Exploring the Politics of Climate EngineeringExploring the Politics of Climate Engineering: Discourses For and Against Climate Engineering in the International.

Exploring the Politics of Climate Engineering: Discourses For and Against Climate Engineering in the International Mass Media

JONAS ANSHELM & ANDERS HANSSON ([email protected]]

UNIT OF TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL CHANGE

LINKÖPING UNIVERSITY CLIMATE ENGINEERING PROGRAMME (LUCE), LINKÖPING UNIVERSITY, SWEDEN

Introduction

Anshelm J. & Hansson A. The last chance to save the planet? An analysis of geoengineering's advocates discourse in the public debate. (under review)

Anshelm J. & Hansson A. (2014) Battling Promethean dreams and Trojan horses: Revealing the critical discourses of geoengineering. Energy Research and Social Science. 2:135-144.

Aim: Identify the central claims, controversial subjects, and what worldviews, values, and problematizations that are shared by the two discourses (the advocacy and critical discourse) in the public debate

Why study geoengineering in mass media?

Specific portrayals may change the course of national and international policies, governance and public opinion

Endorse a sound and reflexive debate

Introduction - methodology

About 1500 newspaper articles from all over the world, published between 2005 and 2013 in English, German, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian

More than 75% of the articles were in English and published in either the USA or the UK.

A total of about 10% critical of geoengineering

We define geoengineering advocacy as recommending more geoengineering research or deployment

Only deeply sceptical or opposed storylines are included in the discourse critical of geoengineering

Geoengineering: Grand global project and an idea of humanity’s ultimate control of the planet’s climate

Advocacy discourse

Storyline: The scientists’ double fear

Climate researchers now have re-evaluated the climate crisis and have started to advocate research into geoengineering, even though it entails major risks. Either to inactively wait for the catastrophe or to explore the final option: geoengineering.

Fear of the consequences of climate change is an asset or a powerful rhetorical resource (see also Rayner, 2014).

Geoengineering is, unlike other large-scale technologies, not connected to promises of a better world – negative expectations

Advocacy discourse

The failure of politics and cynical industrial fatalism

Politics has failed and can no longer reverse the situation – geoengineering is the price to be paid for political failure.

This viewpoint sees politics as impeding efficient climate change management.

The resignation in this storyline rests on fatalism

Advocacy discourse

Pure technology: a bridge to a sustainable future

The development of geoengineering is referred to as “plan B”; it constitutes a “last-ditch” alternative, “parachute”, “airbag”, and “last resort”.

It is possible to test, study, and identify the environmental consequences of geoengineering in advance, but also admitted that such assumptions are highly problematic.

Advocacy discourse

Just mimicking nature

The most promising geoengineering technologies obtained their “proof of concept from nature”, it is just about “mimicking nature”.

Has gradually gained influence over the last two or three years, and more or less replaced the storyline of the scientist’s double fear.

De-politizising influence?

The discourse critical of geoengineering

The technological gamble with the planet

Geoengineering schemes are treated as more dangerous than any previous technological enterprise, and are understood as “megalomania” 

e.g. “a dangerous game with unclear rules”, “the biggest technological gamble of all”, “rolling the dice”, “gaming with the earth”, “completely nutty”.

Global geoengineering is inherently untestable.

The discourse critical of geoengineering

The inability to handle structural dysfunction

The ultimate sign of contemporary industrial society's inability or unwillingness to confront fundamental structural dysfunctionality:

“the ultimate expression of a desire to avoid doing the hard work of reducing emissions”

Geoengineering proponents are understood as defending the belief that it is unnecessary to revise the goals of economic growth/increasing consumption

The discourse critical of geoengineering

The geoclique and the Trojan horse

An extreme and grand-scale form of industrial “greenwashing”

The main actors are a “geoclique” with personal economic interests

Venture capitalists and conservative think tanks together with the military form a powerful lobby for geoengineering.

Intense lobbying is supporting the geoclique and trying to admit the “Trojan horse” (i.e. geoengineering research)

The discourse critical of geoengineering

The democratic deficit and the need for public engagement

The really important questions concerning the incredible risks are neglected or forgotten by the proponents

Primarily a moral and political concern, and not an issue to be left to scientists and engineers

Also creates new governance problems: It could be attempted unilaterally, or even be militarized

Discussion

Contrary to what is claimed in the critical discourse, the advocacy discourse anticipated the main problems of geoengineering and presented many central risks and moral concerns openly

As most other environmental innovations geoengineering is not framed as a typical ecological modern technology by its proponents – even negative expectations. And few pure advocates

The debate seems to open up (see also Scholte, 2012), but is this seemingly shared view of the climate crisis, acknowledgment of major risks and problems a good basis for a mutual understanding of geoengineering?

Discussion: Tentative explanations of diverging standpoints

1. Field experiments will never provide the answers needed

2. Geoengineering as a method for buying time in order to make way for renewables and a low-carbon society is completely discounted in the critical discourse. 

3. Third, the most horrifying risks of geoengineering are, according to the discourse critical of geoengineering, not directly related to its deployment, but to its reinforcement of unsustainable social and economic structures.

4. Geoengineering is depicted as an act of piracy, a form of neo-colonialism.

5. Leading proponents of geoengineering are not primarily devoted to long-term sustainability worldwide, but rather to promoting their own profits (e.g., from patent rights), advancing personal careers, or serving the interests of think tanks or the fossil fuel industry. 

6. The discourse critical of geoengineering insists that international political action is both possible and necessary (i.e. no “failure of politics”).

Concluding remarks

The advocacy discourse is more reflexive and critical than what is claimed in the critical discourse

The fundamental dissensus between the two discourses is related mainly to the views on social change, knowledge limits, and humanity's ability/right to control nature (see also e.g. Hamilton, 2013).

Promises of progress and objective truth are no longer the legitimation grounds for research into and deployment of the technology – fear and uncertainty are assets.

However, by the end of the studied period, considerable efforts are being made to enact geoengineering as less uncertain, by emphasizing the mimicking nature storyline (de-politzising influence?), while the ‘scientists double fear’ storyline and emergency framings are declining.