Paper short abstract:

Decarbonization has emerged as a new mode of ‘sustainable’ operation for the oil and gas industry. This paper explores how environmental technologies of ‘carbon control’ in the oil and gas industry reproduce extractive landscapes whilst projecting new imaginaries of protection and exposure.

Paper long abstract:

Amidst rising concerns and changing shareholder values around environmental sustainability, the climate crisis has emerged as a strategic risk to the operations and viability of international oil and gas companies. Responsible for over a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, the oil and gas industry has turned to ‘sustainability’ as a new mode of operation – adopting targets to net-zero through various techniques of environmental control and mitigation. In this paper, I describe how energy professionals (chemists, environmental engineers, and environmental officers) in the oil and gas industry in Ghana attempt to control carbon through environmental technologies of waste management and oil spill prevention. Based on fieldwork at a waste management site for the oil and gas industry in Takoradi, Ghana, I argue that environmental technologies and practices that seek to make oil production ‘clean’ create imaginaries of partial protection in a context of global petro-corporate power. Contributing to recent debates about the need to ethnographically situate normative calls for decarbonization and energy transitions, the paper explores the rise of ‘extractive environmentalism’ as a form of climate politics that reproduces extractive landscapes through the revaluation of low-carbon as an exploitable asset.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a 12-month ethnography in Chile, I argue that the lithium extraction boom can be better understood by de-commodify the focus on what is extracted to what is inserted to extract, which reveals how green technologies expands neo-colonial capitalism and environmental crisis.

Paper long abstract:

Due to its materiality, lithium plays a key role in lithium-ion batteries, which has increased its demands as electric cars production is to multiply in the next years. Therefore, lithium has been framed as a strategic raw material for the new "green technologies" needed for a technological energy transition.

Hegemonic narratives have also constructed a commodity zone called the "Lithium Triangle" in South Abya Yala, given its high percentage of lithium reserves (USGS, 2020). In contrast, my 12-month ethnography in Chile (2020-2021) showed that lithium is at no point visible or differentiable materiality - but quite the opposite: lithium remains invisible and is only tracible following its relations and connections to other elements. As such, the paper will focus on what is visible in the territory as ethnographic objects and encounters, which is rather lithium insertions and relationalities: copper, infrastructure, material imaginaries, economic interests, and ways-of-being-in-the-world (West, 2016) in the desert-scape.

By mixing political ontology (Blaser, 2020) with critical geography of resources (Bakker and Bridge, 2006), I propose to de-commodify the focus on what is extracted, and rather deepen in the different elements that are inserted to extract. Against the risk to help to construct materialities rather than interconnections; fragments rather than wholes; I argue that expanding on the relationship between inserting-extracting supports the need to go beyond technological solutions and reveals how green technologies expands neo-colonial capitalism and the environmental crisis.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how people's everyday encounters and interactions with technologies as aggregated contributors to climate change relates to their classed access to technological devices and knowledge having implications on their imaginational capacity to make decarbonized lifestyle choices.

Paper long abstract:

While the European Green Deal attempts to push innovation in decarbonizing technologies, on a household level, a carbon-neutrality transition in domains of nutrition, housing and transport for many remains a utopian dream. Solar panels, heat pumps and electric cars is a massive investment that in popular imagination seems unreachable for most households in Eastern European countries like Latvia. As a result, transition is imaginable as a technological fix only in policy circles, among green entrepreneurs and the wealthiest. This paper builds on a study of diverse activists aspiring to make lifestyle choices compatible with climate goals in their struggles to calculate their carbon footprint, tinker with technologies and optimize consumption. I explore the ways how people deal with technologies and imagine their capacities in using 'green technology' as a classed clima-technological struggle. I argue that the dominant European framings of decarbonization present a developmentalist regime of growth rooted in a techno-ecological and capitalist understanding of the climate that is accessible in a highly technical form. In this vision, the figure of green technologies embodies growing technological prowess and 'smart' knowledge infrastructures for 'knowing the climate' forming a key narrative for sustaining the temporal horizon of an increasing standard of living. In the meantime, people's 'non-technological choices' that are related to their sense of self, wellbeing and navigating desires are often harder to consider materially relevant since their aggregated climate impact might be small if compared to building renovation, but can become framed as climate-related only when framed as technological choices.

Paper short abstract:

Through over forty in-depth interviews with experts, I explore how and why certain topics elicit repudiation from scientific and policy debate. This contributes to a cultural analysis of the paradigmatic celebration of technologies as bets solutions to climate crisis.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing from a broader study of disputes among environmentalists over technological solutions to climate crisis, this paper presents data on the social life of scientific findings and their implications for “renewable” (or rebuildable) technology proposals. Through in-depth study of the published works of and interviews with climatological, earth systems, and geological scientists, engineers, and policymakers, I discuss the social and political reception of their research. Prominent among their empirical assessments treated as offensive to the current policy paradigm are those related to biological limits of population and consumption as well as biological limits of resources and technological capacities needed for a “green” energy transition. I first identify kinds of evidence that are both taboo to raise in some circles and repudiated and deligitimated in others. I then outline a typology of critical responses to this research, ranging from relief and vindication among industry insiders, to moral outrage and castigation by policymakers and activists, and dismissal. I discuss observed patterned sanctions of shaming and delegitimation as reinforcing a burgeoning moral order surrounding technological schemes for decarbonization and the mechanisms for protection from transgressions against celebrated proposals. I present a sociological analysis of what has become both a policy paradigm and a moral order in the global debate about climate change.