The Dark Sun Network

Climate scientists agree that climate change will soon require the deployment of a highly dangerous geoengineering approach known as “solar radiation management.” Solar radiation management uses chemical or physical barriers to solar energy entering the atmosphere and thereby forces global temperatures downwards almost immediately by creating “artificial shade.” Problematically, the unilateral deployment of domestic solar radiation management approaches can have different and potentially devastating effects around the world, even if they help the country deploying the approach to limit the worst climate change consequences at home. So far, there is no global governance framework that can guide the development and deployment of solar radiation management. In this Article, I develop how a networked, bottom-up governance approach can resolve the current solar radiation management global governance deadlock. I argue that such bottom-up governance must be consistent with principles of nondomination developed in civic republican and postcolonial theories of consent.

I submit that the most promising way to jumpstart such a network is to lean into what appears to many as U.S. unilateralism. I argue that U.S. environmental law provides a ready model for global bottom-up solar radiation management governance coordination and collaboration in the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act. Centrally, the Dark Sun Network provides a realistic and meaningful governance approach that can be scaled up immediately on the basis of existing law.