Carbon Time Machines: The Techno-politics of Carbon Capture and Silicon Valley's Climate Future

• In Event: 50266 - New Directions and Emerging Studies of Politics in Science and Technology: Changes in Governance, Political Economy, Labor, and Work (Co-sponsored by Section on Political Sociology)

Abstract

As climate change accelerates, a critical political contest has emerged: not over whether technological intervention is necessary, but which technologies will be deployed, by whom, and to what ends. Climate models and state climate plans have shifted from a narrow focus on reducing carbon emissions by deploying renewable energy, broadly known as "cleantech," to a broader strategy including novel technologies for capturing and storing carbon emissions, which I term "carbontech." While many of these technologies are still in early stages of development, they are slated to play a central role in future climate scenarios: the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects a need for removing billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere annually by 2045. Environmentalists and many climate scientists, meanwhile, have criticized carbontech as economically unrealistic, a distraction from emissions reductions, and an example of fossil fuel industry greenwashing. How, and to what extent, carbontech will shape the future of climate change is a live political struggle spanning multiple empirical domains. It is also a theoretically generative case for developing stronger accounts of techno-politics, or the mutual constitution of technological and political development. This paper theorizes the techno-politics of climate change through a Gramscian lens. While previous work has focused on the fossil fuel industry’s connection to carbontech, this study focuses on another pillar of support: the U.S. tech coalition. Drawing on longitudinal analysis of the VERGE conference, the preeminent "climate tech" industry gathering, I demonstrate how carbontech grew to become a focus of the coalition.

Author

• Andrew Jaeger, University of California-Berkeley