by Emilia Groupp, Stanford University, United States
What if the solution to climate change was as easy as building giant space mirrors that reflect sunlight away from the earth to reduce global warming? Or perhaps, two Dutch researchers ventured, we could build huge underwater walls around northern Europe to prevent rising sea levels from submerging coastal cities. Better yet, let’s just send nukes into the upper stratosphere and cross our fingers that it does something.
These wild ideas may have been science fiction ten years ago, but as pressure mounts to address climate change in the face of record-high emissions, those promising near magical solutions have emerged on the global stage en force. A record number of new technologies lobbyists descended on the 2023 COP meeting in Dubai, with 475 lobbyists just for carbon capture alone, along with hundreds more ‘clean’ tech startups and companies offering ‘green’ innovations, making Expo City feel more like a trade show than a climate conference. The entire space was bursting with exhibits of untested and unproven technologies, each promising a myriad of solutions to the ‘problem’ of climate change. Talks, debates, and negotiations focused on the potential of technological interventions, such as those claiming to be able to desalinate farmland, harvest water out of desert air, produce new kinds of energy resources, and capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Concepts like ‘dust grounding,’ ‘shoreline rehabilitation,’ and ‘climate repair’ were advanced by both academic research centers and tech startups attempting to promote technical solutions to environmental degradation.
The proliferation of climate change technologies is not just a passing trend or a symptom of startup fever. Rather, techno-fixes have emerged as increasingly central to powerful (and sometimes privately funded) political agendas surrounding climate change mitigation and governance. For instance, the Climate Overshoot Commission was established in 2022 by a steering committee made up of individuals associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and geoengineering researchers from US universities. The steering committee claimed to have founded the Commission to explore strategies to reduce the chances of exceeding the 1.5C warming threshold. The Commission’s report, published just before COP28, advocated for technologies like carbon capture and geoengineering as key strategies in climate mitigation efforts. At best, these technologies have not been demonstrated at scale; at worst, they could result in possible damage to the entire biosphere. Despite its associations with IPCC actors, the Commission is not mandated nor sanctioned by the UN, and has invited criticism that the purpose of the group was merely to build the legitimacy of disputed technologies and stimulate the market for such controversial interventions. Since 2022, over 500 academic researchers from 67 countries have signed an open letter calling for an International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering. Despite such widespread pushback, the Commission’s recommendations were embraced at the most recent COP meeting, making their way into final agreements. At the national level, such technologies are similarly being included in country-level climate models as part of plans to avoid breaching a 1.5C temperature rise, even though they are not currently realistic at the scales proposed.
In many ways, climate change is increasingly portrayed as a technical problem that can be solved with technological ingenuity. There are several compelling explanations for this embrace of speculative technologies and techno-fixes. Most prominently, these technologies create the false impression that we can achieve climate goals while continuing expansive fossil fuel consumption. In this vein, the idea that climate change is a problem that merely awaits technological innovation distracts from its root causes, and makes space for the fossil fuel industry to continue business as usual. Addressing climate change is also, as the US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen maintained, ‘the greatest economic opportunity of our time.’ There are clearly heavy financial stakes driving the push for technological solutions, and fossil fuel companies are just one of many interested parties attempting to maximize profit. At the same time, the sheer number of people promoting new technologies at COP28 in Dubai – an unprecedented number in all aspects – raises questions as to the role of such spaces in promoting and legitimizing the high profile of technology in climate mitigation and governance. Namely, how do the spaces of COP meetings contribute to configuring climate change as a technical problem, in need of technical solutions? How do actors navigating these spaces produce political confidence in arguably unreliable technologies? What does this focus on technological optimism obscure? Which actors and perspectives are excluded, and who are those who stand to gain from such ‘solutions’?
I offer some preliminary perspectives based on ongoing ethnographic research on large-scale renewable energy development and projects aimed at cultivating new ‘climate resilient’ landscapes, the contours of which are in part shaped by international climate agreements and initiatives. My engagements focus predominantly on those working in the renewable energy industry and proponents of technologies that aim to reconfigure rural spaces in the name of climate change mitigation. I build on anthropological scholarship that has engaged with modes of technological optimism and techno-fixes in relation to climate change (e.g., O’Reilly et al. 2020; Vaughn 2022). This includes the ways in which techno-fixes are linked to ideas of progress (Günel 2016), how technological optimism works to depoliticize climate change (Stensrud 2019), and how technological interventions in one locale can lead to disproportionate burdens on another (Isenhour 2016). Here, I show how the purveyors of new technologies at COP28 routinely deferred the reliability of technical interventions to the future tense, in part, through cultivating the idea of certain regions as natural laboratories, key sites in the new frontiers of climate change.
To say that technology had a high profile at this year’s COP would be an understatement; it was nearly impossible to find a corner of the conference where there wasn’t a display advertising a new invention or near-magical innovation. Throngs of people moved through the crowded aisles and queued outside meeting rooms while engaged in animated conversations, seemingly eager to explore the latest advancements in climate technology. As I approached each booth, I was greeted by enthusiastic exhibitors excited to demonstrate their products and engage in conversation. Well-dressed and armed with slick marketing materials, they exuded confidence and optimism about the potential of their technologies to address the urgent challenges of climate change. Some booths featured live demonstrations, with tech startups showcasing the capabilities of their inventions through interactive simulations and virtual reality experiences. The colors were bold and eye-catching, with sleek metallic surfaces, vivid digital screens, and neon accents adorning the booths. Each display seemed to compete for attention, vying to showcase the latest and most innovative technologies that would intervene in a major cause (or effect) of climate change.
The almost overwhelming presence of technological displays was not an accident, and the spaces of the conference had been carefully orchestrated as a spectacle designed to dazzle rather than inform. In this vein, COP28 was in many ways a theater, where the attendants were expected to engage only in a limited fashion. Spending a little more time at various booths, my specific questions regarding how desalination plants in North Africa would produce ‘enough water to farm the Sahara,’ for instance, were responded to with ultra-vague answers that emphasized future testing and scalability. Time and again, my specific questions were met with a smile, a business card, and a nod to move along. Yet, the more time I spent at the conference, the more palpable the anxiety and skepticism around new technologies became. Cracks appeared in the veneer of optimism and enthusiasm. During events, it was more difficult for proponents of technological solutions to evade such concerns entirely. A range of attendees, from those accompanying national delegations to observers associated with research institutions and NGOs, voiced skepticism of such quick-fixes. Many expressed doubts about the feasibility and effectiveness of the technologies on display, questioning whether they could truly deliver on such promises. More so, the proliferation of untested and unproven technologies at COP raised concerns regarding the risk of exacerbating existing environmental calamity in the pursuit of new technological solutions at this scale. Critical voices – predominantly from civil society organizations and stakeholder groups – repeatedly pointed out that some interventions could cause even greater harm than climate change itself (see also Bardi 2024). Some organizations, like the Climate Action Network, organized protests against techno-fixes during the conference (although no official record of these protests exist nor are there any photos of it on the official UN photo database).
Yet, beyond the inherent risks of relying on untested interventions, the geographic and temporal contours of this widespread push for technologies were not immediately evident. I first encountered the issue of specific test sites for these technologies during a presentation on upcoming solar-powered innovations slated for deployment in Tunisia. After a lofty presentation by a combination of politicians and entrepreneurs, one (Tunisian) commentator stood up and asked the French startup promoting the venture why they had selected the North African country for a test site, particularly given the long history of French ‘development’ and extractivism in the country. Why not, the audience member proffered, just test the technologies in France? The young entrepreneur replied with a narrative that presented Tunisia – a North African country with main urban settlements located on the Mediterranean coast – as inherently under threat from climate change, and therefore, in urgent need of such technologies. He spoke of droughts, desertification, rising sea levels, and increasing temperatures, painting a picture of a country in crisis. Once proven to work, he continued, these technologies could go on to help the rest of the world reduce carbon emissions. At the same time, he postponed questions regarding feasibility to an abstract and uncertain future by framing Tunisia as desperately requiring the technology he offered. Several audience members were unconvinced, but the microphone was quickly handed to a politician sitting on the panel who attempted to push the conversation away from geographic specificities to the idea that such technologies were ‘global’ in their implications.
Despite presenting their interventions as placeless in presentations, marketing materials, official reports and news coverage, when asked by interested stakeholders why certain sites were selected as the (often unknowing) hosts of pilot projects, tech promoters produced certain regions as urgently requiring these various intrusions, invoking such sites as ideal laboratories in which to test the latest innovations. In doing so, they were able to defer the reliability of the technologies to future test results. As a result, they claimed specific land, waters, and skies for the ‘global good,’ framing such landscapes as the new ‘frontiers’ of climate change technologies. Far from global, narratives of frontier further elided how these sites are connected to much longer histories of colonial and imperial violence. For instance, Harvard researchers selected indigenous Sámi homelands for the SCoPEx project that would test whether it was possible to block warming sunlight by injecting aerosol into the stratosphere. The California-based Arctic Ice Project wants to spread crushed glass on top of Inuit lands without fully comprehending the environmental impacts, and a spinoff from Bangor University wants to test a method for building new ice sheets in the ‘icy wastes’ of Iqaluktuuttiaq (also Inuit homelands). To date, the majority of carbon capture projects are taking place at the sites of fossil fuel extraction, often to increase production of oil and gas. These locations have already endured decades of slow and spectacular violence, in most cases born by marginalized populations. North Africa is similarly attracting widespread attention as an ideal laboratory for new technologies, including desert reclamation, desalinization, drought-resistant crops, water cultivation, new energy experiments, and dust storm prevention. These projects are built on the legacies of French colonial violence, where the region served as a site of imperial experiments from nuclear testing to pesticide trials.
Thus, the risks of potential negative impacts from new technologies are routinely concentrated in those places deemed ‘already impacted’ that could be used to formulate better, more reliable, iterations of innovations to address climate change. In this vein, these places were branded ‘living laboratories’ (cf. Watts 2018) where experimental climate futures can be tested in situ. The idea of living laboratories have long served colonial and imperial projects, wherein people and places become the experimental testing grounds for new technologies, from energy and weapons development to biotechnology and housing (e.g., Chakrabarti 2012; El Shakry 2007; Laveaga 2009). Purveyors of new technologies at COP28 framed specific sites using the metaphors of ‘frontiers’ and ‘natural laboratories’ much like early anthropologists and natural scientists, conceiving them as isolated microcosms. Test sites were depicted as akin to sealed petri dishes, where the results of tests could be copied with equal success (or failure) anywhere else on the planet. This framing not only justifies risks by proposing that harm is already underway, but also perpetuates a cycle of exploitation under the guise of innovation. Many proponents of such technologies similarly assumed they would have unrestricted access to these locations, revealing, as Liboiron (2022) points out, ongoing colonial relationships and radically uneven power dynamics.
Additionally, the Arctic, North Africa, and sites of fossil fuel extraction were forwarded as ideal locations for another recurring reason. They were not only made out to be the places that face the most immediate impacts from climate change or environmental degradation as a result of fossil fuel production, but they were routinely presented as key sites that would affect other regions and geographies. Thus, it was not only that North Africa and the Arctic are regions that will suffer considerably from global warming, but that (wealthy) neighboring regions will be impacted by ripple effects. Melting Arctic Sea ice will result in flooded coastal cities in the United States, sandstorms from North Africa will reach Europe, and people in regions most immediately impacted will be forced to move. Thus, those promoting new technologies not only produced specific places as natural laboratories, but as sites that required intervention to resolve problems that would impact (predominantly) global North interests. While hardly concealing the geopolitical interests evident in the geographies of climate mitigation technologies, it is increasingly clear that technopolitics is a distinct aspect of climate change governance, shaping both the strategies employed and the distribution of benefits and burdens among nations and regions.
By way of conclusion, I suggest that while there are many overlapping interests driving the wide embrace of techno-fixes, the spaces of COP meetings serve important roles in producing and legitimizing climate change as a technical problem in need of technical solutions. Promoters of such solutions at COP28 routinely deferred trust to the future by producing specific regions as urgently in need of interventions, and as such, natural laboratories for testing new technologies. In this vein, the (uncritical) advocacy for climate mitigation technologies in Dubai contributed to a fiction of technological placelessness, which continues to shape imperial and colonial geographies of environmental violence.
References
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Acknowledgments
Travel to COP28 was generously funded by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
Emilia Groupp is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, working at the intersection of environmental anthropology and science and technology studies. Her current research focuses on the work to develop new sources of energy and the cultivation of ‘climate resilient’ landscapes. Her research and writing have been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, among others. She founded the Stanford University Energy and Society Network for cross-disciplinary collaboration on energy research, and serves as co-editor of the Anthropology Book Forum. Her work has appeared in Anthropology News, and has forthcoming contributions in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Journal of Gulf Studies, and The Routledge Handbook of Climate Change Activism.
