This section further explores the structural dynamics of mitigation deterrence. Note that our perspective is a relational Marxist [25] one, where the only-ever-temporary stability of the system with its co-evolving constituent parts, and characterised by contradictions and ambiguities, needs ongoing maintenance and regularisation. We will discuss the scope for agency in the “Stopping digging: reducing the risks of mitigation deterrence” section below.
We first identify key modelling practices, and resulting framing effects that contribute to mitigation deterrence of NETs, by reinterpreting the results of McLaren [36] who engaged with modelling literature and quantified risks of mitigation deterrence from NETs. We then also discuss how the practices of the cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence co-evolve. For this, we build on McLaren and Markusson [32] who reviewed the history of low-carbon technology promises, and their co-evolution with modelling and climate policy, and showed that NETs is only one in a series of technology promises that have undermined climate action. Finally, we briefly speculate on how these practices might fare under a change away from the current neoliberal political regime.
Practices and framing effects
Mitigation deterrence is a temporal phenomenon: the future promise of NETs replaces present-day mitigation. Not only is action deterred, and the climate crisis made more acute, but the severity of the crisis for fossil capital may even ultimately be exacerbated if the promise of NETs enables continued fossil fuel exploration and development. Mitigation deterrence thus relies on decision makers being oriented to the future in particular ways, and on systemic effects emerging over time. Here, we discuss how this happens in modelling practice.
A key route to policy impact of NETs today goes via climate pathway modelling. The function of such modelling is to suggest, or predict, future pathways to emissions reduction and climate stability, and in doing so, to inform present-day policy decisions. We can understand the potential for NETs promises to contribute to mitigation deterrence by analysing the practices that are involved in climate pathway modelling, and the temporalities at play in the process. Here we specifically discuss a tension inherent in an ambiguity between two different ways of understanding and representing NETs. NETs are, on the one hand, a possible kind of item used in the practice of carbon budgeting, and, on the other, a set of socio-technical innovation practices.
NETs came to the fore in climate policy, and the modelling that underpins it, with the adoption of carbon budgeting [35]. Artificial GHG sinks offer unique possibilities to make tight carbon budgets—and specifically a net zero target—palatable and plausible. This happens in two ways: firstly, NETs are seen to compensate, or net off, some residual, hard-to-remove emissions. Secondly, if the budget overshoots, i.e. if emissions reductions are not swift enough, NETs provide the promise of negative emissions in future years, to clean up. NETs therefore feature in these roles in many models. Carbon budget modelling has not just mediated between science and policy, but has had a key role in generating the imaginary [24] of NETs [1, 6].
To be useful as a carbon budget item, NETs have to be seen, at least provisionally, as a black-boxed ‘thing’ that can be planned—i.e. predicted and managed. The thinner and simpler the framing of the techniques, the more likely they are to seem predictable and manageable. Modellers make judgements about the plausibility of specific NETs, in order to include them in carbon budgets. Such judgements may contain caveats, but these are easily watered down or lost in the process of writing up results, or indeed summaries for policy makers, resulting in the “invocation of an improbable certainty about future socio-spatial relations” ([5]: 764).
An alternative to seeing NETs as a black-boxed carbon budget item (or several) is to approach them as a set of socio-technical innovation practices, embroiled in a cultural political economy. Viewed in that way, all the things that can fail, and a fuller range of impacts, are more readily visible and foregrounded [36]. Getting to widespread deployment is understood as involving a complex set of contested innovation practices including research, testing, marketing, financing, hyping, protesting, lobbying etc. We here take a relatively encompassing view of innovation practices, to include not just apparently techno-economic, but also cultural and political ones [2, 15, 49]. With this rich understanding of how NETs innovation processes might unfold, it is also easier to see all the ways in which they may interact—functionally, environmentally, economically, culturally, politically etc.—emergently with their context. This includes interactions with other climate policy options, in ways that can lead to synergies or deterrence effects.
This rich view, including contestation and emergent effects, can be compared to the simplified and foreshortened step from the ‘now’ of the baseline to the temporal endpoint of a budget, as depicted in a simple graph, for example, of carbon reductions and removals over time. The modelling perspective on NETs thus leaves deterrence risks out of the frame and makes them harder to counter. Not only do the summary outputs of models conceal any substitution effects, but the specific practices of limited parameterisation of technologies (as bounded, with limited or no side effects or co-benefits), discounting of future costs and benefits, and overall financial cost-optimisation come together in ways that give integrated assessment models a strong preference for any potential future technological fix over near-term emissions cuts, and mean that rebound effects are not automatically considered. It is possible to estimate the likely scale of effects of such mitigation deterrence, in terms of emissions reductions not achieved, and consequent impacts on global temperatures if NETs are not subsequently delivered. McLaren [36] reviewed the expectations of NETs implied by integrated assessment modelling, and concluded that 371–545 Gt of carbon could be at risk from mitigation deterrence, which could add another 0.7 °C of warming.
The risk of mitigation deterrence is thus exacerbated by the way NETs are framed in carbon budgeting practice. Four framing effectsFootnote 5 can be highlighted: rationalism, certainty, substitutability and boundedness. The basic assumption of rationally planned and coordinated deployment, which is itself optimistic, obscures messier scenarios of ‘wild’ deployment. By including NETs in models, based on a minimum level of plausibility of their future deployability, the modelling gives the impression of a degree of certainty (cf. [5]). This overshadows the uncertainties of NETs innovation processes. In the context of narrowly framed climate policy goals, a limited number of modelling parameters are used to describe NETs functionality (such as GtC), thus giving an impression of NETs being readily substitutable for other options (cf. [7, 33]). A limited number of parameters and limiting factors are also used to describe NETs impacts and scale so as to make them modellable. This likely means an underplaying of the risk of rebounds, multiplying factors etc., giving the impression that the technologies involved are culturally and politically inert and only interact with other options through resource and cost competition, and facilitate the construction of NETs as bounded entities (and set of component entities). These four framing effects—rationality, certainty, substitutability and boundedness—are differentially at play in the various specific mechanisms through which mitigation deterrence from NETs occurs.
These modelling practices and the framing effects they produce are not just a matter of (eminently understandable) practical limitations to modelling; they are also implicated in the neoliberal political economy, where markets are used to govern issues, and where markets do not already exist, for the state to set them up, with emissions trading a pertinent example. There is thus a tension between plan and market in neoliberal climate policy, which adds to the ambiguities and contradictions of actually existing neoliberalism. Carbon budgeting has supported the articulation of caps and deadlines as climate policy targets, to be implemented through economic instruments like emissions trading. The credibility of the market-instrument approach relies on the planning of caps and deadlines to appear definite and certain, and so to promise to constrain the flexibility that emissions trading affords, at the same time as it is enabled and stimulated by the setting up of the emissions allowance market in the first place. In practice, for a range of reasons, including divergent national implementations reflecting domestic political economies, the flooding of the emissions markets with phony permits and financial crisis [12], capital interests have trumped planning. Framing NETs as certain, as a defensive STF promise, helps sustain the idea that decarbonisation is governable, even when other options may fail to materialise and the problem becomes more urgent. This effectively reduces the pressure on capital [5]. The modelling practices of carbon budgeting thus support neoliberal climate policy, and so the neoliberal political regime and the continued economic viability of fossil assets. The result is enhanced mitigation deterrence risks, as partial policy failure may well ensue, and NETs deployment may fail to fully materialise.
Moreover, Markusson et al. [31] argued that under a neoliberal political regime, the specific form of substitutability constructed is fungibility, whereby positive emissions and negative emissions from NETs are commensurated into quanta of the same kind that can be priced and traded on the same markets. Modelling practices that present NETs as bounded obscure complex externalities, and so facilitate the construction of the radically simplified characterisations necessary for commensuration.
We have here been able to detail further how specific modelling practices orient policy making to the future in particular ways, and are involved in creating and enhancing the risks of mitigation deterrence from promises of future NETs. We have seen how four framing effects (NETs as rational, certain, substitutable and bounded) contribute to sustaining the legitimacy of the neoliberal, fossil-dependent political regime and its policies. We have focussed here on modelling, but we argue below that this happens through a mutually reinforcing interaction between the practices of climate modelling (specifically carbon budgeting), climate policy-making practices (including target setting) and low carbon innovation practices (specifically NETs, and dominated by R&D, but also demonstration etc.). Note also that other practices, like lobbying, are implicated in the co-evolutionary dynamic of the cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence too, but not discussed here.
The evolution of the cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence
An analysis of the history of climate science and policy shows that mitigation deterrence has had many previous manifestations, and is not just an issue for NETs. McLaren and Markusson [32] mapped the history of climate policy in five phases, and related this to developments in modelling and the prominence of a range of technology promises, drawing mainly on international and UK material. Each phase has two distinct characteristics: a change in conceptualisation of the overarching goal of avoiding dangerous climate change, or ‘target framing’; and shifting promises of future technology deployment. Working together, these have enabled the avoidance of transformative social, economic and political change, and therefore delayed decarbonisation. Target framings have co-evolved with modelling practices, in part reflecting growing computational power, and science and engineering research and development frontiers, resulting in an expanding set of technology promises. Rather than lead to technology development and deployment, however, the outcome has primarily been a deferral of action on decarbonisation.
Target framings have evolved [35] from a target of general ‘stabilisation’, via ‘percentage emissions reductions’, ‘atmospheric concentrations’ and ‘carbon budgets’, to ‘outcome temperature’; a sequence that, after the initial vague stabilisation frame, has moved from cause towards impact on climate (understood as globally averaged conditions). With the transition from emissions reductions to atmospheric concentrations in the late 2000s, enabled by improved modelling, came interest in a technology that can act on GHGs already in the atmosphere. Here, BECCS technology was forged and given a role in scenarios, drawing on earlier CCS and biomass modelling and evidence. Somewhat later, carbon budgets became the favoured target framing, drawing again on modelling improvements, as well as (changing) technology promises. With carbon budgeting, the notion of negative emissions came into its own, offering both ways of balancing out recalcitrant emissions and reversing overshoots. More recently, climate policy targets have been set in (global average) temperature terms, opening up potential demand for technologies that act “directly” on “temperature”. In this regard, we would expect Solar Radiation Management (SRM) to be the next promise lined up to make the policy goals achievable without radical economic disruption—with NETs remaining necessary too—though suffering from disappointment after the initial hype. Similar stories can be told about other, earlier climate response options, like nuclear energy and fossil CCS.
All of these technologies have predominantly been constituted as defensive STF promises. Despite (fluctuating) R&D investments, deployment has in practice mainly been partial and geographically patchy, and in the case of carbon sinks maybe even gone backwards with net carbon releases from land. Under the neoliberal regime, climate policy has favoured words and trading over action. Surprise [48] writes about SRM as a pressure valve that makes the pressure on fossil capital manageable. As our historical overview shows, there is an organ-ful of such valves already mounted and in play. Though one or a few may have dominated policy discussions at a given time, previous ones have not disappeared, but become taken for granted in policy and modelling. Each technology promise has gone through a hype-disappointment cycle leaving behind mainly modelling traces (cf. [40]: 254). The climate models contain sedimented layers of old technofix promises. Together they serve as a historical record and measure of the unmanageability of the climate crisis under conditions in which responses remain constrained by a strong priority to avoid disruption and preserve economic, political and social business as usual.
In terms of understanding the cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence, we note that the set of practices (policy making and target setting, modelling and R&D), involved in enabling deterrence and delay from NETs, are also evident in other examples of climate-related technological promises. Moreover, the practices of the set have co-evolved, and technology promises—as defensive STF promises (or less formally, ‘technologies of prevarication’)—have evolved with them. As targets shifted from cause (emissions) to effect (temperature), technology promises became further removed from the sectors where emissions originate, such as energy, transport and land use; and so they become further removed from challenging the value of existing carbon-dependent assets, and so the underlying capitalist logic of society. This, more or less deliberate, avoidance of challenging carbon-dependent capital interests goes a long way towards explaining the intense, felt attraction of each generation of technology promises, and the deterrence they enable.
The set of practices has thus evolved in a specific direction, which has allowed the decarbonisation of the economy to be deferred (or done very slowly and partially), relying on imagined technologies that are ever more invasive in the natural environment (and ever less so in the economy), benefitting primarily global elites and corporate interests. Under their dominance, a hole has been dug for us all to live in, using defensive STF promises as shovels.
And there is not obviously a technological endpoint to this progression. Even if powerful actors decided to, prepared to, and perhaps even tried to ‘regularise’ the global temperature directly with SRM, there could be reasons to prepare to fix the impacts of SRM deployment with further new technology, and so on. It is impossible to foresee exactly what STF might be offered to supersede SRM, but the sequence so far would suggest for example a (perhaps nano-) technology imagined able to compensate for and remediate climate change without any of the side-effects of currently envisaged SRM.
However, there are reasons for cautious hope that do not simply rely on such imagined technical fixes. Although, with the rise of temperature framed targets, SRM looks like the next likely promise to prop up climate policy, and the political regime with it, the future may be less predictable than that. Currently, the neoliberal regime is undergoing yet another moment of crisis. The financial crisis of 2009 shook the regime, but it has sustained itself through initiatives such as quantitative easing. Even as stock markets have continued to grow, COVID-19 related impacts on economic activity and relations have added to the stresses facing neoliberalism. What has so far remained largely talk, might under a different political regime turn real. There may be a resurgence in low carbon innovation, maybe induced through Green New Deal-like initiatives under a more progressive regime. Or, the current trend towards nationalist protectionism may mean governments, for example the Chinese one, seeing merit in investing in technological protection of their own nation from climate disasters—though there may also be resurgent SRM under protectionist regimes [32].
There may be mitigation deterrence dynamics playing out through defensive STFs under different political regimes, though they would operate differently and perhaps with different intensities [37]. NETs techniques are no silver bullets, but there are no simple political solutions either. However, the financialisation of the economy under neoliberalism is likely to be followed by a round of investment in the “real” economy, assuming that capitalism as such survives and that the long waves of system renewal do not stop rolling [28]. The defensive STF promises proliferating under neoliberalism in response to climate change may well see their fortunes change, and receive substantial amounts of investment, and so turn into classical STFs under a new capitalist phase. The (comparatively fast) co-evolutionary dynamic of mitigation deterrence would then turn into part of a larger (and slower) co-evolutionary loop of regime change (see Fig. 3).
Summing up, the process and practices enabling mitigation deterrence from NETs are generalisable as a cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence. The practices have co-evolved, in a direction that has allowed ongoing prevarication, re-focussing technology development efforts from emissions towards the atmosphere, and the digging of an ever-deeper climate crisis hole. This discussion helps inform our analysis in the next section of what can be done to stop the digging and begin to do something more constructive. This includes examination, in line with our phronetic take on practices, of the scope for reflection on how the practices involved are performed and the emotional labour that entails.