The Politics of Carbon Dioxide Removal as Promissory Technology

• In Event: The Sociology of Climate Change

Abstract

This paper examines carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as a promissory technology whose political significance lies not in its current material deployment but in the performative effects its promise generates. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in the CDR sector, including 53 expert interviews and ethnographic observation at CDR events and field sites, I argue that CDR stabilizes the existing social order through the deferral of structural transformation. The paper develops the concept of promissory technology — distinguished from socio-technical imaginaries, technologies of imagination, and the politics of anticipation — to capture how certain technologies derive their social significance from the promise to retain an existing societal order by sketching a future of technological emancipation from environmental constraints. Three political effects of CDR's promise are identified. First, in climate policy, CDR has evolved from optional supplement to load-bearing assumption of the global mitigation architecture, culminating in overshoot scenarios that render large-scale carbon removal obligatory. Second, in mitigation imaginaries, CDR experts constitute a shared vision organized around societal pessimism and technological optimism, naturalizing the continuation of current consumption patterns while foreclosing structural alternatives. Third, in the society-environment relationship, CDR promises to resolve the hybridity of nature and culture produced by climate change by reasserting human mastery over the carbon cycle. Across all three domains, CDR forecloses alternatives not through repression but through promise, contributing to the idea that the climate crisis can be resolved without addressing the social relations that produced it. The paper contributes to the dialogue between the sociology of climate change and the sociology of futures.

Author

• Jan Gilles, London School of Economics and Political Science