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Paper short abstract

Studies have largely overlooked the processes in which carbonisation takes place as both technical, environmental, social and political processes. We develop the terminology centres of carbonisation to zoom in on how responsibility, power, guilt and agency are practically distributed differently.

Paper long abstract

In last decades, solutions to increasing carbon emissions have largely developed within a techno-optimistic frame. While we have witnessed a decade of ‘acting’ on mitigating the consequences of climate change, emissions keep increasing globally. The paradox of increased climate action and increasing carbon emissions calls for reflection of the research methodologies with which we attend to climate change across a range of empirical domains.

STS scholars have ethnographically unfolded and demonstrated the limits and potential of technological solutions; however, we argue that STS, especially using ethnographic methods, has the potential to attend to emissions and thereby also to the limitations needed to enable change. While decarbonisation has emerged as a stable term referring to the societal processes actively decreasing overall carbon emissions, studies have largely overlooked the processes in which carbonisation takes place as both technical, environmental, social and political processes.

Drawing on field studies on fossil fuel divestment and renewable energy investments, we develop the terminology centres of carbonisation, with attention to how responsibility, power, guilt and agency are differently distributed between and certainly beyond the individual and the government. The relations at play must be attended to with a lens of effects and distributive causality. The framework can be seen as a way that STS can limit itself, and thereby also foster analytical practices that can attend to questions of differentiation by asking: who are contributing to emissions, and who can limit them?