CO2 Removal. The Technopolitics of Negative Emissions Technologies

The project analyzes the Technopolitics of Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) in global climate action. It is a sociological project inspired by interdisciplinary approaches from Science and Technology Studies. NETs should mitigate global heating by removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

They not only offset residual emissions to achieve net-zero but promise to contribute to net-negative emissions by removing enough CO2 from the atmosphere to reduce warming to 1.5 or 2C after a temperature overshoot.

Though many NETs are not yet fully developed, prohibitively costly, and hard to scale up, they already figure prominently in climate scenarios by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

This tension between assigned role and current reality of NETs calls for an inquiry that looks at NETs as socio-technical imaginaries (Jassanoff) that shape and are shaped by imagined futures (Beckert).

Drawing on qualitative social research methods, the project will in a first step look at the framing of NETs in climate scenarios and ask if and how they justify the delay of climate action. In a second step, the project will analyze the development of NETs in oil and gas companies.

It will ask how NETs allow the companies to envision a future where they can continue their current business model despite stricter climate regulation.

The project will thus analyze how the mutual reinforcement between calculative devices (scenarios) and technical devices (NETs) turn NETs into attractive climate action options.

The technopolitics lens the project adopts stresses that these seemingly innocuous devices embody and effectuate political stances that have significant consequences for the direction of climate politics.

This perspective helps to engender a reflexive discussion on NETs that not only narrowly focuses on the cost-efficiency of carbon removal but also on their effectivity for climate mitigation and their potential contribution to questions of equity.