Essays on Political Responses to Climate Change Mitigation, Geoengineering, and Adaptation

Abstract

Climate mitigation, geoengineering, and adaptation present humans with new opportunities and challenges. The three essays that comprise this dissertation use diverse methods — a randomized control trial, formal model, and qualitative interviews — to examine how political actors respond to each of these three prongs of climate policy. Chapter 1 examines how affordable solar lanterns alter household behavior and improve the quality of life in rural India. It demonstrates that renewable energy can serve as an effective stopgap for households not yet reached by India’s national electrification campaign. Chapter 2 studies the security implications of solar geoengineering, a novel technology that can reduce global temperatures, and counter-geoengineering that reverses these effects. It shows how the deployment of both technologies may produce an international climate "tug-of-war" over global temperatures. In some settings, the threat of war or wasteful deployment may curtail deployment. Such cooperative equilibria are fragile, as the inability to monitor, detect, or attribute deployment induces countries to divert from agreements. Chapter 3 conducts one of the first political studies of a state climate adaptation program. It aims to fit adaptation into existing political frameworks, finding gaps between theory and qualitative evidence collected from interviews with municipal stakeholders. Collectively, the three essays demonstrate how political science might shed insight on these unexplored developments, and how climate change raises questions that demand more exploration.