There is a common framing in communications about carbon dioxide removal (CDR) which amounts to saying ‘we need to do both’ CDR and emissions reductions, but without explaining further what this means or how to achieve it. This leaves the impression that such framing is empty and performative, doing little to counteract the risk of mitigation deterrence, i.e., that the pursuit of CDR undermines and delays emission reductions, which the framing is meant to address. This article substantiates and illustrates this claim, and develops recommendations for how to frame CDR more carefully. Such careful framing crucially involves indicating the relatively minor role CDR can play compared to emissions reductions on the path to net zero. Finally, we reflect on the barriers to and importance of these recommendations being taken up.

The risk that overall mitigation efforts will be deterred by the pursuit of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is real. Some awareness about this risk among climate policy stakeholders appears to be widespread, but it is not clear that the risk is being taken very seriously. This essay identifies arguments for thinking that mitigation deterrence from CDR is not a big risk. These arguments revolve around removal being too small a thing to deter anything, and that other things are worse for deterring overall mitigation efforts. The essay presents counterarguments, facilitated by a shift of the perspective on technologies from being physical, stand-alone, apolitical things, to one where technologies also have discursive effects, are part of the wider phenomenon of technology in general, and are entangled with politics. The essay aims to strengthen the concern about mitigation deterrence from CDR, and so help justify efforts to pre-empt it.

Using carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) for carbon removal is crucial to climate policy, but implementation at scale is at risk owing to political obstacles. Climate policies must avoid relying on empty promises of CCS for carbon removal without necessary financial resourcing and support emissions reductions separately from carbon removal.

Carbon dioxide Capture and Storage (CCS) is a technology that captures carbon dioxide from a point source, transports it to a suitable site and sequesters the CO2, typically underground. The entry looks at the history and technology of CCS along with some of the issues that need to be resolved.

Two major sociopolitical challenges loom over the development of carbon removal. One is mitigation deterrence: that research and deployment of carbon removal could delay mitigation efforts. The other is environmental and climate justice — in particular that carbon removal will be developed in ways that further environmental racism, e.g. for the benefit of interests and groups in the global North while harming overburdened communities of color. A variety of policy measures have been proposed to deal with these challenges, from developing separate targets for emissions and removals to social safeguarding principles and standards. Here, we suggest that such measures in and of themselves are unlikely to be sufficient. Policy recommendations and scholarship on mitigation deterrence need to become more attentive to how racial capitalism helps form the conditions for mitigation deterrence. We describe how racial capitalism sets up mitigation deterrence, and how mitigation deterrence in turn goes on to perpetuate racial capitalism. We conclude by suggesting a few ways in which incorporating understandings of racial capitalism can help policymakers, carbon removal developers and investors make decisions that limit the risks of mitigation deterrence and racial injustice.

Concerns have been raised that a focus on greenhouse gas removals (GGR) in climate models, scientific literature and other media might deter measures to mitigate climate change through reduction of emissions at source – the phenomenon of ‘mitigation deterrence’. Given the urgent need for climate action, any delay in emissions reduction would be worrying. We convened nine deliberative workshops to expose stakeholders to futures scenarios involving mitigation deterrence. The workshops examined ways in which deterrence might arise, and how it could be minimized. The deliberation exposed social and cultural interactions that might otherwise remain hidden. The paper describes narratives and ideas discussed in the workshops regarding political and economic mechanisms through which mitigation deterrence might occur, the plausibility of such pathways, and measures recommended to reduce the risk of such occurrence. Mitigation deterrence is interpreted as an important example of the ‘attraction of delay’ in a setting in which there are many incentives for procrastination. While our stakeholders accepted the historic persistence of delay in mitigation, some struggled to accept that similar processes, involving GGRs, may be happening now. The paper therefore also reviews the claims made by participants about mitigation deterrence, identifying discursive strategies that advocates of carbon removal might deploy to deflect concerns about mitigation deterrence. We conclude that the problem of mitigation deterrence is significant, needs to be recognized in climate policy, and its mechanisms better understood. Based on stakeholder proposals we suggest ways of governing GGR which would maximize both GGR and carbon reduction through other means.

Achieving net zero means balancing remaining emissions with carbon removal, and understanding the nature and scope of residual emissions is key to planning decarbonized energy and industrial systems. However, our analysis of long-term climate strategies shows that many governments lack clear projections for residual emissions at net zero.

Carbon dioxide removal is rapidly becoming a key focus in climate research and politics. This is raising concerns of "moral hazard" or "mitigation deterrence," that is, the risk that promises of and/or efforts to pursue carbon removal end up reducing or delaying near-term mitigation efforts. Some, however, contest this risk, arguing that it is overstated or lacking evidence. In this review, we explore the reasons behind the disagreement in the literature. We unpack the different ways in which moral hazard/mitigation deterrence (MH/MD) is conceptualized and examine how these conceptualizations inform assessments of MH/MD risks. We find that MH/MD is a commonly recognized feature of modeled mitigation pathways but that conclusions as to the real-world existence of MH/MD diverge on individualistic versus structural approaches to examining it. Individualistic approaches favor narrow conceptualizations of MH/MD, which tend to exclude the wider political-economic contexts in which carbon removal emerges. This exclusion limits the value and relevance of such approaches. We argue for a broader understanding of what counts as evidence of delaying practices and propose a research agenda that complements theoretical accounts of MH/MD with empirical studies of the political-economic structures that may drive mitigation deterrence dynamics.This article is categorized under:The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Benefits of MitigationThe Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate KnowledgePolicy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance

Researchers using deliberative techniques tend to favour in-person processes. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has added urgency to the question of whether meaningful deliberative research is possible in an online setting. This paper considers the reasons for taking deliberation online, including bringing people together more easily; convening international events; and reducing the environmental impact of research. It reports on four case studies: a set of stakeholder workshops considering greenhouse gas removal technologies, convened online in 2019, and online research workshops investigating local climate strategies; as well as two in-person processes which moved online due to COVID-19: Climate Assembly UK, a Citizens' Assembly on climate change, and the Lancaster Citizens' Jury on Climate Change. It sets out learnings from these processes, concluding that deliberation online is substantively different from in-person meetings, but can meet the requirements of deliberative research, and can be a rewarding and useful process for participants and researchers alike.

The apparent, if uncertain, rejection of neoliberalism manifested by the election of Donald Trump in the US (alongside the slim, but clear majority for Brexit in the UK, and a growing racist and protectionist nationalism across Europe) necessitates renewed analysis of the future of both promises of technical fixes to climate change, such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) (in this chapter collectively referred to as climate engineering), and the potential future hegemonic political regimes that may replace neoliberalism.Drawing on a cultural political economy analysis of the co-evolution of political regimes and promises of technical fixes to climate change (Markusson et al. 2017), we here discuss what the current moment of radical destabilisation might augur.The election of Trump indicates a potential unsettling of an established dynamic whereby promises of technical fixes to climate change co-evolved with, and imperfectly supported, the neoliberal power regime and its preferred marketbased solutions to the climate change problem.We identify two key and interacting dialectics, between neoliberalism and illiberalism, and between continued neoliberal (but illiberally challenged) US hegemony and budding China-centred liberalism 2.0.Both these dialectics appear conducive to prolonged attention to the promise of climate engineering, as talk and research, or even as limited deployment.

In this perspective article, we call for more engagement with the unexplored politics of residual emissions. Residual emissions are those emissions that remain at the point of net zero, despite abatement efforts. Unlike carbon dioxide removal, which has been the focus of a lively research and policy debate, the notion of residual emissions remains relatively unexplored so far. With the mainstreaming of net zero as the long-term goal of climate policy, the politics of residual emissions are set to become a key point of contestation. Claims about residual emissions tend to revolve around notions of necessity and possibility, i.e. emissions that derive from activities deemed socially necessary yet impossible to fully abate. In this perspective article, we highlight how such claims are socially constructed and ultimately contingent on values, norms and interests. We call upon researchers to help render visible the geographically and historically contingent claims to necessity and possibility that underpin projected residual emissions. We see this as an important means to repoliticize debates about the limits and possibilities of emissions abatement, and suggest entry points for such research efforts.

Net-zero targets imply that continuing residual emissions will be balanced by carbon dioxide removal. However, residual emissions are typically not well defined, conceptually or quantitatively. We analysed governments’ long-term strategies submitted to the UNFCCC to explore projections of residual emissions, including amounts and sectors. We found substantial levels of residual emissions at net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, on average 18% of current emissions for Annex I countries. The majority of strategies were imprecise about which sectors residual emissions would originate from, and few offered specific projections of how residual emissions could be balanced by carbon removal. Our findings indicate the need for a consistent definition of residual emissions, as well as processes that standardize and compare expectations about residual emissions across countries. This is necessary for two reasons: to avoid projections of excessive residuals and correspondent unsustainable or unfeasible carbon-removal levels and to send clearer signals about the temporality of fossil fuel use.

Negative emissions techniques (NETs) promise to capture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and sequester them. Since decarbonisation efforts have been slow, and the climate crisis is intensifying, it is increasingly likely that removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere will be necessary to meet internationally-agreed targets. Yet there are fears that pursuing NETs might undermine other mitigation efforts, primarily the reduction (rather than removal) of greenhouse gas emissions. This paper discusses the risk of this phenomenon, named ‘mitigation deterrence’. Some of us have previously argued that a cultural political economy framework is needed for analysing NETs. Such a framework explains how promises of future NETs deployment, understood as defensive spatio-temporal fixes, are depoliticised and help defend an existing neoliberal political regime, and its inadequate climate policy. Thus they risk deterring necessary emissions reductions. Here we build on that framework, arguing that to understand such risks, we need to understand them as the result of historically situated, evolving, lived practices. We identify key contributing practices, focussing in particular but not exclusively on climate modelling, and discuss how they have been reproduced and co-evolved, here likened to having dug a hole for ourselves as a society. We argue that understanding and reducing deterrence risks requires phronetic knowledge practices, involving not just disembodied, dispassionate technoeconomic knowledge-making, but also strategic attention to political and normative issues, as well as emotional labour. Reflecting on life in the hole hurts.

Lay people tend to prefer natural solutions for carbon removal over technological ones. Researchers have argued that all carbon removal methods can be seen as "natural." Here I argue that it is also in practice necessary to see all carbon removal methods as "technological," that is, standardized, engineered, machine-like, enclosed systems. Natural carbon removal methods are complex socio-natural-technical messy systems that interact in complex ways with their environments. But to work well in practice as an option in climate policy-including in any emissions trading or offsetting schemes-they simultaneously need to be framed in much narrower terms, to be accountable (modellable, tradeable). And there will be efforts to not just frame, but physically make natural carbon removal as standardized, engineered, machine-like and enclosed as possible-although doomed to never be fully successful. It is in these senses that all carbon removal is technological. The ambiguity between an often vague framing as natural, a narrowly technological framing, and a wider socio-natural-technical framing, matters for public understanding and acceptance. Would lay publics still prefer natural solutions to carbon removal, if they are informed about the inevitable technological framing and shaping of them? Research is needed about this. It also matters for the risk of mitigation deterrence. Previous research shows that the narrow framing, of carbon removal methods as technology is implicated in societal processes that deter efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate Knowledge Climate, History, Society, Culture > Technological Aspects and Ideas

The idea of the carbon budget is a powerful conceptual tool to define and quantify the climate challenge. Whilst scientists present the carbon budget as the geophysical foundation for global net-zero targets, the financial metaphor of a budget implies figuratively the existence of a ‘budget manager’ who oversees the budget balance. Using this fictive character of budget manager as a heuristic device, the paper analyses the roles of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) under a carbon budget. We argue that both CDR and SRM can be understood as ‘technologies of offset’. CDR offsets positive carbon emissions by negative emissions, whereas SRM offsets the warming from positive greenhouse gas forcing by the induced cooling from negative forcing. These offset technologies serve as flexible budgeting tools in two different strategies for budget management: they offer the promise of achieving a balanced budget, but also introduce the possibility for running a budget deficit. The lure of offsetting rests on the flexibility of keeping up an ‘appearance’ of delivering a given budget whilst at the same time easing budget constraints for a certain period of time. The political side-effect of offsetting is to change the stringency of budgetary constraints from being regulated by geophysics to being adjustable by human discretion. As a result, a budget deficit can be normalised as an acceptable fiscal condition. We suggest that the behavioural tendency of policymakers to avoid blame could lead them to resort to using offset technologies to circumvent the admission of failure to secure a given temperature target.