The Future is the Termination Shock: On the Antinomies and Psychopathologies of Geoengineering. Part Two

Abstract

As capitalist society remains incapable of addressing climate breakdown, one measure is waiting in the wings: solar geoengineering. No other technology can cut global temperatures immediately. It would alleviate the symptoms of the crisis, not its causes. But might it be combined with radical emissions cuts? This essay, the final instalment of two, subjects geoengineering to a materialist psychoanalysis and argues that it represents a fantasy of repression, setting itself up for a dreadful return of the repressed.

Anthro abuzz: fuel, electricity, and ethnography in the era of global boiling

“…And the reality is daunting. It includes the fact that the majority of the carbon footprint of the wealthiest 10 per cent of the world's population (and thus the biggest emitters) comes not from consumption but from assets they are loath to leave stranded; that agricultural productivity has been declining since the 1990s, less and less responsive to the traditional inputs of petro-chemical farming and increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather and superweeds; that aerosol termination shock from increased regulations on sulphur emissions in maritime shipping has likely accelerated global heating; that thermal sacrifice zones proliferate to the point that air-conditioning will soon no doubt be considered a human right; that insane solar geoengineering schemes will be accepted as a rational way to continue business as usual (Malm 2023). In all of these dilemmas, we might begin to feel the maw of a system whose revolutions stretch back to New World plantations and their exhaustion of slave and soil.…”