Solar geoengineering may lead to excessive cooling and high strategic uncertainty

Climate engineering-the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the Earth's climate system-is a set of technologies for reducing climate-change impacts and risks. It is controversial and raises novel governance challenges [T. C. Schelling, Climatic Change, 33, 303-307 (1996); J. Virgoe, Climatic Change, 95, 103-119 (2008)]. We focus on the strategic implications of solar geoengineering. When countries engineer the climate, conflict can arise because different countries might prefer different temperatures. This would result in too much geoengineering: the country with the highest preference for geoengineering cools the planet beyond what is socially optimal at the expense of the others-a theoretical possibility termed "free-driving" [M. L. Weitzman, Scand. J. Econ., 117, 1049-1068 (2015)]. This study is an empirical test of this hypothesis. We carry out an economic laboratory experiment based on a public "good or bad" game. We find compelling evidence of free-driving: global geoengineering exceeds the socially efficient level and leads to welfare losses. We also evaluate the possibility of counteracting the geoengineering efforts of others. Results show that countergeoengineering generates high payoff inequality as well as heavy welfare losses, resulting from both strategic and behavioral factors. Finally, we compare strategic behavior in bilateral and multilateral settings. We find that welfare deteriorates even more under multilateralism when countergeoengineering is a possibility. These results have general implications for governing global good or bad commons

Prioritizing interdependent production processes using leontief input-output model

This paper proposes a methodology in identifying key production processes in an interdependent production system. Previous approaches on this domain have drawbacks that may potentially affect the reliability of decision-making. The proposed approach adopts the Leontief input-output model (L-IOM) which was proven successful in analyzing interdependent economic systems. The motivation behind such adoption lies in the strength of L-IOM in providing a rigorous quantitative framework in identifying key components of interdependent systems. In this proposed approach, the consumption and production flows of each process are represented respectively by the material inventory produced by the prior process and the material inventory produced by the current process, both in monetary values. A case study in a furniture production system located in central Philippines was carried out to elucidate the proposed approach. Results of the case were reported in this work