Short abstract:

This presentation retraces the history of “negative emissions” as a proposal that bridges not only land-use and energy-systems models, but more broadly ecosystems and energy systems perspectives on climate change, and discusses the valuation puzzles that ensue.

Long abstract:

So called “negative emissions” have become an almost inescapable component of mitigation pathways. Research in STS and in climate science has documented the speculative character of negative emission technologies, tracing their origins in Integrated Assessment Models and their failure to materialize to date, and suggesting their invention risks locking us into unrealistic techno-optimistic imaginaries of climate action (Beck and Mahony 2018, Beck and Oomen 2021, Anderson and Jewell 2019). In this presentation, I will explore the hypothesis that the invention of negative emissions is not merely about techno-optimism, but also about enrolling ecosystems in climate action. More specifically, it is about finding ways of coupling industrial and terrestrial systems, both physically and conceptually.

I will focus on the history of BECCS – BioEnergy with Carbon Capture and Storage. The idea of BECCS is relatively simple: if one burns CO2 stored in biomass to generate power, and captures and stores the CO2 emitted in the process, the emission balance is negative. The idea emerged in the early 2000s from the encounter of forestry sciences with engineering, and its integration into models drove the coupling of land-use and energy systems models. Bridging industrial and natural systems is a condition for making BECCS even thinkable. I will discuss how it required both inventing new forms of valuations and articulating two distinct perspectives on climate change: energy-systems and ecosystems perspectives, or, in Isabel Schrickel’s words, “control” and “complexity” (Schrickel 2017).