Wil Burns, Co-​​Director, Forum for Cli­mate Engi­neer­ing Assessment

RAEL Lab Meeting

12:00 pm, 15 April 2015

310 Bar­rows Hall, Room 323

—Wednes­day—

While geo­engi­neer­ing was once con­sid­ered to be “taboo” in the forum of cli­mate change pol­i­cy­mak­ing, the increas­ing des­per­a­tion engen­dered by the specter of pass­ing crit­i­cal tem­per­a­ture thresh­olds has led to increas­ing inter­est in the approach, includ­ing by key stake­hold­ers. Even Pres­i­dent Obama’s chief sci­ence advi­sor has indi­cated that geo­engi­neer­ing should “not be taken off the table” as a poten­tial com­po­nent of cli­mate pol­i­cy­mak­ing. The pur­pose of this pre­sen­ta­tion will be to assess the poten­tial ben­e­fits of cli­mate geo­engi­neer­ing, as well as poten­tial neg­a­tive impacts. More­over, the pre­sen­ta­tion will dis­cuss gov­er­nance issues, includ­ing per­ti­nent inter­na­tional treaty regimes, the con­tours of a poten­tial frame­work for lia­bil­ity for poten­tial neg­a­tive impacts.

Wil Burns cur­rently serves as the Co-​​Director of the Forum for Cli­mate Engi­neer­ing Assess­ment, a schol­arly ini­tia­tive of the School of Inter­na­tional Ser­vice at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity. He pre­vi­ously served as Direc­tor of the Energy Pol­icy & Cli­mate pro­gram at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity and has taught also at Tulane University’s School of Law, Colby Col­lege and Williams Col­lege. He holds a Ph.D. in Inter­na­tional Law from the Uni­ver­sity of Wales-​​Cardiff School of Law.