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Paper short abstract

Analyzing the social and epistemic aspects of carbon durability and drawing on Agamben's political theology, this paper argues that Carbon Removal is better understood as an apparatus for accumulating and governing debt: it contains the undesirable while creating obligations across deep time.

Paper long abstract

Gaining momentum after the 2015 Paris Agreement, Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies are often framed as canceling out emissions toward climate mitigation. However, recent debates on carbon “durability”—the persistence of sequestration across different methods and timescales—complicate this promise.

Analyzing the social and epistemic aspects of carbon durability and drawing on Agamben's political theology, this paper argues that CDR is better understood as an apparatus for accumulating and governing debt. Agamben (in The Mystery of Evil [2017] and elsewhere) shows that in modern governance, evil must be contained rather than expelled, because the very act of restraint structures historical time and enables political life to continue. Carbon removal emerges precisely to fulfill such a role: not eliminating CO₂ but containing it, while simultaneously creating new liabilities and obligations across deep time.

Carbon durability is not only a matter of geophysical capacity but a complex socio-technical construction including scientific definitions, standardization protocols, legal and accounting structures, economic instruments of derisking and carbon insurance, professionalized monitoring practices, and routinized landscape maintenance. Aside from the flows and storage of material carbon, this governmental apparatus also manages temporal obligations towards future landscapes and generations. To make carbon durable, then, is to create socio-epistemic debt: responsibility for institutional memory, monitoring infrastructure, data collection, and remediation capacity that must persist for centuries.

Methodologically, I analyze public and private durability standards (Kyoto Protocol, EU framework, Verra, Puro.earth) through Agamben’s discussion of the katechon and the debt/guilt binary, as well as through parallels to the history of burial practices.