Up in the air: the challenge of conceptualizing and crafting a post-carbon planetary politics to confront climate change

ABSTRACT

I argue that confronting climate change requires conceptualizing and crafting a post-carbon planetary politics focused on removing carbon from the atmosphere. A focal point for beginning to build this politics should be carbon removal networks. I conceptualize these networks as vehicles that tap diverse knowledge domains (from sciences such as ecology or chemistry to activism and the law) to establish a planetary-wide political alliance which removes carbon while delivering nutrition, shelter, and care to populations in all manner of geographical settings. Such networks would mobilize the cooperative and collaborative power of civil society to establish an extensive, significant, and as yet under-recognized, ‘civil society carbon sink.’ I then suggest astute political organizing might take advantage of contemporary (and emerging) technologies to build such alliances and amplify the potential impact of organizing to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• civil society
• carbon removal networks
• cooperative economies
• emerging technologies

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Nancy Ettlinger for always reading the numerous versions of this paper with enthusiasm and patience. I also thank Jun Borras and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments on the original and revised version of this manuscript. Any mistakes or errors are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Laudel (2006), research funding agencies operate on the mistaken assumption their systems support only the highest quality research, whereas evidence from Australia and Germany demonstrate that

successful acquisition of competitive grants is influenced by a variety of factors such as a country’s general investment in research, a scientist’s research field, the availability of enabling funds, and the continuity of the research trail. These factors depend either partly or not at all on a scientist’s or a proposal’s quality. (398)

The parochialism of the ‘quality myth’ interacts with systemic practices that direct funding toward ‘closed clubs’ (Enger 2018) of higher education institutions.

2 A further consideration is the verticality of urban space: one hectare in a high-rise city could contain many multiples of hectares when roof space and walls are used to grow biomass or food. Capitalists are leading the way in the emergence of urban indoor vertical farms or so-called ‘controlled environment agriculture’ using LED lights, climate-controls, and carbon dioxide (Benke and Tomkins 2017; van Delden, Sharath Kumar, and Butturini 2021); carbon removal networks might follow suit via experimentation and innovation to improve methodologies, while discovering and sharing new techniques with others.

3 Such a shift is not quite what has happened with Toronto’s move away from Alphabet’s smart city vision but there are resemblances (Jacobs 2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alistair Fraser

Alistair Fraser is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University, Ireland. He holds a PhD in Geography from the Ohio State University, USA. He is the author of Global Foodscapes: Oppression and Resistance in the Life of Food (Routledge, 2017) and the co-author with Rob Kitchin of Slow Computing: Why we need balanced digital lives (Bristol University Press, 2020). Other works include articles in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Rural Studies, Environment & Planning A, and Geoforum.