Geoengineering guarantees ecocide for the sake of caplitalism.

With carbon emissions not slowing down in time to avoid surpassing 2°C of warming, a large number of climate experts and entrepreneur- ial capitalists are turning to questions of geoengineering and carbon removal. In After Geoengineering, Holly Jean Buck provides a useful review of many of the methods being developed and the difficulties and limitations they entail. Since carbon capture is being sold as a way to buy more time, she poses the question, time for whom or for what? Are we buying more time for endangered species, threatened habitats, and vulnerable human populations? Or are we buying more time for govern- ments and companies to continue enriching themselves and to slowly wean themselves off of fossil fuels when it is convenient to their profit margins and geopolitical strategies? As she makes clear, “the polluters are first in line to benefit from carbon capture.”62

Currently, the predominant strategy for carbon capture is through “natural” methods, namely reforestation, which comes with its own problems. But other strategies, many of them classified as geoengi- neering, are increasingly gaining attention, and sometimes, funding. Examples include injecting carbon pulled out of the atmosphere into cement or into bedrock, where it mineralizes; liquefying carbon and storing it in old gas and oil wells; constantly seeding the upper atmo- sphere with aerosols that will reflect sunlight; dusting agricultural soils with ground up minerals that increase carbon retention; or running huge offshore plantations for genetically modified algae to be used as a fuel source. The main real usage of any of these technologies, at the moment, is by the fossil fuel industry injecting captured carbon into its wells to displace oil or gas and increase output, known as enhanced oil recovery. I agree that we need to consider all of these proposals since it is a matter of stopping mass starvation and saving species from extinction, but only if we can do so fully aware of their true dimensions.

First off, we need to consider the cane toad phenomenon, whereby interventionist technologies introduced to solve problems created by earlier interventions create even bigger problems. As Western colonial civilization fumblingly developed an interventionist, mechanical under- standing of ecology, in this case in Australia, they released the giant cane toad as a predator to control runaway populations of rabbits, an earlier colonial introduction, but the cane toads ended up eating everything, decimating many native populations.

The truth is, at the intersection between knowledge and business that constitutes almost all of today’s scientific practice, there is a solid tendency to pollute first, and look into the health problems later, from plastics to PFOA to phthalates. If you dangle a dollar bill over a cliff, today’s science-driven industries will jump and assume they can use their earnings to buy a parachute before they hit the bottom.

A pertinent example of this phenomenon is how carbon capture at scale will require a massive infrastructure including a huge network of pipelines for transporting carbon from its capture site to its storage site. The fossil fuel industry are the only players in the current context with the ability to build—and profit from—this infrastructure.

And the reality is, all pipelines leak. From February 2019 to March 2021, there were around 320 “oil- and gas-related incidents” (“oil spills, fires, blowouts and gas releases”) just in the northwestern corner of New Mexico, mostly on Navajo Nation land. One such “incident” was the leakage of 1,400 barrels of fracking slurry into the local watershed.63 Shall we now build more pipelines for the sake of the environment? This is yet another proposal sopping in climate reductionism, environmen- tal racism, and coloniality. In the case of carbon pipelines, a leak would mean death by suffocation for all animal life forms nearby.

Beyond cane toads, we need to consider the very question of what we consider to be technology. After all, the Amazon rainforest constitutes a massive technology resulting from thousands of years of intelligent and reciprocal influencing by hundreds of native peoples. Next to them, carbon capture experts are amateurs. At this point it becomes necessary to distinguish between two very different paradigms of technology. What we can call interventionist or engineered technology is a Trojan horse for beliefs of human supremacy and practices of extractivism, exploita- tion, and depersonification of the Other against which the technology is deployed. Today, it is fully wrapped up in the legal regime of intellectual property and the institutional framework of the profit-oriented academy, laboratory, and research institute. It is a technology of enclosure, of the alienated worldview that looks down at our lives from above in order to impose a plan that necessarily divides governors and governed, design- ers and inert material. On the other hand, we have popular or traditional technology, which belongs to, is developed and passed down by a com- munity; which is territorially specific, nuanced, and reciprocal; which constitutes a form of dialogue and commoning and therefore tends to be ecocentric; and which is necessarily anticolonial.

Half of any technology is deployment, how a specific artifact is inte- grated and mobilized throughout society in conjunction with other technologies and organizational techniques. Currently, interventionist technologies are deployed by a massive, ecocidal infrastructure and their use is controlled by corporations governed by the need to profit. The institutional paradigm reinforces technocratic, quantitative thinking that is reductionist and blind to complex realities on the ground, putting well-meaning scientists in bed with entrepreneurs and economists, giving rise to figures like the “carbon budget” that normalize the extreme suffering and damage that are already widespread.

To discuss BECCS or “rocks-for-crops” in the current context, as though once we invent these marvelous things we will be able to use them in a sensible manner, is to be completely oblivious of our sur- roundings. The extreme naïveté of brilliant scientists should never be underestimated. It was, after all, pacifists who gave us nuclear weapons (particularly Einstein, Meitner, and Szilard). The infrastructural and cultural context—who holds power and how power is shaped and con- ceived—matters. The intentions of inventors and researchers do not.

An acceleration of interventionist technologies will only accelerate the tendencies of power as it already exists. Already, technologies for controlling the weather are exacerbating pre-existing conflicts. Seeding clouds to capture rain or prevent it has pitted the owners of BMW factory lots in Mexico against local farmers, and contributed to the militarized conflict between China and India, with the latter unable to compete with the scale of the Chinese program to harness ever diminishing rainfall.