Gambling with our climate futures: On the temporal structure of negative emissions

Abstract

This paper considers negative emissions—the deliberate removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere by human intervention—as a future-oriented imaginary of connected social and technological order. It does so in order to examine how expectations around the development and use of negative emission technologies are managed with the help of integrated assessment models (IAMs). By treating this family of models as a case study for drawing out historical associations between the terminology of risk saturating the discourse of net-zero emissions and the modern conception of the future as an unexplored territory to be profitably colonized, the paper argues that integrated assessment modeling, as a praxis of forecast, structure and organize our experience of the future through standards of risk management and utility maximization. It concludes that to consider risk as a means of navigating between possible futures is to engage with practices that are enacted in the name of a particular understanding of how one ought to act in the face of deep uncertainty. Aside from epistemic questions of how to treat various kinds of uncertainties inherent to IAMs, of pressing concern are thus also normative questions of how its representation of environmental hazards in terms of risk are distinctively writing the contours of our contemporary forms of responsibility toward nature, each other, as well as future generations.