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Has It Come to This?
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Nature, Society, and Culture
Scott Frickel, Series Editor
A sophisticated and wide- ranging sociological literature analyzing nature- society-
culture interactions has blossomed in recent decades. is book series provides a
platform for showcasing the best of that scholarship: carefully craed empirical
studies of socioenvironmental change and the eects such change has on ecosys-
tems, social institutions, historical processes, and cultural practices.
e series aims for topical and theoretical breadth. Anchored in sociological
analyses of the environment, Nature, Society, and Culture is home to studies
employing a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives and inves-
tigating the pressing socioenvironmental questions of our time— from environ-
mental inequality and risk, to the science and politics of climate change and
serial disaster, to the environmental causes and consequences of urbanization
and war making, and beyond.
Available titles in the Nature, Society, and Culture series:
Diane C. Bates, Superstorm Sandy: e Inevitable Destruction and Reconstruction
of the Jersey Shore
Elizabeth Cherry, For the Birds: Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gaze
Cody Ferguson, is Is Our Land: Grassroots Enironmentalism in the Late
Twentieth Century
Aya H. Kimura and Abby Kinchy, Science by the People: Participation, Power,
and the Politics of Enironmental Knowledge
Anthony B. Ladd, ed., Fractured Communities: Risk, Impacts, and Protest against
Hydraulic Fracking in U.S. Shale Regions
Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark, e Tragedy of the Com-
modity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture
Stephanie A. Malin, e Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and
Enironmental Justice
Kari Marie Norgaard, Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature,
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
America
Diane Sicotte, From Workshop to Waste Magnet: Enironmental Inequality in
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.
is collection copyright © by Rutgers, e State University of New Jersey
Individual chapters copyright © in the names of their authors
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from
the publisher. Please contact Rutg ers University Press, Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ
. e only exception to this prohibition is “fa ir use” a s dened by U.S. copyright law.
♾ e paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard
for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Librar y Materials, A NSIZ.- .
www .rutgersuniversitypress .org
Manufactured in the Unite d States of America
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v
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 aer 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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34
3
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 eects 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 oer a sucient 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 backres 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 oen
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 eort
could be made by planting “another Brazil in terms of rainforest.”
ese astonishing claims fulll 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,
aer 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 scientic 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. Briey 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 specic 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- eective emission reduction pathways. is eectively means that they pri-
oritize dierent 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 dierent technologies), these are usually still
translated into economic terms.
Now, this primary concern in IAMs with optimized, cost-eective 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 signicantly 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- eective 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 aorestation,
that allow for the removal of CO from the atmosphere. ese were not entirely
conjured out of thin air, of course. Aorestation had long been promoted as a
carbon osetting 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 signicantly 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-eciency, 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 specic economic framework within which these models operate. Current
scenarios are in this sense the result of a cost- minimization exercise—a fully
institutionalized eort 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- eective 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
oer 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 ecient. 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 dicult to uphold in practice. Scholars in this discipline
point out that any kind of scientic knowledge production comes with value
judgments and therefore inevitably ends up fullling 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 oen reective of existing power relations
in society, and at the same time, it contributes to and justies the reproduc-
tion of those relations. e future focus and therefore unveriable and specu-
lative character of scenario production signicantly amplies 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 scientic 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 inuential 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-
eective 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 eorts. 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 eorts 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 reects 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- eective mitigation. Why exactly
is it that the prioritization of cost- eective 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 benets of the “no- policy” scenario and therefore presum-
ably inates the aggregate costs of mitigation. More generally, it means that the
choice of baseline signicantly inuences 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 dierent extents, these baseline scenarios assume continued (and oen
growing) fossil fuel consumption and trade well into the twenty- rst century.
Moving to a mitigation scenario, then, logically implies signicantly 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
reects 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 eect 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-eective focus of IAMs
in this way renders dierent 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
specied 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 denition
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 eect 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. VanVuuren 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 reecting 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 dierent 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 benets need
to be discounted relative to the present. IAMs generally use a discount rate
of percent, which means they weigh costs and benets 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 benets 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 benets of
avoided warming for future generations, which is “a problem of ethics, not eco-
nomic theory or scientic 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 eect of
deferring mitigation costs into the future when those costs will supposedly be
more aordable. 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 specic 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 benets through business as usual baselines,
the management of the rate of mitigation by way of cost- eective 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 benets 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 specic 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- eectiveness 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 scientic 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. Aorestation 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 benets 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 aorestation, 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 conrms the potential benets that tree planting oers but also vividly
illustrates the trade- os 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 aected. Debates on forest-based
carbon osetting— 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” oen 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 dierences), 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 inuence. It is illuminating in this respect
that VanVuuren et al. recently published a study that modeled scenarios to .°C
with minimal negative emissions simply by assuming more rapid electrication
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 signicantly 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 dier-
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-eective 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 benets 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- eective. 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 dened,
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 dicult one? When climate policies turn
out to be so woefully inadequate, it is perhaps time for the scientic 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 aboe 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 Eorts to Eradicate Poerty (Geneva, Switzerland: IPCC, );
IPCC, Climate Change : Mitigation of Climate Change; Working Group III Contri-
bution to the Fih Assessment Report of the Intergoernmental 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 Tyeld, “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,” Enironmental Research Letters , no. (): .
6Henry Shue, “Climate Dreaming: Negative Emissions, Risk Transfer, and Irreversibility,”
Journal of Human Rights and the Enironment , 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 dierent 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- benet analysis of dierent 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: Graing 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. VanVuuren 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. VanVuuren 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. ():
– .
25 Leo Hickman, “Timeline: How BECCS Became Climate Change’s ‘Saviour’ Technol-
ogy,” Carbon Brief, April, , http:// www .carbonbrief .org/ beccs -the -story -of -climate
-changes -saviour -technology.
26 VanVuuren et al., “Stabilizing Greenhouse Gas Concentrations”; Christian Azar et al.,
“Carbon Capture and Storage from Fossil Fuels and Biomass— Costs and Potential Role
in Stabilizing the Atmosphere,” Climatic Change , nos.– (): – .
27 Carton, “‘Fixing’ Climate Change.”
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
and Negative Emissions: Trade- Os for Sustainable Land- Use,” Global Sustainability
(): .
30 Parson, “Climate Policymakers.”
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. (): – .
35 Esther Turnhout, Katja Neves, and Elisa DeLijster, “‘Measurementality’ in Biodiver-
sity Governance: Knowledge, Transparency, and the Intergovernmental Science- Policy
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