One of the things we mean by cosmolocalism in the Alternative UK is the growing capacity for communities to not just manage their own affairs, but have a say and a take on the wider structural and civilisational forces that bear upon them (enabled by networked society).

At the very least, the pandemic and climate catastrophe has brought technology’s disruptions of nature to our front doors, indeed to the spaces between us, our mutual respirations.

If the big systems in our lives are no longer humming away in the background, but right in our faces, we need to grow as citizens to such challenge, and first imagine that we can decide the direction of major forces in our world.

We came upon a raging debate this week which clearly asks us to imagine ourselves in that role, so momentous are its consequences. The core of it is: who controls the deployment and development of carbon capture technology? If we urgently need to suck carbon out of our atmosphere, as well as push to zero the amount we’re putting into it, whose agenda carries forward that need?

The tip was this audio discussion in the American leftist magazine Jacobin’s podcast, Behind the News (a long standing discussion show from Doug Henwood). The first item is an interview with the US political economist Christian Parenti, who has written “A Left Defense of Carbon Dioxide Removal: the state must be forced to deploy civilization-saving technology”. There are some pages here on Google books, but we’ve screengrabbed the opening paragraphs (UPDATE: Here’s the full PDF paper from Parenti, graciously given to us):

Two-fisted talk! A bit of research opens up a nascent school of left thinkers (centred around Holly Jean Buck and Andreas Malm) who are also making the same case - that we urgently need these air-carbon-removing technologies, as part of our armoury against global warming, but that commerce and the marketplace won’t get us there in time. Thus, the need for leftist movements to conduct one last assault on the ramparts of the state, which will direct the investment and planning required.

As ever in A/UK, we’re conflicted. We wish our leftist friends well in their long march through electoralism and parliamentary politics, on the way to seizing the state levers that are available. But we retain our emphasis on power-from-below, community power, and citizens’ action, as the preconditions in which any kind of top-down strategy might flourish, than wither in the face of distrust and scepticism. “Nothing about us without us” is the usual slogan. So how can communities be “with” the technologies of carbon capture (without waiting for state electoralism to save us)?

A paper from Andreas Malm, Seize the Means of Carbon Removal: the Political Economy of Direct Air Capture, which is in the same left space as Parenti, nevertheless highlights aspects of carbon capture which don’t imply massively centralised projects. There is no reason why carbon-from-air machines shouldn’t be as equally (and as locally) distributed as, say, wind farms, heat capture or other community-level generators of renewable energy. Indeed carbon dioxide has a whole planet’s atmosphere to occupy. So the greater dispersion and localisation of the technologies drawing it out of the air, the better.

What’s fascinating about Malm’s work (which has the added virtue of being wittily written) is the way he points up the metaphorical battle that has to go on around carbon capture tech.

Its commercial advocates at the moment, often taking heavy financial investment from existing fossil fuel companies, use the delightful “toilet” metaphor. Carbon capture is equivalent to us “flushing away” the ordure of the fossil economy. Indeed, in some of their hype, it’s as if this will allow our carbon civilisation to continue as it is - now that from-air capture has provided the essential plumbing system to deal with its consequences.

Where do we put this sucked-out carbon? What can it be used for? At the more psychopathic end, the idea is that it can be turned into more standard resources and products - moulded trainers, airfuel - which repollute the same atmosphere, in their manufacture.

However, as Malm puts it: “direct air capture can perform useful work in the background, its primary function to chip away at historical emissions, not cancel out present or anticipated ones – like the slow and tedious work of cleaning up after an oil-spill, futile before the leak has been stemmed.”

The most inert outcome is transformation into a non-toxic, limestone-like substance, which can be buried. Or the carbon can be repumped into used-up oilfields (as long as it isn’t used - as some advocate - to push remaining oil reserves up to the surface).

Malm wants to make clear that adopting the “toilet” metaphor means we’d miss a vast opportunity to really unleash those “forces of production”, that might blunt the toughest blows of climate breakdown:

The fact that there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere means precisely that there can be no more of it. Perhaps the greatest folly of banking on any substitute for ultra-radical emissions cuts is the presupposition that the climate system can be driven to a state of collapse and then wound back to the status quo ante, much as one turns a radiator up and down: but this system is not linear.

If the West Antarctic ice sheet has drifted into the ocean or the Amazon rainforest desiccated, they will not be instantly resurrected by subtracting 10 or 50 ppm. The breakdown itself cannot be put into reverse gear.

All the same, three things remain indisputable: such break- down becomes likelier the longer an excess of CO2 stays in the atmosphere; without human intervention, it will linger for millennia; nothing guarantees that fossil capital is defeated and emissions cease this evening.

That composite of circumstances makes it inadvisable to write off carbon dioxide removal completely.

More here. These pieces all make it clear that there is a public ideological battle to be waged about the uses of carbon capture - highly urgent, as this government begins to deploy it in the UK.

Our predilection for “geoengineering” - the overall term for active intervention in the biosphere - would be initiatives at the scale implied by this “nature futures” strand of Atlas Of The Future:

Coral rock revived by electrical stimulus in Indonesia
A web of wildlines for Invertebrates across the UK
AI and sensors watch the world’s bees

—and much more. But there is something to be said for Parenti’s point, made in 2019, that:

…We cannot retreat from our role as environment makers. Humans have always been remaking “nature.” Today, we do so as reckless, marauding somnambulants. But this is not inevitable or “natural.”

…We can become self-conscious, cooperative, solidaristic, life-producing and -enhancing, environment makers. In the age of climate crisis, we need to embrace that role on a planetary scale.

What we will not do, because we cannot, is retreat from something called “nature.” So, while the Green New Deal is about policy, it also relates to our deeper mission as an environment-making species. We cannot “tread lightly on the Earth,” but we can pull back from the brink of extinction and remake and restore the planet.

More here. And your overall responses welcomed below.

Carbon capture can sit in the background, cleaning up our historic biosphere damage. But there's an acute battle for the metaphors around it