After Geoengineering

by Holly Jean Buck

  “If you want to make major changes, change the way you see things.” Brown says he can tell right away when someone is ready to learn—that’s the way it is with regenerative agriculture—and quotes the spiritual adage, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

  “The real product is the mind of the farmer,” I kept hearing throughout the day. This idea of changing one’s way of seeing was primary. It wasn’t only about learning, but unlearning.

  How do we learn, not just the skills, but the mindset that would be needed to realize a carbon removal society? What would it mean to culturally internalize the aim of carbon removal—to have it as part of the fabric of everyday life—and how do we get there? These questions might seem eccentric to some readers. After all, much of carbon removal looks like familiar day-to-day work. As Klaus Lackner says of direct air capture, “I think the people that make this work are not all that different than people who make windmills work, who keep solar panels running, who make solar thermal plants work. And so there are a lot of jobs that are parallel to that. But of course, in the details, they are different, right?” These are similar activities: electric work, plumbing, creating automated devices, writing software, and fixing it all. “To a large extent, there’s a manufacturing industry behind it. But, I don’t think it takes all that much a different set of skills than building cars or building washing machines,” Lackner says. From a purely technical standpoint, you could imagine a carbon removal society that does the same kinds of activities as today, with an economic fabric that simply replaces carbon taken from the ground by orienting activity toward mining it from the air. That substitute for real transformation is, of course, exactly what many social justice advocates fear. And in my view, not only would replacing one commodity for another be a missed opportunity—it would likely fail to reach net-negative levels.

  Right now, fossil fuels are embedded in the structure of our political systems, economies, and everyday lives. If a society patterned around fossil fuel extraction and greenhouse gas emissions has a specific way of working, as some thinkers postulate, it figures that a society patterned around drawing down carbon would also have specific ways of looking, feeling, and working. As political theorist Timothy Mitchell points out, the leading industrialized countries are oil states; thus, without energy from oil, their current forms of political and economic life would not exist—food, travel, housing, consumer goods, and more.1 In Mitchell’s analysis, oil produces both specific forms of democracies and the economy itself. It’s not just fossil fuel extraction that shapes the patterns of our lives, though. As Carbon180 executive director Noah Deich pointed out in our conversation, there’s a wider “greenhouse gas emission paradigm, where it’s not just fossil fuels but clearing forests, farming in ways that release carbon from soils, et cetera.”2

  In many ways, a world patterned around carbon removal would be similar to one that’s committed itself to deep decarbonization and extreme mitigation. Under one view, it would essentially be that world, taken a step further. In another view, it might be qualitatively different, because regeneration, removal, restoration, and so forth bring a different narrative than mitigation, and perhaps a different politics. How? First, it may be easier to build a broader coalition around regeneration. Second, the goal is more drastic. As Deich notes, there is currently a mass movement toward decarbonization. “We’re just not aiming for the end zone yet. We’re aiming for the twenty-yard line, and that doesn’t work.” It might seem nonintuitive that a more drastic goal has a better chance of success, but it is possible that it’s more galvanizing.

  It would be extraordinarily speculative to imagine the contours of carbon removal cultures (and they would certainly be plural). We can begin to think about it by considering education. Like carbon removal, education is a long game.

  Right now, both the primary and university education systems are broken in several ways—and in many areas of the world, certain groups don’t even have access to education. Dozens of other books analyze and diagnose the ills in these varied educational contexts, from early childhood to the university. For the purposes of this discussion, I note six major challenges to the transformation of education. One is disciplinary siloing. Carbon removal, like many other socio-environmental challenges, requires an ability to understand across disciplines. Second, formal education at every level needs to be decolonized. A third challenge is the rote learning still present in primary school education, which inhibits creative problem solving and the innate capacity for inquiry. Fourth, higher education enrolls many students in debt, curtailing their futures and limiting their choices, at least in the US context. Fifth, teachers are undervalued, which is an obstacle to quality education in general. Sixth, as jobs become automated or obsolete, people will need reskilling throughout the life course in order to shift careers. One could add to this list for a very long time.

  Yet despite all the ways in which this system is broken, people maintain faith in education as a remedy for both social and environmental malaise. What other choice do we have? Recently, I took part in a discussion with Silicon Valley thought-leaders about the threats posed by increasing inequality. It was chaired by a CEO of a major tech company, who expressed genuine concern about the trends in income disparity. The conversation, though, kept coming back to education as if it were some kind of salve or universal remedy—if we just educate people right, it will fix inequality! Education is a quintessential liberal panacea for deeper structural problems. Thus, I do not wish to insinuate that it is some kind of cure that obviates political change. Rather, education is tied up in the political change we need. It is therefore hard to imagine climate repair taking place without deep changes in our education. Both the content and the methods of instruction need to be shifted, throughout the life course, to create educational experiences that can meet twenty-first century socio-environmental challenges.

  Let’s continue to imagine a world that has embarked upon carbon removal for climate restoration, and consider what they had to learn and unlearn to get there. In the following thought-experiment, I identify ten key capacities to build during early formal education, which might make realization of a carbon removal society more possible:

  1. Critical design skills, including visualization of the invisible. This encompasses a basic concept: we need to be able to imagine and consider something that we can’t see, carbon. But the same could go for seeing microbial life, or for seeing people in other places that are impacted by our actions, such as the workers producing our goods. Here I refer not only to the skills of being a designer—of data visualization and user interface design—but the skills of being a user and critic of others’ designs. For example, imagine devices that track carbon flows—this could be a positive, fun game, or a nightmare of calculation, depending on the design. Artifacts like the Styrofoam cup, the internal combustion engine, and others become inelegant from a design perspective (assuming, of course, a universal design aesthetic that is focused around environmental sustainability or regeneration). If the culture at large were infused with a design sensibility, it could alleviate part of the problem—demand for wasteful, polluting things and landscapes—and moved in the direction of carbon removal.

  2. Empathy—cross-cultural and multispecies. This competency comes with visualization of the invisible, but transcends it, in that it also extends to care for others—including those displaced in space or time. At present, preschoolers seem to be the only ones coached in empathy, but this faculty could be practiced throughout education.

  3. Decolonial practice. Basic knowledge of history and geography are a foundation for this. Understanding fundamental processes of colonialism and exploitation will help students grasp the limitations to carbon removal, as well as the equity issues involved. This understanding will be key to seeing climate restoration actually happen. For understanding history opens space and insight for other possible futures. Decolonial practice is about more than just content knowledge, though; it’s about the
process of recognizing hegemony and domination, and acting on those understandings.

  4. Experiential knowledge of the natural world. This is necessary for having a true relationship with the outside world.

  5. Numeracy and scale. In the context of a shifting climate, it will be essential for the new generation to understand the scale of the climate change problem and the methods proposed for addressing it. This including the capacity to work with big numbers as well as orders of magnitude, for gigatons, millions of hectares, and trillions of dollars are still nonintuitive to most people. This probably has to do with the way we teach math in primary school, where the focus is on operations rather than development of mathematical intuitions.

  6. Critical algorithmic literacy. At root, critical algorithmic literacy has to do with understanding models for predicting the future—and the decisions that are based upon those models. People need to learn the limitations of these algorithms, how to intuit when they might be wrong, and how to improve upon them. This isn’t just a technocratic, expert-level skill for programmers; it will need to be a fundamental part of life in a society that is, for better or worse, partially governed by algorithms.

  7. Interdisciplinary systems thinking. A society embarking on something as complex as restoring the climate will have to comprehend myriad interacting human and natural systems, from carbon and nutrient cycles to hydrology to microbes to economies.

  8. Dialogue. Carbon removal will never be realized unless people build coalitions to do it, which means dissolving ideological boundaries and political or identity-based factions, and working together on an agreed-upon goal. An educational system and scholarly discourse designed solely around constructing arguments and critique, rather than listening and collaborating, is doomed to fail at a task such as this.

  9. Imagination. While students are increasingly taught the kind of creativity and imagination that is useful in entrepreneurship, a related capacity is the ability to imagine large-scale or long-term changes in systems. What does it take to imagine a world that’s quite different from the one we live in now? What activities or practices enable and strengthen it?

  10. Emotional self-knowledge. There is tremendous emotional content and context around climate change: fear, loss, guilt, vulnerability, love, and longing, to name a few. Grasping this, and being able to connect with and articulate it, will probably be necessary to mobilize around the scale of action called for.

  Cultivation of these capacities would constitute an education not in methods of control, management, or domination of nature, but in how to work with it. Meanwhile, the STEM engine keeps chugging; people still view learning to code as a ticket to the next income tier, even as inequality rises and computers get better at programming themselves. The trends for some of these competencies, such as critical algorithmic literacy, design, or data visualization, look positive, and they are perhaps inevitable as education transforms. Others, such as empathy, dialogue, and experience with the natural world, could easily be left out.

  8

  Co-opting

  Baku, Azerbaijan, 2010, pleasant weather, with oil prices over $100 a barrel

  I was strolling along the edge of the Caspian Sea when I happened upon the setup for Oil Worker Appreciation Day. Along the trimmed lawns of a quiet park, wall-sized photos of oil infrastructure had been erected—gleaming refineries, offshore rigs, compressors. National patriarch Heydar Aliyev was photoshopped into some of them, looking inspired or determined in his tuxedo, with the blue-red-green of the Azeri flag rippling behind him. Breaking up the infrastructure panoramas were images of seedlings being replanted in depleted oil fields, scenes from new hospitals, and a map of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) had also constructed stages for evening concerts in the park. The bands would play against backdrops of oil rigs and tambourines. I tried to picture people dancing into the night, courtesy of SOCAR.

  In some places, oil connotes regeneration. Shining blue-glass skyscrapers were being sculpted in the shape of flames. Versace and other fashion houses were popping up with silent boutiques, and the streets were jammed end to end with Mercedes SUVs. Resplendent fountains and gardens appeared in the new plazas; more were under construction.

  Traveling out beyond the capital, to the oil fields of the Absheron Peninsula, I walked through a different picture: people living among unfettered extraction. Baku, like many capital cities, is an anomaly. Out near the oil fields, children played in the streets, indifferent to the puddles of pitch-black oil seeps. Women strung up laundry to dry between pieces of decaying oil infrastructure, red-and-white striped towels fluttering among empty cylindrical tanks. Rusting pipelines, no longer connecting anything with anything, crisscrossed bare earth or shrubs. A newer set of pipelines, mustard yellow, connected the pumps that were still sucking. Everything was drenched in the smell of naphtha. In the midst of it all, under the flat, dusty-blue sky, women carried home loaves of round bread.

  Azerbaijan relies on energy for 70 percent of its income; oil makes up 95 percent of its exports. Now, with oil prices half of what they were a few years ago, the country faces the task of developing non-oil sectors. Yet oil is so embedded that the fifty-manat banknote features a diagram of the benzene molecule, C6H6: six carbon atoms, six hydrogen atoms, arranged like an esoteric star.

  A key question behind decarbonization is this: How does one get companies to walk away from their assets? Or: How does one get countries to walk away from assets they are counting on? For three-quarters of the oil extraction is done not by international companies like ExxonMobil and Shell, but by national oil companies like SOCAR. (The latter are actually entangled with private companies—BP owns a 20 percent stake in Russian firm Rosneft, for example.) Oil-producer governments still capture a large part of revenues—on average, 70 percent of net revenues, from 40 percent in the United States to 95 percent in Iran.1 Geographers Gavin Bridge and Phillippe Le Billon break down the oil value chain: with oil at one hundred dollars a barrel, 20 percent of that goes to cover costs, 33 percent is gained by producer governments, consumer governments earn 40 percent, and companies get 7 percent.2 Note also that privately held companies aren’t simply private; investment by pension funds in fossil fuel companies means citizens are caught up in their fates.

  If oil prices were back up to one hundred dollars a barrel, the 1.7 trillion barrels of oil in reserves add up to $170 trillion of unburnable carbon—two years of global GDP.3 The infrastructure at stake is also worth tens of trillions. That is a lot of revenue, not just for companies, but for nation-states like Azerbaijan, to turn away from. In many cases, citizens aren’t profiting from these revenues, though in some areas they are. All this entanglement means that the dilemma of what to do with these fossil fuel entities isn’t a simple one of fighting against a few corporations we don’t like. We need to understand it as a social question, not just a business or economics or political question. Despite the stirrings of discussion about a fossil fuel “exit” or “phaseout,” this question still needs to be pushed into the mainstream. So far, the literature on “de-risking” pathways for companies is very corporate, originating from think tanks and research institutions, and aimed at fossil fuel companies. It is not a social question—despite how socially embedded these fuels are.

  The entanglement of states, citizen investors, and fossil fuel producers also means that if the narrative flips and the turn away from fossil fuels truly happens, the public could suddenly be holding a lot of debt and liabilities. If we are serious about getting off of fossil fuels, we may be headed for a bailout that makes the industry bailout following the 2008 financial crisis look like crumbs. For example, consider Peabody Energy—responsible for 1.16 percent of global greenhouse emissions, and number sixteen of the 100 top producers of greenhouse gas emissions according to a list compiled by the nonprofit CDP.4 Its predecessor, Peabody Coal, went bankrupt in 2016, when coal prices dropped and they were stuck with $10 billion in debt—and
their executive walked away with significant compensation. Then, the reformulated Peabody Energy “exited bankruptcy” in 2017, back in action. Meanwhile, Peabody was one of thirty-seven fossil fuel companies being sued by municipalities in California for damages due to climate change. However, a judge ruled that they weren’t responsible for climate impacts incurred before their 2016 bankruptcy; they got a clean slate. It’s not hard to imagine this maneuver becoming part of the playbook. Indeed, immunity from climate change lawsuits for fossil fuel companies is shaping up to be a part of any compromise legislation on climate change.

  There’s another reason what to do with fossil fuel entities is a complex social question, which is that these revenues are sometimes used to fund mitigation and adaptation to climate change. For example, the state of Louisiana is rapidly losing land to coastal erosion. The state’s master plan for coping comes with a $50 billion price tag, and, as journalists Kevin Sack and John Schwartz report in a 2018 article in the New York Times and New Orleans’s Times-Picayune, “the only dependable financing model has been catastrophe”: the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.5 Offshore leases were also budgeted in at $176 million a year, to help pay for adaptation, but those revenues have fallen with oil prices. That $50 billion is twice the state’s annual budget, and a federal bailout seems unlikely: there will be competition from other coastal areas, like South Florida and metropolitan New York. Oil and gas, Sack and Schwartz report, are the only industries flush enough to fund some restoration, and despite some politicans’ reluctance to hold a main source of local income accountable, Louisianans “seem newly receptive to holding the industry accountable for the consequences of its activities.” In a Times-Picayune poll, 72 percent agreed that industry should help pay, and another 18 percent said that industry alone should bear the cost. Only half of individuals were willing to pay higher taxes for coastal restoration. But they already do: state taxpayers spent $588 million to repair oil-and-gas-related damage along the Louisiana coast, which perversely goes to benefit those very industries, as they own or lease much of the coast.