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Short abstract:

Why, how, and for whom are the global oceans becoming an engine of climate research, action, and politics? A comparison of the sociotechnical imaginaries that animate research into ocean-based negative emissions technologies in the US, Germany, and Australia reveals a distinctive style of reasoning.

Long abstract:

Why, how, and for whom are the global oceans becoming an engine of climate research, action, and politics? What exactly is an ocean-based “negative emissions technology” (NET) and what can it tell us about changing uses and understandings of marine life and worlds?

Marine geoengineering research claims to prime its promises with geopolitical context if not restraint through concepts like “transboundary effects,” “systemic risk,” or “moral hazard.” Yet highlighting “knowledge gaps”—between, for example, research and deployment or measurement and regulation—may not so much interrogate as prepare the reasonableness of engineering ocean life and worlds. Can a broader view of knowing—one that emphasizes the critical potential of STS scholarship to detect the drives of capital, knowledge/power, and technofuturism—hold open the straightforwardly pressing question of why transforming the oceans into a planetary-scale carbon “net” can pass for a seemingly “normal” thing to want to do?

To address these questions, I venture some interpretations of the current trajectory of research and development into ocean-based NETs in the US, Germany, and Australia. First, I test the usefulness of sociotechnical imaginaries for showing how these different geographic but also politico-moral contexts of inquiry offer fertile ground for the same proposed marine transformation. I then analyze this transformation as “net thinking,” a style of reasoning that connects negative emissions technologies with net-zero forecasts in an aspirationally total description of global environmental change. I close with some suggestions for how to get out from under the net by engaging the writings of Iris Murdoch.