted the self-imposed moratorium among researchers in 2006, leading to an exponential increase in research interest and publications but, over a decade later, direct global research funding on the topic is still at most around $20 million per year.¹⁸ That compares to the U.S. government alone spending over $2 billion on overall climate science research.¹⁹ It is still early days in solar geoengineering research. Uncertainties abound.

It’s similarly clear that it would take many years, perhaps decades, to see anything close to a comprehensive deployment program in action – even when somebody somewhere decides to pull the trigger.