After Geoengineering
Page 4
Critical theorist McKenzie Wark asks: “We think within a metaphysical construct in which capital has some eternal inner essence, and only its forms of appearance ever change … But what if the whole of capitalism had mutated into something else?”13 Wark speculates on the emergence of what he calls the “vectoralist” class, a new postcapitalist ruling class that owns and controls the means of producing information: the vectors. This is actually worse than capitalism, Wark argues, because the information vector can render everything on the planet a resource.
So what does all this mean for geoengineering? If capitalism is focused on vectoral control and ineffective when it comes to ensuring the material conditions of its own existence, solar geoengineering would be done by states or not at all. As for carbon removal, the question is this: If zombified neoliberal capitalism isn’t going to build up CCS and carbon removal in order to save itself from planetary crisis, who’s going to do it?
We, the workers and voters, will have to decide to force the removal of carbon from the atmosphere. And we should—those of us living in the global North, in particular. A whole host of commonly accepted moral principles align with carbon removal: “clean up your own mess,” “the polluter pays,” the “precautionary principle,” and others. Moreover, doing carbon removal in a socially just and environmentally rigorous manner is not just morally desirable—it is actually a precondition for emissions going net negative.
There are basically two levels to carbon removal, as I see it. Level 1 involves niche, boutique, aesthetic, or symbolic removals. This is the biochar at your farmer’s market, the wool beanie grown with regeneratively grazed sheep, the shoes made with recycled carbon, water carbonated by Coca-Cola with carbon captured directly from the air. It is cool. Advocates see it as the first step toward reaching Level 2. You don’t want to knock its fragile emergence, because it’s important for generating momentum and raising awareness of carbon removal. But it’s geophysically impossible that it will “solve” climate change.
Level 2 is the gigaton-scale removals that could actually lower greenhouse gas concentrations. Call it “climate significant.” It’s waste cleanup; pollution disposal.
How does one get from Level 1 to Level 2? Some people think it will naturally happen, just as cleantech—renewable energy—“naturally” becomes cheaper and scales. But unlike cleantech, Level 2 is a cleanup operation; in general, these scales of storage and disposal don’t generate usable products. I asked Noah Deich, executive director of the nonprofit Carbon180, about these middle-range pathways from demonstration to disposal scales, because his organization has done significant work articulating policy proposals for carbon removal. In the near term, Deich sees a threefold approach, or a “stool with three legs.” One is moonshot research and development across the technology and land sectors. The second is supporting entrepreneurs to bring promising ideas to market. Lastly, he notes, “we need to change policy so that there’s sufficient funding for the research and development, but there are also large-scale markets, so that those entrepreneurs and those land managers can access those markets at a meaningful scale.” The near-term actions he identifies include engagement of universities in research and development, starting up an incubator for carbon tech, and policy work such as implementation of tax credits for CCS and the inclusion of carbon farming in the US farm bill.
When I remarked that the middle time frame seemed fuzzy, Deich replied, “The middle part will remain fuzzy, because I think it’s iterative.” You get started with technology in existing markets, which creates jobs and investment opportunities, he says. Success begets policy support, whether it be government or corporate, which begets more markets, and it becomes a reinforcing cycle that snowballs. “If we’re able to create incentives for taking that carbon out of the air, I think it’s reasonable that we’ll be able to ratchet up those incentives and build that broad political coalition that’s both durable and meaningful to do this at large scale.”
Yet I am less and less convinced that there is a clear route from Level 1 to Level 2, nor that the first would naturally progress to the next. Level 1 is what our current set of policies and incentives can accomplish, with a lot of work from think tanks, NGOs, philanthropists, and the like. Level 2 requires a massive transformation: economic, political, cultural. It implies that we decide to treat carbon dioxide as a waste product and dedicate a significant portion of GDP to cleaning it up, at the least. It would require profound state regulation—the same sort that’s needed for strong mitigation, and then some.
There is sometimes a hope among environmentalists and social justice advocates that confronting climate change will itself bring about social transformation—that it will flip us into a new narrative that could take on the climate pollution challenge. As cultural theorist Claire Colebrook writes,
From Naomi Klein’s claim that climate change is the opportunity finally to triumph over capitalism, to the environmental humanities movement that spurns decades of “textualist” theory in order to regain nature and life, to wise geo-engineers who operate from the imperative that if we are to survive we must act immediately and unilaterally, the end of man has generated a thousand tiny industries of new dawns.14
However, I think there are plenty of scenarios where we deal with climate change in a middling way that preserves the existing unequal arrangements, leaving us not with a new dawn, but with a long and torturous afternoon. Replacing our current liquid fuels with synthetic, lower-carbon fuels produced with direct air capture and enhanced oil recovery would be one version. But those dawnless scenarios are not necessarily geoengineering scenarios, and vice versa. There are both horrifying and mildly likeable scenarios for how carbon removal might be accomplished. The horrifying ones are easy to conjure to mind, while the likable ones stretch the imagination. It would be easy to tag best-case carbon removal scenarios as utopias—even though they would actually be worlds that have failed to mitigate in time, representing at best a muddling through. That’s where we’re at: even muddling through looks like an amazing social feat, an orchestration so elaborate and requiring so much luck that people may find it a fantastic, utopian dream.
We can maximize our chances of muddling through by engaging proactively with both carbon removal and solar geoengineering. However, binary thinking about climate engineering has made it difficult for progressives to create a dialogue about how engaging with these emerging approaches might be done. Climate engineering has been stuck in the realm of “technology,” rather than understood as a variety of practices that include people in various relationships with nature and each other. To free ourselves of these binaries and imagine a different kind of strategy-led engagement, it’s valuable to articulate a best-case scenario for how these practices could unfold.
Rigid binaries leave climate engineering in the hands of elites
There’s an abyss in contemporary thinking about the role of industrial technology in coping with climate change.
On one side of this abyss are people who appraise the potential of technology optimistically, but fail to articulate any real historical awareness of how technology has developed in and through contexts that are often exploitative, unequal, and even violent.
On the other side of the abyss are thinkers who, on the contrary, have a deep understanding of colonialism, imperialism, and the historical evolution of capitalism, but dismiss technology as a useful part of responding to climate change.
This cleavage leaves little room for critical discussion of how technologies might be used to further climate justice. It makes it impossible to imagine, for example, democratically controlled industrial technology that doesn’t exist to “conquer” nature. Today, most left thinking has abandoned the “streak of admiration for the productive forces as the instruments of a conquest of nature that will ultimately usher in communist affluence for everyone,” as human ecologist Andreas Malm has observed.15 But this abandonment did not immediately lead to a coherent articulation of a view of technology
that is collective or cooperative, or that works with nature.
I am not the first to observe this. A number of calls have emerged recently for the left to think differently about industrial technology. Geographer Matthew Huber, for one, suggests that “Marx believed that there is something inherently emancipatory about large-scale industrialization, and ecosocialists need not be so quick to dismiss this possibility.” He asks, “What if the phrase ‘development of the productive forces’ was not simply equated with the expansion of dirty industrial production based on coal, oil, and gas and instead represented the full development of industrial energy systems based on cleaner and renewable fuels?”16 Sociologist Jesse Goldstein, in Planetary Improvement, his critical ethnographic analysis of cleantech, observes that “the sociotechnical capacity is out there to transform the world in any number of ways,” but realizing emancipatory visions will require “killing the investor” in our minds, “thereby liberating our imaginations, our sciences, and our technologies from the narrowing logic of capital.”17
Others calls to embrace industrial technology are more strident. Science journalist Leigh Phillips, in his book Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry, and Stuff, derides the left’s small-is-beautiful, local-retreat tendencies, pointing out that the left was not always this way:
Historically, when we criticised the failings of the market, the left had no particular quarrel with industry, let alone science, technology, or medicine. We celebrated modernity. Rather, our demand had always been that the fruits of civilization should be extended to all of humanity. When did we turn away from the idea that capitalism was the problem, and begin to believe that it was modernity instead, or even the advent of mankind itself, that was the problem?18
Phillips’s book attempts to answer that question by arguing that austerity ecology is an incarnation of a “very old, dark and Malthusian set of ideas that the left historically did battle with.” Phillips sees austerity and degrowth as “mathematically and socially identical.” To solve the global biocrisis, more is needed: more growth, progress, industry, and civilization. He asserts that “it will require significant ingenuity to engineer a reverse of the processes we have inadvertently set in motion, likely even some way to produce a carbon-negative economy for a period,” with hundreds of innovations that will come from the most advanced research laboratories and factories. “By turning its back on the possibility of such technologies, on the very idea of progress, green anti-modernism actually commits us to catastrophic climate change.” The conclusion is that retreat is not an option; we must accelerate modernity. In some kind of company with this book is Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. Srnicek and Williams reject the localism of “folk politics” and call for repurposing technologies, pointing out that it’s not just about seizing the means of production, but inventing new means of production.19
Xenofeminism, as articulated in the Xenofeminist Manifesto by the collective Laboria Cuboniks, also seeks to “strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world.” They ask, “Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends?” The real emancipatory potential of tech, they claim, is unrealized:
The excess of modesty in feminist agendas of recent decades is not proportionate to the monstrous complexity of our reality, a reality cross-hatched with fibre-optic cables, radio and microwaves, oil and gas pipelines, aerial and shipping routes, and the unrelenting, simultaneous execution of millions of communication protocols with every passing millisecond. Systematic thinking and structural analysis have largely fallen by the wayside in favour of admirable, but insufficient struggles, bound to fixed localities and fragmented insurrections.20
Again, there is a call for a wider scale of analysis and practice than local efforts or folk politics can allow for. The Xenofeminist Manifesto further asserts that “suggestions to pull the lever on the emergency brake of embedded velocities, the call to slow down and scale back, is a possibility available only to the few—a violent particularity of exclusivity—ultimately entailing catastrophe for the many.”
While these currents are swirling on the radical left, they haven’t seeped into the environmental mainstream. There, the conception of an industrial technology that works with nature is limited to solar panels and wind turbines (as long as they are not in anyone’s backyard). Otherwise, industrial technology is still seen as that of the dark satanic mills—and certainly, there are plenty of extractive operations around the globe that reinforce this view. Technology and capitalism remain conflated (and the heavy government subsidies received by many transformative technologies are elided from view). So when it comes to geoengineering, many environmentalists have adopted a simple refrain: “We don’t need geoengineering, we need x.” This is a familiar formula, where x may be sustainable, ecological agriculture. Or system transformation. Or degrowth. Geoengineering serves as a foil for the beautiful x, the blossoming future we really want.
Let’s look more closely around how these binaries are articulated, and where they originate. One formulation of the binary is to view geoengineering as conflicting with real, transformative change. This is a compelling structure of thought because it focuses on changes that advocates actually want. The ETC Group, a civil society organization critical of the ways many emerging technologies are conceived and wielded, warns against geoengineering as a “perfect excuse”: “Geoengineering offers governments an option other than reducing emissions and protecting biodiversity.”21 Journalist and activist Naomi Klein declares that “the fact that geoengineering is being treated so seriously should underline the urgent need for a real plan A—one based on emission reduction, however economically radical it must be.”22
Advocates of geoengineering research, on the other hand, tend to believe that mitigation will not be enough to stave off the worst of climate change. One counterargument to the no-plan-but-mitigation position is posed by Harvard solar geoengineering researchers David Keith and Josh Horton:
At the risk of oversimplification, this line of argument essentially involves rich-country commentators criticizing solar geoengineering in an effort to shore up mitigation as their priority domestic climate policy, while ignoring the potentially huge distributional advantages SRM [solar radiation management] might confer on the world’s poorest in the global South. Their deeper motives vary, from a sense of moral indignation over shirking (Hamilton) to neo-Luddism (ETC Group) to anti-corporate ideology (Klein) and beyond. Whatever the reasons, the resulting admonition not to research SRM for fear of its policy implications for industrialized countries, at the expense of possibly enormous welfare gains in developing countries, is ethically disturbing in a global moral context.23
Retorts to this counterargument have included assertions that research advocates are being insincere about their concerns for vulnerable people, or limited in their thinking. Environmental policy scholars Jane Flegal and Aarti Gupta, for example, point out that the “performative power and political implications of specific expert visions of equity, evoked as a rationale to undertake solar geoengineering research, require continued scrutiny”—in part because these expert visions are filtered through a technological frame where equity is understood only narrowly.24 Moreover, philosopher and activist Kyle Whyte observes that “the argument that geoengineering is actually intended to sort of save or support indigenous people is actually hard to maintain because it’s not temperature rise or unpredictable precipitation that are really the problems.”25 Rather, colonialism and global inequality are at the heart of climate change—so if you care about the poorest in the global South, shouldn’t those be first and foremost in the discussion?
I agree wholeheartedly with the critiques offered by Whyte, Flegal, Gupta, and others of the solar geoengineering research enterprise. Yet, to me, it is presumptuous to entirely cross off an idea that could, in a future scenario wi
th runaway climate change, alleviate much suffering in places with less capacity to adapt to changing conditions. Systemic change is absolutely necessary. But geoengineering does not have to substitute for transformative change—in fact, to work well, geoengineering requires systemic change, because responsible solar geoengineering requires carbon removal, which requires renewable energy. This scale-up of renewables and carbon removal is only accomplishable with massive social and political transformation. The best-case solar geoengineering scenario is only achievable with dramatic social change. At the same time, critics rightfully worry that fossil fuel actors and other elites will use solar geoengineering to forestall social transformation, and the same concern applies to carbon removal. Yet at this point in time, a blanket rejection of carbon removal, in particular, comes off as an aesthetic luxury.
At the roots of this binary between geoengineering and social transformation, I think, are contemporary struggles around agriculture and food sovereignty. Contemporary agriculture is riddled with binary constructions: there’s holistic agroecology versus reductionist and mechanistic industrial agriculture; resilient agroecology versus techno-fix drought-resistant crop breeding. Geoengineering gets mapped onto these preexisting binaries, leading to the impression that geoengineering represents one distinct set of options, and agroecological transformation another. It is the mindsets, values, cultures, and systems behind these practices that agroecology advocates perceive to be in conflict. “We need regenerative farming, not geoengineering,” argues teacher and activist Charles Eisenstein in a 2015 Guardian op-ed.26 The ETC Group, for its part, opposes geoengineering as a false solution to climate change, along with proprietary climate-ready crops, and supports peasant-led agroecological responses to the climate crisis.27 Environmental NGO Biofuelwatch calls climate engineering techniques like bioenergy with CCS a “distraction of attention away from genuine and credible ways of sequestering carbon: agroecology and ecosystem regeneration.”28