Thinking Well About Solar Geoengineering

Solar Geoengineering Research Program Seminar featuring: Britta Clark, Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program

Debates about solar geoengineering often move quickly to questions about whether the technology should be researched or eventually deployed. But those questions cannot be answered adequately if they are poorly framed. In this talk, Britta Clark, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program, will examine several recurring errors in public and academic discussions of solar geoengineering. By bringing these errors into view, she aims to clear the way for a more precise, productive, and honest debate over the role of solar geoengineering in the energy transition.

Britta Clark is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program. In Fall 2026, she will join the philosophy department at Texas A&M as an Assistant Professor. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 2025. Before that, she received a master’s degree from the University of Otago in New Zealand, supported by a Fulbright research fellowship. Before that, she graduated from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Her research focuses on a range of ethical and political questions raised by the climate crisis. In particular, she is interested in what role, if any, technologies such as carbon removal and solar geoengineering should play in the energy transition. Making progress on this question requires understanding—and often intervening in—longstanding debates about efficiency, economic growth, burden-sharing, and non-ideal theory.