Mining the Sky

• In Event: STS Underground - I: Mining Knowledge Practices

Abstract

As scientific and technological research explores the feasibility of removing carbon from the atmosphere, related governance scholarship has not kept pace. Carbon removal, reuse, and storage (CRRS) may emerge as a unique policy domain and market sector or become absorbed into those already existing (eg., science and technology, agriculture, health, economic development, manufacturing, environment, energy), borrowing key assumptions and norms along the way. Underlying assumptions reflect acceptable imagined future scenarios and judgments about business and economic drivers, the legitimacy of various stakeholders, the loci of decision-making, and the salience of public understanding and attitudes. Governance regimes systematically allocate and enforce property rights, police distributional concerns, assign liability, and orchestrate complex multi-scalar action. At this nascent stage, attention to language opens a window into underlying assumptions as they form, creating an opportunity to engage upstream with the evolution of human attempts to mediate, with sociotechnical innovation, the increasingly urgent relationship between underground and atmospheric planetary systems. Will atmospheric carbon be managed as a waste product of fossil fuel combustion (solid, toxic); extracted as a natural resource (timber, gas); harvested as a cultivated or biological resource (food, fiber, wildlife); withdrawn (water); or mined (coal, minerals)? The implications are more than semantic, and the notion of mining carbon from the atmosphere may be gaining traction. A hard look at the implications of transferring conceptual models about the world underground to the sky above demands critical attention at this anticipatory stage of a governance regime with multi-generational, cosmic impact.

Author

• Elisabeth Graffy, Arizona State University