The politics of anticipation: the IPCC and the negative emissions technologies experience

Abstract

Non-technical summaryIn the post-Paris political landscape, the relationship between science and politics is changing. We discuss what this means for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), using recent controversies over negative emissions technologies (NETs) as a window into the fraught politics of producing policy-relevant pathways and scenarios. We suggest that pathways and scenarios have a ‘world-making’ power, potentially shaping the world in their own image and creating new political realities. Assessment bodies like the IPCC need to reflect on this power, and the implications of changing political contexts, in new ways.

“Fixing” Climate Change by Mortgaging the Future: Negative Emissions, Spatiotemporal Fixes, and the Political Economy of Delay

“…The significant, negative social and environmental consequences that one could expect with the actual implementation of some NETs have already been alluded to in the introduction. The negative emissions concept —as modelled in IAMs—however has concrete implications already now (Beck and Mahony ). By enabling a pathway to the 2°C target in the face of a tight carbon budget, it helps preserve a sense of normality in climate policy, fostering the notion that current policy commitments are appropriate and sufficient, that ambitious climate targets are still within reach and that governments are putting in place adequate measures to achieve them (Anderson and Peters ; Beck and Mahony ; Geden ; Pielke ).…”

“…Climate policy does not express itself in a social and economic vacuum, but comes with vested interests, power relations, allegiances and assumptions. Any “policy‐performative” science—of which the IPCC is an example (Beck and Mahony )—inevitably inserts itself in these dynamics. In this sense it is not just weak climate policy that is being maintained by the invocation of negative emissions, but crucially also the carbon‐intensive economic processes that it is supposed to regulate.…”

“…(:583) note, “dominant political discourses compel scientists to create assessments that work within these discourses”, which involves the articulation of problems that are legible to, and the proposal of solutions compatible with, dominant political and economic logics. The production of models is no different and if anything merely goes further in shrouding ideological assumptions behind seemingly technical and objective processes (Beck and Mahony ; Demeritt ; Mahony and Hulme ). As it turns out, the specific assumptions that underpin IAMs are highly consequential for the kind of scenarios that are produced.…”

Tools of the trade: practices and politics of researching the future in climate engineering

“…There are concerns over the risks of deploying BECCS, such as land-use conflicts, carbon storage safety, or de-incentivizing emissions reductions, alongside fears that if there few other envisioned paths capable of meeting 2C, then climate policy is being shoehorned into a future generated from these projections (e.g. Beck and Mahony 2018).…”

“…This is complicated by ambiguities surrounding the intents of modeling for explicitly providing decision-making support. IAM work-more established as 1 3 a science-for-policy enterprise than SRM modeling due to its role in WGIII work in the IPCC process-tends to frame itself as neutral 'map-making', following the 'policy relevant but not policy prescriptive' ethos of the IPCC (Edenhofer and Minx 2014); the signaling implications of their 'maps' for expectations in climate governance, however, are highlighted in Beck and Mahony (2018). In contrast, SRM modeling networks have no common platform.…”