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Carbon Unicorns and Fossil Futures: Whose Emission Reduction Pathways Is the IPCC Performing?

November 2020

DOI:10.36019/9781978809390-003

In book: Has It Come to This?: The Promises and Perils of Geoengineering on the Brink
Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Authors:

Wim Carton

Lund University

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Has It Come to This?

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Nature, Society, and Culture

Scott Frickel, Series Editor

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and Social Action

J.P. Sapinski, Holly Jean Buck, and Andreas Malm, eds., Has It Come to is?

e Promises and Perils of Geoengineering on the Brink

Chelsea Schelly, Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in

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the Philadelphia Region

Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Lee Kleinman, Vanishing Bees: Science,

Politics, and Honeybee Health

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Has It Come to This?

The Promises and Perils of

Geoengineering on the Brink

EDITED BY J.P. SAPINSKI, HOLLY JEAN BUCK,

AND ANDREAS MALM

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

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{~?~CIP t/k}

A British Cataloging- in- Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or

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Manufactured in the Unite d States of America

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Contents

Part I Introduction

1Critical Perspectives on Geoengineering: A Dialogue 

HOLLY JEAN BUCK, J.P. SAPINSKI, AND ANDREAS MALM

Part II Contesting Geoengineering: Power, Justice,

and Civil Society

2Winning Hearts and Minds? Explaining the Rise

of the Geoengineering Idea 

INA MÖLLER

3Carbon Unicorns and Fossil Futures: Whose Emission

Reduction Pathways Is the IPCC Performing? 

WIM CARTON

4Defending a Failed Status uo: e Case against

Geoengineering from a Civil Society Perspective 

LINDA SCHNEIDER AND LILI FUHR

5Geoengineering and Indigenous Climate Justice:

A Conversation with Kyle Powys Whyte 

KYLE POWYS WHYTE, INTERVIEWED BY HOLLY JEAN BUCK

6Recognizing the Injustice in Geoengineering:

Negotiating a Path to Restorative Climate Justice through

a Political Account of Justice as Recognition 

DUNCAN MCLAREN

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vi • Contents

7An Intersectional Analysis of Geoengineering: Overlapping

Oppressions and the Demand for Ecological Citizenship 

TINA SIKKA

Part III State Power, Economic Planning,

and Geoengineering

8Mobilizing in a Climate Shock: Geoengineering

or Accelerated Energy Transition? 

LAURENCE L. DELINA

9A Le Defense of Carbon Dioxide Removal: e State

Must Be Forced to Deploy Civilization- Saving Technology 

CHRISTIAN PARENTI

10 Planning the Planet: Geoengineering Our Way Out of

and Back into a Planned Economy 

ANDREAS MALM

11 Provisioning Climate: An Infrastructural Approach

to Geoengineering 

ANNE PASEK

Part IV Geoengineering: A Class Project

in the Face of Systemic Crisis?

12 Geoengineering and Imperialism 

RICHARD YORK

13 Gramsci in the Stratosphere: Solar Geoengineering

and Capitalist Hegemony 

KEVIN SURPRISE

14 Promises of Climate Engineering aer Neoliberalism 

NILS MARKUSSON, DAVID TYFIELD, JENNIE C. STEPHENS,

AND MADS DAHL GJEFSEN

15 Prospects of Climate Engineering in a Post-truth Era 

HOLLY JEAN BUCK

Acknowledgments 

Notes on Contributors 

Index 

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Has It Come to This?

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Carbon Unicorns

and Fossil Futures

Whose Emission Reduction

Pathways Is the IPCC

Performing?

WIM CARTON

If one is to believe recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

reports, then gone are the days when the world could resolve the climate crisis

merely by reducing emissions. Avoiding global warming in excess of °C/.°C

now also involves a rather more interventionist enterprise: to remove vast

amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, amounts that only increase the

longer emissions refuse to fall. e basic problem with this idea is that the tech-

nologies that are supposed to deliver these “negative emissions” do not currently

exist at any meaningful scale. Given the large uncertainties surrounding their

feasibility; their expected eects on land use change, food security, and biodi-

versity; and their scalability, it moreover seems improbable that they ever will.

Indeed, there appears to be something of an unspoken consensus among scien-

tists that the mitigation scenarios represented in the IPCC increasingly mirror

science ction writing. In a recent assessment, the European Academies Science

Advisory Council (EASAC), for example, concluded that negative emissions

technologies (NETs) have “limited realistic potential” to help mitigate climate

change on the scale that many scenarios assume will be needed. One expert

summarized the skepticism well when she recently characterized such technolo-

gies as “carbon unicorns,” underscoring the widening gap between the level of

mitigation that is needed and the apparent infeasibility of the pathways that are

supposed to take us there.

Despite its fantastical nature, however, the negative emissions idea has

recently burst into the public arena, where it is already leading a life of its own.

For skeptics, this raises the concern of a “moral hazard,” or the possibility that

the mere promise of future NETs could act as a break on emission reductions

in the present. Techno-optimist policy makers, the thinking goes, might very

well seize on the negative emissions idea as a “get- out- of- jail” card, holding back

from rapid near- term decarbonization in the belief that opportunities for future

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Carbon Unicorns and Fossil Futures • 35

negative emissions oer a sucient guarantee that the climate crisis can be con-

tained. It is, above all, future generations, and particularly the poorest among

them, that would face the consequences when this “high- stakes gamble” eventu-

ally backres and large- scale NETs turn out to be little more than a pipe dream.

At that point, the window of opportunity for avoiding dangerous warming

through conventional mitigation would have closed, and the world would be le

with the unenviable choice between runaway warming or implementing some

of the more dystopian geoengineering technologies that this book documents.

ese are not empty fears: as I discuss next, the perceived necessity to defer the

bulk of mitigation into a discounted future is the exact logic that underpins the

rise to prominence of NETs in mitigation scenarios. How can we expect policy

makers to guard against wishful thinking when even scientists appear unable to

do so? Besides, the negative emissions concept has already strayed beyond the

realm of abstract science and policy debates. e business case for mitigation

deferral is already under construction, suggesting that NETs are already per-

forming valuable political- economic work. is makes it necessary to scrutinize

much more closely what is actually going on in the various models that generate

the apparent need for negative emissions.

Take the example of Shell. While not exactly known for its vanguard mitiga-

tion actions, the company recently released a document in which it outlines its

vision to keep global warming “well below °C.” Unsurprisingly perhaps, Shell’s

“most ambitious climate scenario” turns out to include substantial fossil fuel use

well into the future. It, for example, assumes that demand for oil will grow until

about  and then decrease only gradually. By , the year when the world

needs to reach net- zero emissions in order to stay below .°C, oil demand in

this scenario would still account for about percent of current consumption.

By , the net- zero target for °C, fossil fuel production would still be respon-

sible for . GtCO, or almost half of what it is today. For Shell to be able to

claim that these estimates are compatible with the targets of the Paris Agree-

ment, it heavily relies on speculative technologies, in particular carbon capture,

usage, and storage (CCUS) and NETs. It thus assumes that all the remaining

fossil fuel carbon can be captured and/or compensated for by storing it in prod-

ucts (. CO/yr), applying direct carbon capture and storage (CCS) to oil and

gas installations (. GtCO/yr), and deploying large-scale bioenergy with car-

bon capture and storage (BECCS— . CO/yr), which is the NET most oen

favored in models. In total, this would require that “some , large carbon

capture and storage facilities are built, compared to fewer than  in operation

in .” To reach .°C, the company then imagines that an additional eort

could be made by planting “another Brazil in terms of rainforest.”

ese astonishing claims fulll a clear function, even if they are only a sce-

nario exercise or a best- case “possible” future, not a concrete prediction or com-

mitment. e inclusion of NETs and CCUS in Shell’s future scenario constructs

a vision in which the risk for stranded assets is minimized. It makes it possible to

claim, as Shell does in its “Shell Energy Transition Report,” that all the compa-

ny’s proven and potential fossil fuel reserves could be utilized— around twenty-

ve years of reserves at current production rates— while still staying within

the limits of the Paris Agreement. Invoking a future of large-scale negative

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36 • Wim Carton

emissions in this way suggests that there is no need to cut fossil fuel production

before its economic value has been fully recovered and thus no need for drastic

short- term changes in the company’s business model. Given the urgency of the

climate problem, this surely seems extraordinary. Is Shell making these numbers

up? An analysis by Carbon Brief suggests that the math does indeed add up.

Despite being somewhat optimistic about future energy demand in general,

Shell’s projections of future coal, oil, and gas demand and of the scale at which

NETs could be deployed are all broadly in line with those of °C- compatible

IPCC scenarios. If anything, Shell’s scenario is at the lower end of how much

negative emissions models say could be deployed by the end of the century.

In itself, of course, it is unremarkable that a fossil fuel company would use all

means possible to help justify the continued use of oil and gas, including foster-

ing narratives about the large- scale deployment of future carbon unicorns. is,

aer all, is the company that has known about the dangers of climate change

since at least the s and still decided to double down on oil and gas invest-

ments. More surprising is the fact that this logic appears fully internalized in

mainstream climate scenarios— in other words, that the IPCC reports appear

to feature emission reduction pathways that seem fully compatible with mas-

sive continued fossil fuel use in the medium term. More than a “moral hazard,”

this suggests some fairly hazardous scientic morals. Surely this should raise a

few eyebrows. How is it possible that the world’s most authoritative science on

climate change is generative of scenarios that play directly in the hands of the

fossil fuel industry? In this chapter, I want to explore some of the reasons this

is occurring. I want to argue that the path that led to the inclusion of negative

emissions in models and from there into the IPCC was a profoundly ideological

one and that we need to understand it as such to make sense of the way in which

negative emissions are already being invoked to justify business as usual. Doing

so, I suggest, helps us challenge the now common idea that negative emissions

are somehow an inevitable reality of climate politics.

Negative Emissions as Convenient Fiction

To unpack the work that negative emission scenarios perform, we need to start

with the science that produces them. e scenarios represented in the IPCC are

generated by using so- called integrated assessment models (IAMs), which

are designed to model the complex relationship between social and biophysical

systems. Briey put, these models seek to project future technological innova-

tion, economic growth, demographic change, energy use, and so on and how

these interact with changes in the climate system. A rst important observation

is that economics plays a central role in this exercise, in that IAMs are generally

made to operate in line with mainstream economic theories. e IPCC is quite

explicit about what this means. e h assessment report (AR), for example,

notes that “the models use economics as the basis for decision making. is may

be implemented in a variety of ways, but it fundamentally implies that the mod-

els tend toward the goal of minimizing aggregate economic costs of achieving

mitigation outcomes.... In this sense, the scenarios tend towards normative,

economics- focused descriptions of the future.” e IPCC also acknowledges

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Carbon Unicorns and Fossil Futures • 37

that models “typically assume fully functioning markets and competitive mar-

ket behavior” and therefore do not take account of existing asymmetries and

(market) power relations.

is focus on economics is important for a number of reasons. Most directly,

it means that climate policy in IAMs is interpreted as the implementation of

a carbon price— that is, it is the assumed cost of carbon that gives the main

incentive for a specic level of mitigation. Other mechanisms by which trans-

formational change might come about— for example, through mass behav-

ioral changes or nonmarket government interventions on the scale of recent

Green New Deal proposals— are largely ignored by the models. A second and

related constraint lies in the cost- minimization focus that the IPCC mentions.

Essentially, IAMs are designed to “maximize overall welfare” and nd the most

cost- eective emission reduction pathways. is eectively means that they pri-

oritize dierent mitigation technologies on the basis of primarily economic and

technological criteria and underplay social, political, and broader environmen-

tal reasons society might opt for one mitigation technology over another. In

fact, this is the main reason a technology like BECCS can be modeled by IAMs

on such obviously unrealistic scales (e.g., requiring a land area twice the size of

India). Even when models take into account more explicitly social factors (e.g.,

to assess the public acceptability of dierent technologies), these are usually still

translated into economic terms.

Now, this primary concern in IAMs with optimized, cost-eective mitigation

pathways has long meant that very few scenarios were compatible with keep-

ing temperatures below °C. Up to the fourth assessment report or so, models

tended to generate results that stabilized greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations

at levels that were signicantly higher than those corresponding with what are

now the Paris Agreement targets. As political recognition of the need for a °C

limit grew, rst in Europe and then elsewhere, policy makers asked the model-

ing community to come up with scenarios that would be consistent with this.

is confronted modelers with a considerable dilemma. As Parson notes, “Most

of the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs)... found that the target could

not be met via plausible and cost- eective levels of mitigation.” e solution

they came up with was as innovative as it was problematic. Modelers decided to

include in IAMs novel mitigation options, primarily BECCS and aorestation,

that allow for the removal of CO from the atmosphere. ese were not entirely

conjured out of thin air, of course. Aorestation had long been promoted as a

carbon osetting strategy, and researchers had put forward the possibility for

BECCS already in the late ’s and early s, though it had so far only been

considered as a “backstop” option. Now, however, it became the go- to method.

Not only did this signicantly decrease the costs of achieving stringent mitiga-

tion targets; it also introduced a debt mechanism into the models. By allow-

ing for large- scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR), it suddenly became possible

to exceed carbon budgets in the short term, on the assumption that this “over-

spending” would be compensated for by net- negative emissions in the second

half of the twenty- rst century.

e inclusion of NETs in IAMs in this way played a crucial role in uphold-

ing the possibility of the °C limit. As Dooley et al. argue, “e availability of

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38 • Wim Carton

BECCS proved critical to the cost-eciency, and indeed the theoretical possibil-

ity, of these deep mitigation scenarios, leading to systemic inclusion of BECCS

in RCP. scenarios [the IPCC’s most optimistic scenarios] included in AR.”

It is worth underscoring what this means. NETs were mainstreamed in IAMs in

order to square the request of policy makers (i.e., to provide °C pathways) with

the specic economic framework within which these models operate. Current

scenarios are in this sense the result of a cost- minimization exercise—a fully

institutionalized eort to keep the costs of mitigation as low as possible. e

models are therefore not actually telling us that NETs are a biophysical necessity

to achieve stringent mitigation targets. ey are merely saying that these technol-

ogies are more cost- eective than other forms of mitigation. Whether one accepts

the need for negative emissions in this sense ultimately depends on whether one

agrees with the various economic assumptions upon which the models are based.

As I discuss next, there are plenty of reasons not to do so.

The Politics of a Pathway

Modelers tend to see their work as “objective input[s] to the climate policy

debate,” as do, presumably, most policy makers. ey are generally quite can-

did about the assumptions that underpin their models but insist that scenarios

are still useful because they are not actually meant to be policy prescriptive or

oer accurate predictions of the future. Rather, modelers argue, scenarios are

merely supposed to be policy relevant to “support policy decisions between dif-

ferent choices” and point to those pathways that would be most ecient. e

IPCC has in many ways sought to patrol this border between policy- relevant

and policy- prescriptive science.

A rich literature in science and technology studies, however, suggests that

this distinction is dicult to uphold in practice. Scholars in this discipline

point out that any kind of scientic knowledge production comes with value

judgments and therefore inevitably ends up fullling some kind of political

function. e incorporation of NETs in IPCC scenarios is one clear illustra-

tion of how, as Turnhout et al. put it, “dominant political discourses compel

scientists to create assessments that work within these discourses,” a process

that involves the articulation of problems that are legible to and the proposal

of solutions compatible with prevailing political and economic logics. Knowl-

edge production, in other words, is oen reective of existing power relations

in society, and at the same time, it contributes to and justies the reproduc-

tion of those relations. e future focus and therefore unveriable and specu-

lative character of scenario production signicantly amplies these dynamics.

In this, the problem is not that science is political per se but that its political

character remains unrecognized or actively denied by the actors involved, either

directly or as a consequence of the methods that are used. As a result, value-

laden and contestable assumptions appear as somehow unavoidable or “natural,”

which closes opportunities for debate and the involvement of dissenting voices.

e use of models, particularly ones as complex as IAMs, further contributes to

this process of depoliticization by shrouding assumptions and value judgments

behind seemingly technocratic and objective modeling choices.

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Carbon Unicorns and Fossil Futures • 39

Beck and Mahony argue that the increasing importance of modeled emission

reduction pathways in the IPCC in this way represents a shi toward a “new pol-

itics of anticipation, wherein potentially contestable choices for climate futures

are woven into the technical elaboration of alternative pathways.” ey note

that by being included in the authoritative assessments of the IPCC, such path-

ways do not just describe possible climate futures but potentially help bring them

into being— that is, they perform certain futures as seemingly legitimate, neces-

sary, and desirable. IAMs in this sense provide scientic backing for the kind of

mitigation scenarios that are “thinkable and therefore actionable” while simul-

taneously sidelining others. One of the clearest examples of this is the negative

emissions idea. Before they appeared in IAMs, NETs were virtually absent from

the climate policy arena. Following their inclusion in models, they appeared

in IPCC assessments and from there have become an increasingly common

topic in mainstream policy debates. As the previous Shell example shows, they

have now moved into the delaying tactics of the fossil fuel industry. e mod-

eling community in this way “performed an important legitimating function

for the speculative technology of BECCS, pulling it into the political world,

making previously unthinkable notions... more mainstream and acceptable, as

well as perhaps pushing it ahead of policy options (such as radical mitigation)

in political calculations.” e speculative and contestable inclusion of NETs

in inuential and seemingly neutral IPCC assessments served to normalize and

mainstream the idea that negative emissions are both feasible and necessary.

Taking this one step further, some scholars have argued that the negative

emissions idea is performing an important legitimizing role for the existing

architecture of climate policy as a whole. By perpetuating the idea that cost-

eective pathways to °C and now also .°C are still available, the argument

goes, the IPCC is providing a rather convenient narrative to governments. e

possibility of future NETs appears to suggest that more of the same incremental

policies will eventually get us there— that there is no need for drastic or eco-

nomically “irrational” actions. As such, it helps preserve a sense of normality

against increasingly dire warnings— and observations— of an unfolding climate

emergency against thirty years of political delay in delivering serious mitiga-

tion eorts. e science- sanctioned normalization of negative emissions in this

sense reproduces the idea that all is as it should be in the magical wonderland

of climate politics, where mitigation need not imply eorts to cut actual fos-

sil fuel production, at least not in the short term. At the same time, this dis-

course builds on highly improbable projections of the future that rely on the

hypothetical deployment of technologies that— at the scale they are being

proposed— reasonably belong in the realm of science ction. When it so obvi-

ously constitutes a form of risk transfer, in which it is the powers that be that

stand to gain, while it is future generations that will be le to pick up what

pieces remain, then the need for critique runs very deep indeed.

Performing the Imperative of Gradualism

So how did it come to this? To understand how IPCC scenarios ended up being

“performative” in this way requires us to scrutinize not just model outcomes and

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40 • Wim Carton

the political work that these perform but also the logics that generate these out-

comes in the rst place. ere is plenty to suggest that the dynamics described in

the science and technology literature can in large part be traced back to the vari-

ous connected assumptions that underlie IAMs, assumptions that together con-

stitute an ideological commitment to the postulates of mainstream economic

theory. is is, of course, hardly a unique case. In important ways, it reects the

wider trend by which economics has come to dominate the terms of the cli-

mate policy debate— of how to assess and understand both the problem and its

potential solutions.

Consider again the focus of IAMs on cost- eective mitigation. Why exactly

is it that the prioritization of cost- eective solutions leads to the need for nega-

tive emissions? ere are a number of intertwined reasons for this, and while

I cannot consider all of them here, a few stand out as particularly important.

First, it is worth noting that mitigation costs in IAMs are usually calculated on

the basis of a comparison with a so- called baseline, meaning a counterfactual

scenario of what the world would look like in the absence of climate policies.

e cost of mitigation, in other words, is an estimate of what it takes, in eco-

nomic terms, to move from the assumed baseline to the desired mitigation sce-

nario. Observe that these baselines are necessarily hypothetical exercises, not in

the least because, with a few exceptions, models so far do not take into consider-

ation the many feedbacks of a warming climate itself. Essentially, they assume

that economic growth, population growth, consumption, energy demand, and

so on will continue as an extrapolation of existing trends despite rapidly increas-

ing temperatures, as if climate change has no societal impact at all. is crucial

omission is acknowledged by modelers as a shortcoming, but in itself, it argu-

ably already invalidates the entire scenario- building exercise. Calculating costs

and cost- dependent mitigation pathways in relation to an impossible baseline

clearly overstates the benets of the “no- policy” scenario and therefore presum-

ably inates the aggregate costs of mitigation. More generally, it means that the

choice of baseline signicantly inuences the outcomes of the model. Model-

ers generally deal with this by considering a large range of possible baselines that

are grouped together under stylized “socioeconomic pathways.”

To dierent extents, these baseline scenarios assume continued (and oen

growing) fossil fuel consumption and trade well into the twenty- rst century.

Moving to a mitigation scenario, then, logically implies signicantly reducing

that consumption and trade as well as its corresponding economic value (since

baselines are seen as economically optimal, any deviation from them becomes

a cost). e extent to which fossil fuel consumption needs to be reduced, how-

ever, and the exact costs this corresponds to fundamentally depend on the kind

of mitigation technologies that are included in the model. For example, if one

assumes a future in which no CCS technologies are implemented, then fossil

fuel consumption needs to fall rapidly to stay within the targeted temperature

limits, reaching zero before the end of the century. Indeed, many of the sce-

narios that explicitly exclude CCS (including BECCS) are unable to gener-

ate °C- compatible pathways at all because of prohibitively high costs. is

reects not only the substantial investments needed to rapidly replace current

high- carbon infrastructures but also the fact that for many sectors where there

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Carbon Unicorns and Fossil Futures • 41

are currently few low-carbon technological alternatives on the horizon—think

cement and steel production, aviation, and so on— drastic emission cuts would

almost, by necessity, involve cuts in economic production. With CCS, some

of those fossil fuels can continue to be used and their corresponding economic

value recovered. e inclusion of negative emissions from BECCS in particu-

lar extends this eect further. BECCS essentially enlarges the carbon budget

while also providing a source of energy, allowing even more fossil fuels to be

used in the medium term. Observe here that the cost-eective focus of IAMs

in this way renders dierent mitigation technologies qualitatively substitutable,

meaning that as long as a given technology is available and economically attrac-

tive (within the assumptions used by the model), it will be prioritized. As noted

previously, this ignores obvious social justice or environmental sustainability

concerns.

From this discussion, it appears that the cost of mitigation tends to decrease

with the continued use of more fossil fuels. is is obviously not fully true. As

the IPCC points out, aggregate mitigation costs in IAMs generally increase

when action is delayed. e reason for this is fairly simple—scenarios still need

to reach °C or .°C by the end of the century. e longer mitigation is delayed,

the more fossil fuels are “locked into” a (growing) economy and the more invest-

ments and/or devaluations it will therefore take to eventually bring emissions

down to net zero / net negative. e cost of mitigation is hence a function not of

continued fossil fuel use per se but of the steepness of the mitigation curve— that

is, of how quickly fossil fuel consumption needs to fall in order to reach the

specied temperature target. e faster fossil fuels are eliminated, the steeper

the emission reduction curve and therefore the higher the cost. is seems like a

trivial consideration, but it is critical to understand its implications. Since IAMs

are designed to minimize mitigation costs, this means that they by denition

select for the most gradual reduction in fossil fuel use. As long as emissions and

fossil fuel consumption go hand in hand, this also means that they select for

the most gradual emission reduction curve. Including CCS in IAMs essentially

decouples fossil fuel consumption from emissions and therefore allows the for-

mer to fall more slowly relative to the latter. Negative emissions go even further

in that they actually extend the carbon budget and thus stretch out the emission

reduction curve itself. e eect is to reduce the rate at which fossil fuel use

needs to fall, which in turn leads to lower mitigation costs. One could say that

the inclusion of NETs in IAMs in this way serves to recover as much economic

value from fossil fuel consumption and trade as possible within the limits of a

°C or .°C budget.

Some of this “gradualizing” of the mitigation curve is done quite explicitly by

modelers themselves. VanVuuren et al., for example, using an earlier version of

the IAM IMAGE, explain the criteria they used when developing their mitiga-

tion pathways: “First, a maximum reduction rate was assumed reecting the tech-

nical (and political) inertia that limits emission reductions. Fast reduction rates

would require the early replacement of fossil fuel– based capital stock, and this

may involve high costs. Secondly the reduction rates compared to baseline were

spread out over time as far as possible— but avoiding rapid early reduction rates

and, thirdly, the reduction rates were only allowed to change slowly over time.”

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42 • Wim Carton

Kriegler et al., using a dierent IAM, similarly note that their model does

not allow for the early retirement of existing fossil fuel infrastructure. In other

words, the models are actively designed so as to avoid the devaluation of eco-

nomically valuable fossil fuel assets, believing this to be unfeasible and so as to

make full use of the window of opportunity for reaching the desired mitigation

target. In this, their assumptions are directly in line with the arguments of the

fossil fuel industry. In Shell’s “well below °C” scenario as well, the imperative

for NETs logically follows from the assumed inevitability of socioeconomic

and technological inertia— that is, the idea that until  or so, “energy system

CO emissions are largely locked in by existing technologies, capital stock, and

societal resistance to change.” Modelers and industry interests in this way agree

that there is no alternative to incremental change, even if that means conjuring

up improbable technological solutions.

ese dynamics are reinforced by the idea that future costs and benets need

to be discounted relative to the present. IAMs generally use a discount rate

of percent, which means they weigh costs and benets in the present more

heavily than those that will occur in the future. e reasoning here, imported

directly from nancial markets, is that future generations will be wealthier

(given continued economic growth) than current generations and will therefore

be better able to pay for any future costs that arise from climate change. is is a

contentious and o- debated assumption. For one, it assumes, wrongly, that the

costs and benets of mitigation/adaptation and indeed the impacts of climate

change itself can be straightforwardly captured / compensated for in monetary

terms. As discussed earlier, it also suggests that growth can and will continue

despite an accelerating environmental crisis, which seems improbable to say the

least. ere is furthermore no consensus among economists about what exact

discount rate to use, which is unsurprising given the inherently subjective and

speculative nature of the exercise. As Stanton et al. note, selecting a discount

rate essentially means making a judgment about how to value the benets of

avoided warming for future generations, which is “a problem of ethics, not eco-

nomic theory or scientic fact.” A high discount rate is an implicit prioritiza-

tion of short- term interests over long- term ones, or as Jasano pointedly says,

it “erases the distant future as a topic of calculable concern.” In the IAMs we

are concerned with here, applying a discount rate of percent has the eect of

deferring mitigation costs into the future when those costs will supposedly be

more aordable. Because large- scale NETs are projected to be implemented

mainly in the second half of the century, discounting makes them compara-

tively more attractive than mitigation measures that are rolled out in the near

term and therefore gives them a direct advantage in the model.

So what is actually going on here? Clearly, the supposed necessity of negative

emissions in mitigation scenarios is the result of a number of specic assump-

tions and value judgments, all of which can reasonably be questioned. But the

problem seems broader than just the negative emissions issue alone. Essentially,

what is being performed in IPCC scenarios is the imperative of gradualism— that

is, the idea that mitigation needs to be incremental if it is to materialize at all.

e “naturalization” of fossil fuel benets through business as usual baselines,

the management of the rate of mitigation by way of cost- eective technology

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Carbon Unicorns and Fossil Futures • 43

choices, the direct “gradualization” of model inputs, and the application of a

high discount rate all form the idea that some degree of emissions is inevitable

and that the economic benets of fossil fuel production must be defended to

the greatest extent possible. Models in this way institutionalize the assumption

that short- term devaluation of fossil fuel assets is untenable and economically

undesirable and hence that the socioeconomic inertia is an unavoidable feature

of the current energy system. is de facto enacts inertia as some kind of natu-

ral law rather than a condition that is maintained and reproduced through his-

torically specic socioeconomic structures and therefore responsive to political

choice.

Connecting integrated assessment modeling to the interests of polluters like

Shell, then, is a commitment to the ideology of mainstream economics, a narrow

reliance on cost- eectiveness as the most appropriate way to mediate between

alternative climate futures. By reducing mitigation to a question of carbon

costs and then applying a cost- minimization model to it, IAMs render climate

change mitigation legible to vested political and economic interests but at the

same time delimit the range of mitigation options that seem feasible. As a result,

modeled pathways end up being biased against more radical, near- term emis-

sion reductions, opportunities for widespread behavioral changes, or the kind

of state- driven economic planning proposed by Andreas Malm in this book. It

then becomes more logical to imagine that warming will be contained by a mas-

sive rollout of fantastical NETs than to try to project, for example, a portfolio of

more short- term and risk- averse strategies, even if that means accepting a higher

economic cost (for some!). By placing IAM- based scenarios center stage in its

assessments, the IPCC in this way reproduces the idea that it is the (contest-

able and awed) laws of economic theory that should determine the rules of

engagement in climate policy, not the laws of the biogeochemical carbon cycle

or consideration for the ethical distribution of mitigation risks and responsibili-

ties. e inevitable end result, ironically, is that the IPCC, as the most authorita-

tive international body on climate change, is providing scientic backing for the

kind of delaying tactics that companies like Shell excel in.

The Point Is to Change It

To be sure, there are plenty of good reasons to support certain kinds of CDR, at

least in principle. Aorestation is direly needed not just to sequester carbon but

also to bend the trend of rapid biodiversity loss. Soil carbon sequestration not

only takes carbon out of the atmosphere but also increases soil organic matter

and therefore improves soil structure, helps build soil fertility, and benets soil

organisms. Neither of these, however, are the silver bullets that IPCC scenar-

ios are projecting with NETs. Implementing these technologies on a planetary

scale comes with enormous challenges, and it therefore seems problematic to

treat them as real alternatives to direct emission cuts. In fact, no new research is

needed to demonstrate that aorestation, bioenergy production, and CCS are

not the convenient and inexpensive mitigation options that they are now being

portrayed as. ese technologies already exist at smaller scales and have already

been extensively studied. e vast literature on carbon forestry, for example,

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44 • Wim Carton

not only conrms the potential benets that tree planting oers but also vividly

illustrates the trade- os commonly involved, including a real possibility for vio-

lence and dispossession, project failure, public disapproval, or the marginaliza-

tion of the interests and voices of those most aected. Debates on forest-based

carbon osetting— a mechanism that in many ways overlaps with the logic of

negative emissions— furthermore underscore the ethical problems with the idea

that land use change should compensate for the continued emissions of fossil

fuels. Fairhead et al. in this context speak of the “economy of repair,” or the idea

that “unsustainable use ‘here’ can be repaired by sustainable practices ‘there,’”

where “there” oen ends up meaning the developing world, since the “economy

of repair” too is a cost- optimizing one. If large- scale negative emissions provide

the next frontier for this perverse logic, as seems a real risk, it needs to be chal-

lenged and resisted.

I have suggested that a good place to start this task is by scrutinizing the idea

that negative emissions are necessary in the rst place. It turns out that NETs

were introduced in models rst and foremost as an economic necessity, given by

the character of the models themselves. Whether we accept the inevitability of

negative emissions— at scale— is therefore entirely contingent on whether we

subscribe to the economic assumptions that they extend from. ese assump-

tions ultimately revolve around the treatment of climate change as primarily a

question of cost- minimizing economics. It seems obvious that this is a wholly

inadequate way to decide on the most feasible, desirable, or appropriate way to

cut emissions. It falsely constructs all forms of mitigation as qualitatively equal

(ignoring important ethical, political, and ecological dierences), perpetuates

simplistic assumptions of how change occurs in complex social systems, and ori-

ents the mitigation curve toward gradualism despite the social and environmen-

tal risks this entails. e cost of mitigation in models is moreover a constructed

category fully dependent on assumed long- term technology costs, the exclusion

of climate feedbacks, and the choice of discount rates and baselines. Translating

this inherently partial approach into concrete mitigation pathways seems like

high- risk theoretical myopia and ends up ignoring real opportunities for more

just and immediate cuts in GHG emissions. Modelers might insist that their

scenarios are not predictions, but their inclusion in the IPCC still gives them

undue real- world validity and political inuence. It is illuminating in this respect

that VanVuuren et al. recently published a study that modeled scenarios to .°C

with minimal negative emissions simply by assuming more rapid electrication

of the energy system and far- reaching lifestyle changes, among other things.

While they don’t provide a cost analysis for these scenarios, one can assume that

they would be signicantly more costly— in the way IAMs assess this— than

“standard” mitigation approaches. What this illustrates is that if one tinkers long

enough with inputs and assumptions, it is possible to make these models come

up with virtually anything. As Tavoni and Socolow note, this “should make the

reader cautious about carrying modeling results into the real world.”

In the end then, while modelers acknowledge that the choice between dier-

ent mitigation options remains a political one, their models only give credibility

to a select range of options. By reducing climate policy to a question of cost-

optimization, IAMs appear to take the cost of mitigation outside of the political

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Carbon Unicorns and Fossil Futures • 45

debate. ey seem to suggest that mitigation needs to be cost-eective if it

will materialize at all, which underplays both the scope and the urgency of the

change that is needed. e need for rapid, radical emission reductions suggests a

need to repoliticize discussions on what forms of mitigation are most appropri-

ate and how we will be paying for it. Surely, if the responsibility of the IPCC’s

working group on mitigation extends beyond minimizing the devaluation of

fossil fuel assets— as of course it does— then its work should involve highlight-

ing, in a much more direct way, the benets of certain emissions reduction

pathways in spite of their cost— that is, to illuminate the many uncertainties and

risks of incremental climate policy. Surely assessing opportunities for mitigation

should involve not just acquiescing to the inevitability of fossil- infused inertia

but actively challenging it by providing an open and honest evaluation of the

social, economic, political, and environmental pros and cons of the full range of

mitigation options, including those that are inconvenient to vested political and

economic interests.

Of course, some economists would fume that no such thing is possible; that

high- cost scenarios are politically unrealistic, not policy- relevant; and that no

politician or business would implement a policy that is not cost- eective. But

that would be missing the point entirely. As Alyssa Battistoni rightly observed

recently, there are no politically realistic climate change mitigation options.

ere is nothing politically realistic about assuming that large- scale NETs are

going to save the day. It merely defers the political inconvenience of implement-

ing those technologies to future generations, pushing the problem out of sight

for the current generation of decision makers. To accept this as a matter of fact

is to fail to stand up to the magnitude of the challenge, to default on our col-

lective responsibility toward future generations. It is to deny that the only real-

istic way forward involves a fundamental change of politics. Moreover, even if

it were true that political decisions are necessarily made in narrowly dened,

cost- optimizing ways and hence that the political arena is locked into long- term

socioeconomic inertia, why should scientists have to play by that game? Why

would modelers need to build political feasibility into their models if all this

does is lead to future scenarios populated by carbon unicorns? Why should the

academic community not point out that there is in fact a choice here, even if

it is an unpopular and economically dicult one? When climate policies turn

out to be so woefully inadequate, it is perhaps time for the scientic community

to become a little less policy relevant and a little more confrontational in its

engagement with decision makers. It is perhaps time to start refusing to per-

form, through seemingly innocuous models, the kind of gradualism that has

long ago proven incapable of taking us out of this mess.

Notes

1Carl- Friedrich Schleussner et al., “Science and Policy Characteristics of the Paris Agree-

ment Temperature Goal,” Nature Climate Change  (July ): – ; Glen P. Peters

and Oliver Geden, “Catalysing a Political Shi from Low to Negative Carbon,” Nat ure

Climate Change  (): – ; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),

Global Warming of .°C: An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of

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46 • Wim Carton

.°C aboe Pre-industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in

the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the reat of Climate Change, Sustain-

able Development, and Eorts to Eradicate Poerty (Geneva, Switzerland: IPCC, );

IPCC, Climate Change : Mitigation of Climate Change; Working Group III Contri-

bution to the Fih Assessment Report of the Intergoernmental Panel on Climate Change

(Geneva, Switzerland: IPCC, ).

2See Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters, “e Trouble with Negative Emissions,” Science ,

no. (): – ; Pete Smith et al., “Biophysical and Economic Limits to Negative

CO Emissions,” Nature Climate Change  (): –; Alice Larkin et al., “What If

Negative Emission Technologies Fail at Scale? Implications of the Paris Agreement for

Big Emitting Nations,” Climate Policy , no. (): – ; Sabine Fuss et al., “Bet-

ting on Negative Emissions,” Nature Climate Change , no. (): – ; Anna B.

Harper et al., “Land- Use Emissions Play a Critical Role in Land- Based Mitigation for Paris

Climate Targets,” Nature Communications , no. ().

3European Academies Science Advisor y Council (EASAC), Negative Emission Tech-

nologies: What Role in Meeting Paris Agreement Targets? EASAC Policy Report (Salle,

Germany: EASAC, ).

4Matt McGrath, “Caution Urged over Use of ‘Carbon Unicorns’ to Limit Warming,” BBC

News, October, , http:// www .bbc .com/ news/ science -environment -.

5Nils Markusson, Duncan McLaren, and David Tyeld, “Towards a Cultural Political

Economy of Mitigation Deterrence by Neg ative Emissions Technologies (NETs),” Global

Sustainability  (): e; Dominic Lenzi, “e Ethics of Negative Emissions,” Global Sus-

tainability (): e; Jan C. Minx et al., “Negative Emissions: Part — Research Landscape,

Ethics and Synthesis,” Enironmental Research Letters , no. (): .

6Henry Shue, “Climate Dreaming: Negative Emissions, Risk Transfer, and Irreversibility,”

Journal of Human Rights and the Enironment , no. (): – ; Anderson and

Peters, “Trouble with Negative Emissions.”

7Minx et al., “Negative Emissions.”

8Royal Dutch Shell, PLC, Shell Scenarios: Sky—Meeting the Goals of the Paris Agreement

(e Hague, Netherlands: Royal Dutch Shell, PLC, ).

9IPCC, Global Warming of .°C.

10 Shell, Shell Scenarios, .

11 Adam Vaughan, “Shell Boss Says Mass Reforestation Needed to Limit Temperature Rises

to . C,” Guardian, October, , http:// www .theguardian .com/ business/ / oct/

/ shell -ben -van -beurden -mass -reforestation -un -climate -change -target.

12 Shell, Shell Energy Transition Report, , https:// www .shell .com/ energy -and

-innovation/ the -energy -future/ shell -energy -transition -report .html.

13 Wim Carton, “‘Fixing’ Climate Change by Mortgaging the Future: Negative Emissions,

Spatiotemporal Fixes, and the Political Economy of Delay,” Antipode , no. ():

– .

14 Simon Evans, “In-Depth: Is Shell’s New Climate Scenario as ‘Radical’ as It Says?,” Carbon

Brief, March, , http:// www .carbonbrief .org/ in -depth -is -shells -new -climate

-scenario -as -radical -as -it -says.

15 Damian Carrington and Jelmer Mommers, “‘Shell Knew’: Oil Giant’s  Film Warned

of Climate Change Danger,” Guardian, February, , http:// www .theguardian .com/

environment/ / feb/ / shell -knew -oil -giants - -lm -warned -climate -change -danger.

16 Note that there is also a dierent set of IAMs that is used to calculate the social cost of

carbon and is not used in producing emission reduction pathways. ese more simple

models make a cost- benet analysis of dierent emission reduction pathways by weighing

the economic costs of various mitigation options against the risks (again, in economic

terms) of climate change. is is the kind of thinking that, for example, leads Wil-

liam Nordhaus— using his Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy

(DICE model)— to the conclusion that the economically “optimal” level of warming is

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Carbon Unicorns and Fossil Futures • 47

somewhere from .°C to .°C and that “the advantage of geoengineering over other poli-

cies is enormous.” See William D. Nordhaus, “An Optimal Transition Path for Control-

ling Greenhouse Gases,” Science , no. (): – ; William D. Nordhaus,

A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies (New Haven,

Conn.: Yale University Press, ); William D. Nordhaus, “Projections and Uncertain-

ties about Climate Change in an Era of Minimal Climate Policies,” American Economic

Journal: Economic Policy , no. (): – ; and Nicholas Stern, “e Structure of

Economic Modeling of the Potential Impacts of Climate Change: Graing Gross Under-

estimation of Risk onto Already Narrow Science Models,” Journal of Economic Literature

, no. (): – .

17 IPCC, Climate Change .

18 IPCC, .

19 Silke Beck and Martin Mahony, “e IP CC and the Politics of Anticipation,” Natu re

Climate Change , no. (): – .

20 Larkin et al., “What If Technologies Fail?”; Detlef P. VanVuuren et al., “Open Discussion

of Negative Emissions Is Urgently Needed,” Nature Energ y  (): – .

21 Simon Evans and Zeke Hausfather, “Q&A: How ‘Integrated Assessment Models’ Are

Used to Study Climate Change,” Carbon Brief, October, , http:// www .carbonbrief

.org/ qa -how -integrated -assessment -models -are -used -to -study -climate -change.

22 Massimo Tavon and Robert Socolow, “Modeling Meets Science and Technolog y: An

Introduction to a Special Issue on Negative Emissions,” Climatic Change , no. ():

– ; Detlef P. VanVuuren et al., “Stabilizing Greenhouse Gas Concentrations at Low

Levels: An Assessment of Reduction Strategies and Costs,” Climatic Change , no.

(): – .

23 Tavoni and Socolow, “Modeling Meets Science and Technology”; Beck and Mahony,

“IPCC and the Politics of Anticipation.”

24 Edward A. Parson, “Climate Policymakers and Assessments Must Get Serious about

Climate Engineering ,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , no. ():

– .

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ogy,” Carbon Brief, April, , http:// www .carbonbrief .org/ beccs -the -story -of -climate

-changes -saviour -technology.

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“Carbon Capture and Storage from Fossil Fuels and Biomass— Costs and Potential Role

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28 Oliver Geden, “Politically Informed Advice for Climate Action,” Nature Geoscience 

( June ): – ; Oliver Geden, “e Paris Agreement and the Inherent Inconsis-

tency of Climate Policymaking,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change , no.

(): – .

29 Kate Dooley, Peter Christo, and Kimberly A. Nicholas, “Co -producing Climate Policy

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31 Dooley, Christo, and Nicholas, “Co-producing Climate Policy,” .

32 Evans and Hausfather, “Q&A.”

33 Silke Beck and Martin Mahony, “e Politics of Anticipation: e IPCC and the Nega-

tive Emissions Technologies Experience,” Global Sustainability  (): e; Dooley,

Christo, and Nicholas, “Co- producing Climate Policy.”

34 Esther Turnhout, “e Politics of Environmental Knowledge,” Conservation and Soci-

ety, no. (): – .

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sity Governance: Knowledge, Transparency, and the Intergovernmental Science- Policy

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36 Sean Low, “e Futures of Climate Engineering,” Earth’s Future  (): –.

37 David Demeritt, “e Construction of Global Warming and the Politics of Science,”

Annals of the Association of American Geographers , no. (): – ; Mar-

tin Mahony and Mike Hulme, “Epistemic Geographies of Climate Change,” Prog-

ress in Human Geography , no. (): – ; Beck and Mahony, “Politics of

Anticipation.”

38 Beck and Mahony, “Politics of Anticipation,” .

39 Beck and Mahony, .

40 Beck and Mahony, .

41 Geden, “Paris Agreement.”

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43 Shue, “Climate Dreaming.”

44 Evans and Hausfather, “Q&A”; IPCC, Climate Change , chap..

45 Cf. VanVuuren et al., “Stabilizing Greenhouse Gas Concentrations”; and Keywan Riahi et

al., “e Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and eir Energy, Land Use, and Greenhouse

Gas Emissions Implications: An Overview,” Global Enironmental Change  ():

– .

46 Riahi et al., “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways.”

47 IPCC, Climate Change , sec.....

48 David Klein et al., “Global Economic Consequences of Deploying Bioenergy with Car-

bon Capture and Storage (BECCS),” Enironmental Research Letters  (): – .

49 IPCC, Climate Change , chap..

50 Elmar Kriegler et al., “Is Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Removal a Game Changer for

Climate Change Mitigation?,” Climatic Change , no. (): – .

51 IPCC, Climate Change , sec.....

52 VanVuuren et al., “Stabilizing Greenhouse Gas Concentrations.”

53 VanVuuren et al., .

54 Kriegler et al., “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Removal.”

55 Shell, “Sky Scenario,” .

56 IPCC, Climate Change ; VanVuuren et al., “Open Discussion.”

57 Robert S. Pindyck, “e Use and Misuse of Models for Climate Polic y,” Review of Eni-

ronmental Economics and Policy , no. (): – .

58 Elizabeth A. Stanton, Frank Ackerman, and Sivan Kartha, “Inside the Integrated Assess-

ment Models: Four Issues in Climate Economics,” Climate and Development , no.

(): .

59 Sheila Jasano, “A New Climate for Society,” eory, Culture and Society , no. (): .

60 Larkin et al., “What If Technologies Fail?”; see also Beck and Mahony, “Politics of

Anticipation.”

61 Timothy E. Crews, Wim Carton, and Lennart Olsson, “Is the Future of Agriculture

Perennial? Imperatives and Opportunities to Reinvent Agriculture by Shiing from

Annual Monocultures to Perennial Polycultures,” Global Sustainability  (): e.

62 Karin Edstedt and Wim Carton, “e Benets at (Only) Capital Can See? Resource

Access and Degradation in Industrial Carbon Forestry, Lessons from the CDM in

Uganda,” Geoforum  (): – ; Sarah Milne et al., “Learning from ‘Actually Exist-

ing’ REDD+: A Synthesis of Etnographic Findings,” Conservation and Society , no.

(): – ; Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones, eds., Carbon Conicts and Forest Land-

scapes in Aica (New York: Routledge, ); Connor Cavanagh and Tor A. Benjaminsen,

“Virtual Nature, Violent Accumulation: e ‘Spectacular Failure’ of Carbon Osetting

at a Ugandan National Park,” Geoforum  (): – ; Esteve Corbera and Charlotte

Friedli, “Planting Trees through the Clean Development Mechanism: A Critical Assess-

ment,” Ephemera , nos.–  (): – ; Tracey Osborne, “Tradeos in Carbon

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rum  (): – .

63 James Fairhead, Melissa Leach, and Ian Scoones, “Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation

of Nature?,” Journal of Peasant Studies , no. (): .

64 Daniela F. Cusack et al., “An Interdisciplinary Assessment of Climate Engineering Strate-

gies,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Enironment , no. (): – .

65 VanVuuren et al., “Alternative Pathways.”

66 Tavoni and Socolow, “Modeling Meets Science and Technology,” .

67 Alyssa Battistoni, “ere’s No Time for Gradualism,” Jacobin, October, , http://

jacobinmag .com/ / / climate -change -united -nations -report -nordhaus -nobel.

68 Kevin Anderson, “Duality in Climate Science,” Nature Geoscience , no. ():

– .

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Is carbon removal delaying emission reductions?

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Jan 2023

Carbon dioxide removal is rapidly becoming a key focus in climate research and politics. This is raising concerns of “moral hazard” or “mitigation deterrence,” that is, the risk that promises of and/or efforts to pursue carbon removal end up reducing or delaying near‐term mitigation efforts. Some, however, contest this risk, arguing that it is overstated or lacking evidence. In this review, we explore the reasons behind the disagreement in the literature. We unpack the different ways in which moral hazard/mitigation deterrence (MH/MD) is conceptualized and examine how these conceptualizations inform assessments of MH/MD risks. We find that MH/MD is a commonly recognized feature of modeled mitigation pathways but that conclusions as to the real‐world existence of MH/MD diverge on individualistic versus structural approaches to examining it. Individualistic approaches favor narrow conceptualizations of MH/MD, which tend to exclude the wider political‐economic contexts in which carbon removal emerges. This exclusion limits the value and relevance of such approaches. We argue for a broader understanding of what counts as evidence of delaying practices and propose a research agenda that complements theoretical accounts of MH/MD with empirical studies of the political‐economic structures that may drive mitigation deterrence dynamics. This article is categorized under: The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Benefits of Mitigation The Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate Knowledge Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance

A history of the 1.5°C target

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Jan 2023

The 1.5°C target is now widely considered as the maximum acceptable limit for global warming. However, it is at once recent and, as it appears increasingly unreachable, already almost obsolete. Adopted as an aspirational target in the Paris Agreement in 2015, the 1.5°C objective originated with a political impetus within UNFCCC negotiations. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) endorsed this policy‐driven target when it produced the Special Report on 1.5°C. This article highlights the continuity of the history of the 1.5°C target with that of the 2°C target, but also the differences between the two. Because the 1.5°C target considerably raises the bar on mitigation efforts, it exacerbates political tensions and ambiguities that were already latent in the 2°C target. This article retraces the emergence of the 1.5°C in diplomatic negotiations, the preparation of the IPCC Special report on 1.5°C, and the new kinds of debates they provoked among climate scientists and experts. To explain how an unreachable target became the reference for climate action, we analyze the “political calibration” of climate science and politics, which can also be described as a codependency between climate science and politics. This article is categorized under: Integrated Assessment of Climate Change > Integrated Assessment Modeling Climate, History, Society, Culture > World Historical Perspectives Assessing Impacts of Climate Change > Evaluating Future Impacts of Climate Change

Exploring possible futures or reinforcing the status-quo? The use of model-based scenarios in the Swiss energy industry

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Jan 2023

Energy scenarios are often claimed to support decision-makers involved in the energy transition. However, an empirical understanding of how decision makers select, interpret, and use energy scenarios is largely missing. This study examined how high-level public utility executives in the energy sector, a key target audience of energy scenarios, perceive and interact with energy scenarios. Based on interviews with representatives of 20 Swiss utilities, we show that the use of scenarios is rarely part of a formalized process aimed at assisting decision-making processes. Instead, the selection of scenarios is often contingent on users’ perceptions of their legitimacy, credibility, and salience. While utility executives could rely on a wide variety of scenarios published by academic, corporate, and non-governmental organizations, they often focus on a limited set. Given the complexity of contemporary energy scenarios, which are often based on sophisticated energy system models, familiarity with publishing organizations and reporting styles is an important selection heuristic for users. This stands in contrast to the purpose and of stated key motivation of considering a broad range of plausible futures and their associated trade-offs. Our results suggest that to evaluate the impact of energy scenarios, social-scientific research also needs to consider potential user groups that are neither involved in participative modeling activities, nor collaborating with scenario developers in any other form. The usefulness of energy scenarios in these contexts and particularly their capacity to contribute to integrative deliberations on plausible and desirable energy futures is highly relevant, yet largely unknown.

Gambling with Our Climate Futures: On the Temporal Structure of Negative Emissions

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Daniel Andersson

This paper considers negative emissions – the deliberate removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere by human intervention – as a future-oriented imaginary of connected social and technological order. It does so in order to examine how expectations around the development and use of negative emission technologies are managed with the help of integrated assessment models. By treating this family of models as a case study for drawing out historical associations between the terminology of risk saturating the discourse of net-zero emissions and the modern conception of the future as an unexplored territory to be profitably colonized, the paper argues that integrated assessment modeling, as a praxis of forecast, structure and organize our experience of the future through standards of risk management and utility maximization. It concludes that to consider risk as a means of navigating between possible futures is to engage with practices that are enacted in the name of a particular understanding of how one ought to act in the face of deep uncertainty. Aside from epistemic questions of how to treat various kinds of uncertainties inherent to integrated assessment models, of pressing concern are thus also normative questions of how its representation of environmental hazards in terms of risk are distinctively writing the contours of our contemporary forms of responsibility toward nature, each other, as well as future generations.

Gambling on unknown unknowns: Risk ethics for a climate change technofix

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In this article, we critically engage with the risk ethics of attempting to mitigate climate change via a technofix, namely Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) utilizing Synthetic Biology. Now that the IPCC has (belatedly) acknowledged climate overshoot as being inevitable, our dependency on NETs to avert runaway climate change has become critical. Given the scale of unknown unknowns at play when utilizing any such technofix, we present gambling as the most apt analogy to communicate the unprecedented realms of risk and uncertainty occasioned by any such action. Hence, we critique traditional normative ethics in order to illustrate how a germane climate ethics must face the largely uncertain and unpredictable risk that any climate change technofix would inevitably represent instead of advocating for outdated risk-averse positions. We conclude by showing that this approach is fundamental to developing impactful future ethics research on climate mitigation, and is required to mark a much-needed new direction for risk ethics in the Anthropocene.

Antroposeeni, kapitaloseeni, fossiilikapitalismi: Miksi antroposeenitutkimuksessa pitäisi puhua fossiilikapitalismista?

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Sakari Säynäjoki

Antroposeenin käsitteen on kritisoitu syyllistävän universaalia ”ihmiskuntaa” ekokatastrofista ja samalla häivyttävän ympäristötuhojen yhteiskunnallista taustaa. Ihmiskunnan sijaan syylliseksi on esitetty kapitalismia, ja keskustelua käydään siksi useimmiten antroposeenin ja kapitaloseenin käsitteiden välillä. Artikkelissa esitetään, että kapitaloseenin näkökulmasta esitetty kritiikki antroposeenia kohtaan ohittaa liiaksi aikamme ekokatastrofin kannalta ratkaisevan tekijän, fossiilienergian ja siihen kytkeytyneen kapitalismin eli fossiilikapitalismin. Artikkelin pääväite on, ettei fossiilikapitalismia kannata analysoida pelkästään kapitalismina yleensä, vaan sitä tulee tutkia myös suhteessa itse fossiilisiin polttoaineisiin. Artikkelissa esitetään fossiilisten polttoaineiden ja kapitalismin erityisestä suhteesta alustava analyysi, joka perustelee väitteen fossiilikapitalismin erityisluonteesta. Ellei erityisluonnetta huomioida, jää tutkimus helposti joko yhteiskunnalliseksi tai tekniseksi eikä yhdistä näitä kahta puolta. Antroposeeni vs. kapitaloseeni -debatin tulisi siksi keskittyä tarkemmin juuri fossiilikapitalismiin.

Beyond Climate Due Diligence: Fossil Fuels, ‘Red Lines’ and Reparations

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Julia Dehm

The scale and scope of the climate crisis and its drastically worsening impacts means that even as a ‘climate due diligence’ obligation is increasingly taking shape as a dimension of human rights due diligence, there is also growing evidence of the limitations of this emerging norm. This article provides four critiques of climate due diligence based on its insufficiency, its conceptual ambiguity, its operational limitations, and its structural limitations. It argues that these critiques could be addressed by regulatory reform that draw clear ‘red lines’ based on the need to prevent the development of any new fossil fuel and address the ‘corporate capture’ of regulatory institutions by the fossil fuel industry. Additionally, it calls for reparations to ensure effective access to a remedy for existing and potential future climate-related human rights impacts that business has caused or contributed to.

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Dialogues on Climate Justice

Book

Sep 2022

Written both for general readers and college students, Dialogues on Climate Justice provides an engaging philosophical introduction to climate justice, and should be of interest to anyone wanting to think seriously about the climate crisis. The story follows the life and conversations of Hope, a fictional protagonist whose life is shaped by the terrifyingly real problem of climate change. From the election of Donald Trump in 2016 until the 2060s, the book documents Hope’s discussions with a diverse cast of characters. As she ages, her conversations move from establishing the nature of the problem, to engaging with climate skepticism, to exploring her own climate responsibilities, through managing contentious international negotiations, to considering big technological fixes, and finally, as an older woman, to reflecting with her granddaughter on what one generation owes another. Following a philosophical tradition established by Plato more than two thousand years ago, these dialogues are not only philosophically substantive and carefully argued, but also distinctly human. The differing perspectives on display mirror those involved in real-world climate dialogues going on today. Key Features: - Written in an engaging dialogue form, which includes characterization, clear exchanges of ideas, and a compelling story arc - Clearly organized to allow readers both in-depth consideration and rapid overviews of various topics - Memorable examples that enable and encourage discussion inside and outside the classroom - An introduction to the book aimed at instructors, which includes helpful instructions for teaching the book and engaging student assignments

"Fixing" Climate Change by Mortgaging the Future: Negative Emissions, Spatiotemporal Fixes, and the Political Economy of Delay

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Mar 2019

Wim Carton

Models suggest that climate change mitigation now depends on negative emissions, i.e. the large-scale removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This assumption has been criticised in the climate policy literature for being unfeasible and unjust. This article asks how critical scholars can make sense of, and contribute to these debates. It suggests that negative emissions can be conceived of as a spatiotemporal fix that promises to defer the devaluation of fixed capital. But the negative emissions example also challenges us to broaden our conception of how the socioecological contradictions of capitalism can be "fixed". I outline three ways in which it does this by highlighting the significance of a predominantly temporal fix, the role of hegemonic, sociopolitical interventions involving multiple actors, and the possibility of safeguarding existing production processes. I conclude that spatiotemporal fixes to climate change should be seen as part of a wider political economy of delay in devaluing carbon-intensive accumulation processes.

Is the future of agriculture perennial? Imperatives and opportunities to reinvent agriculture by shifting from annual monocultures to perennial polycultures

Article

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Nov 2018

Non-technical summary Modern agriculture is associated with numerous environmental predicaments, such as land degradation, water pollution, and greenhouse gas emission. Socio-economically, it is characterized by a treadmill of technological change, increased mechanization, and economic consolidation, while depressing economic returns to farmers. A root cause is the dominance of annual plants cultivated in monocultures. Annual crops require the yearly clearing of vegetation resulting in soil erosion and other forms of ecosystem degradation. Monocultures are susceptible to agricultural pests and weeds. By contrast, perennial polycultures informed by natural ecosystems, promise more sustainable agroecosystems with the potential to also revitalize the economic foundation of farming and hence rural societies.

Towards a cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence by negative emissions technologies (NETs)

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2018

Non-technical summary In the face of limited carbon budgets, negative emissions technologies (NETs) offer hopes of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. It is difficult to determine whether the prospect of NETs is significantly deterring or delaying timely action to cut emissions. This paper sets out a novel theoretical perspective to this challenge, enabling analysis that accounts for interactions between technologies, society and political and economic power. The paper argues that, seen in this light, the scope of NETs to substitute for mitigation may be easily exaggerated, and thus that the risk of harm from mitigation deterrence should be taken seriously.

Learning From ‘Actually Existing’ REDD+: A Synthesis of Ethnographic Findings

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2018

The 2015 United Nations Paris Agreement on Climate reinforces actions to conserve and enhance forests as carbon reservoirs. A decade after sub-national demonstration projects to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) commenced, we examine why many REDD+ schemes appear to have fuelled social conflict while having limited success in addressing the drivers of forest loss and degradation. Our analysis is two-tiered: first we synthesise findings from a set of ethnographic case studies of REDD+ in Mainland Southeast Asia, conducted by the authors; second, we explore whether the insights from our regional synthesis apply globally, through a comparative review of published qualitative research on REDD+ field experiences. Our results reveal three major implementation dynamics that can undermine REDD+ in practice, which we conceptualise from science and technology studies and critical political ecology as follows: 1) problems with the enrolment of governments, civil society, and local forest users in REDD+ governance; 2) the prevalence of overly simplified codification systems for REDD+ implementation that mismatch targeted societies and landscapes; and 3) the consequent dissonance between REDD+ objectives and outcomes. Together, these problematic dynamics reveal how and why REDD+ so often misses its targets of reducing deforestation and delivering community benefits. In effect, it appears that REDD+ in the course of implementation maps onto local power structures and political economies, rendering it blunt as tool for change. The potential of REDD+ as a ‘solution’ in the global climate regime must therefore be scrutinized, along with other similar mechanisms espoused by the green economy.

The benefits that (only) capital can see? Resource access and degradation in industrial carbon forestry, lessons from the CDM in Uganda

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Sep 2018
GEOFORUM

Recent research has shed light on the various tradeoffs involved in carbon forestry, i.e. the pursuit of international forestry projects to help mitigate climate change. This article contributes to these debates by highlighting the importance of resource quality and degradation in evaluating project benefits and tradeoffs. Focusing on the case of an industrial tree plantation in Uganda, the Kachung Forest Project, we highlight how the livelihoods of communities surrounding the reserve have been affected by interlinked changes in local resource access and resource quality. We show that the project has brought about a significant degradation of fuelwood sources, grazing and cultivation lands, and potentially increased pressure on scarce water sources, which in turn contributed to increased poverty in the area. We also argue that the community development interventions that project actors have pursued have primarily delivered ‘benefits that capital can see’ quick-fix solutions that fit within the profit-maximizing logic in which the forest company operates, while obscuring the underlying and resource-dependent drivers of poverty. Our study calls for closer attention to the interlinked socioecological changes underpinning the foundational tradeoffs – between cost-effective carbon sequestration and long-term environmental and developmental objectives – in the industry forestry model analysed here.

Land-use emissions play a critical role in land-based mitigation for Paris climate targets

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2018

Scenarios that limit global warming to below 2 °C by 2100 assume significant land-use change to support large-scale carbon dioxide (CO 2) removal from the atmosphere by afforestation/reforestation, avoided deforestation, and Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). The more ambitious mitigation scenarios require even greater land area for mitigation and/or earlier adoption of CO 2 removal strategies. Here we show that additional land-use change to meet a 1.5 °C climate change target could result in net losses of carbon from the land. The effectiveness of BECCS strongly depends on several assumptions related to the choice of biomass, the fate of initial above ground biomass, and the fossil-fuel emissions offset in the energy system. Depending on these factors, carbon removed from the atmosphere through BECCS could easily be offset by losses due to land-use change. If BECCS involves replacing high-carbon content ecosystems with crops, then forest-based mitigation could be more efficient for atmospheric CO 2 removal than BECCS.

The politics of anticipation: the IPCC and the negative emissions technologies experience

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2018

Non-technical summary In the post-Paris political landscape, the relationship between science and politics is changing. We discuss what this means for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), using recent controversies over negative emissions technologies (NETs) as a window into the fraught politics of producing policy-relevant pathways and scenarios. We suggest that pathways and scenarios have a ‘world-making’ power, potentially shaping the world in their own image and creating new political realities. Assessment bodies like the IPCC need to reflect on this power, and the implications of changing political contexts, in new ways.

The Politics of Environmental Knowledge

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2018

Esther Turnhout

This essay offers a critical engagement with the ideal of policy relevant environmental knowledge. Using examples in environmental governance and conservation, it argues that by packaging knowledge in terms and categories that are considered politically salient, scientists do not just inform policy-making by providing information about presumed pre-existing objects in nature and environment; rather, science is constitutive of those objects and renders them amenable for policy and governance. These political implications of scientific knowledge imply a need for critical scrutiny of the interests that science serves and fails to serve as well as mechanisms to ensure the accountability of science. This essay is a modified and expanded version of the inaugural lecture with the same title that was delivered on June 2, 2016 at Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

Co-producing climate policy and negative emissions: trade-offs for sustainable land-use

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2018

Non-technical summary Under the Paris Agreement, nations have committed to preventing dangerous global warming. Scenarios for achieving net-zero emissions in the second half of this century depend on land (forests and bioenergy) to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Modelled levels of land-based mitigation could reduce the availability of productive agricultural land, and encroach on natural land, with potentially significant social and environmental consequences. However, these issues are poorly recognized in the policy-uptake of modelled outputs. Understanding how science and policy interact to produce expectations about mitigation pathways allows us to consider the trade-offs inherent in relying on land for mitigation.

Negative emissions: Part 1—research landscape and synthesis

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2018
ENVIRON RES LETT

With the Paris Agreement's ambition of limiting climate change to well below 2 °C, negative emission technologies (NETs) have moved into the limelight of discussions in climate science and policy. Despite several assessments, the current knowledge on NETs is still diffuse and incomplete, but also growing fast. Here, we synthesize a comprehensive body of NETs literature, using scientometric tools and performing an in-depth assessment of the quantitative and qualitative evidence therein. We clarify the role of NETs in climate change mitigation scenarios, their ethical implications, as well as the challenges involved in bringing the various NETs to the market and scaling them up in time. There are six major findings arising from our assessment: first, keeping warming below 1.5 °C requires the large-scale deployment of NETs, but this dependency can still be kept to a minimum for the 2 °C warming limit. Second, accounting for economic and biophysical limits, we identify relevant potentials for all NETs except ocean fertilization. Third, any single NET is unlikely to sustainably achieve the large NETs deployment observed in many 1.5 °C and 2 °C mitigation scenarios. Yet, portfolios of multiple NETs, each deployed at modest scales, could be invaluable for reaching the climate goals. Fourth, a substantial gap exists between the upscaling and rapid diffusion of NETs implied in scenarios and progress in actual innovation and deployment. If NETs are required at the scales currently discussed, the resulting urgency of implementation is currently neither reflected in science nor policy. Fifth, NETs face severe barriers to implementation and are only weakly incentivized so far. Finally, we identify distinct ethical discourses relevant for NETs, but highlight the need to root them firmly in the available evidence in order to render such discussions relevant in practice.

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