Chaired by Stine Engen
Hedda Susanne Molland: Temporal friction in climate politics: The case of carbon capture and storage in Norway
In this paper I will investigate temporal friction in politics for technological climate change mitigation. I ask how the Norwegian government’s vision of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is shaped by different time frames and how this temporal entanglement affects how it can be imagined as a major, future climate measure. The friction expresses itself forcefully when it comes to the timeliness of innovation. Over the last decade, Norwegian governments have repeatedly postponed innovation goals and ambitions for CCS, sometimes with and sometimes without new deadlines, while maintaining an expressed faith in the climate measure. These temporal shifts and extensions have been justified through political, financial, and industrial concerns – but all are fundamentally grounded in specific notions of the temporalities of innovation and climate change. In a sense, there exist a tension in my material between two ways of imagining timeliness and progress in climate politics: an emphasis on urgent action and political commitment versus an emphasis on the reliability and safety of established courses of action. In theoretical terms, my analysis is therefore an investigation into temporal concepts such as delay and deliberateness, rush-jobs and accelerated action, and, most fundamentally, what temporal speeds and time frames are considered primary for climate action.
The paper is based on parts of my PhD project, which explores the Norwegian government’s effort, from 2014 to 2020, to launch what eventually became the CCS project Langskip. I study the climate measure, which in Norwegian politics is known as “CO2 handling”, as a temporally organized imaginary, expressed through document practices – from parliamentary debates and white papers to regulations and expert reports. My approach combines STS studies on sociotechnical imaginaries with contemporary humanities research on time. This is operationalized through a focus on document practices and discursive nodal points.
Bio: Hedda Susanne Molland is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of Bergen. In her research, she focuses on how scope of action on climate change is imagined in climate policies, with a specific emphasis on the role of time and the future. Her case study is how the previous Norwegian Government (2013-2021) promoted carbon capture and storage as a climate measure to Parliament. She is currently writing on how the government in 2016 justified postponement of its carbon capture and storage ambition, with a focus on the temporal notions at play.
Beyond her case study, she is very interested in interdisciplinary research on climate change, the environment and sustainability, including approaches in intellectual and political history, STS, and the environmental humanities. She has a BA in the History of Ideas and an MA in Environment and Development Studies from the University of Oslo.
Stine Engen: Buying time: Using carbon markets to manage the risk of the green transition
Carbon markets are oftentimes taken to be the epitomal financialization of the climate issue – its proposed solution boiled down to finding “the correct price”. This paper argues that the world’s largest carbon market, the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), is currently undergoing a form of financialization where financial actors are operating in the market both in increasing numbers and in a new way. Financial actors have for a long time been criticized for buying up carbon credits for speculative purposes, using them as an asset like any other without ties to actual emissions. Through a case study of a portfolio created by a Norwegian insurance company, this paper shows how the recent, and significant, rise in carbon prices have led the EU carbon market to take up a greater and different role in the financial mind. Specifically, carbon credits are here used as a hedging tool, that is, as security against financial losses because of anticipated higher emission prices. The central argument of the paper is that this new use of carbon credits is a further form of financialization of the carbon markets geared towards getting rid of what is called “transition risk”, or the “political risk” of new regulations coming in from the EU and affecting emission prices. Using the EU ETS to deal with such risk consequently changes the aim of the market from minimizing emissions to minimizing “political risk”. Fundamentally, the paper argues, managing this risk is about managing and extracting financial value from time, shifting the focus from what stands still (emissions) to what changes in time (risk). In this sense, the paper argues that we are witnessing a financialization that aims to extract financial value from time, or to “buy time”. The paper explains the financial logic behind the procedure to open the question to broader critical examination.
Bio: Ph.D. candidate at the TIK Centre at UiO, studying the how the finance sector has come out as an environmental agent, and how it is both introducing new practices into the financial sector itself, and how it is positioning finance in a new role in the green transition. I've done my studies within both the natural sciences and humanities, and enjoy widely transdisciplinary thinking. I'm also part of the Value threads project, led by Professor Kristin Asdal at TIK, UiO, which is carried out in collaboration with Centre de sociologie de l’innovation (CSI) at Paris Mines.
Mads Ejsing: Democracy, Climate Change, and the Problem of Time in the Anthropocene
The fate of democracy looms large in debates about climate change. Slow procedures and shrewd negotiations have prompted many to question whether it really has the power needed to save the planet from disaster. In support, skeptics point to the yearly meetings in the Conference of the Parties (COP) on climate change, which have become a public demonstration of the inability of existing democracies to respond with the appropriate urgency. Meanwhile, the yearly emission gap reports that track the goal fulfillment of the member states in accordance with the Paris Agreement from 2015 sounds like a broken clock stuck in the same place. The result is a creeping sense that we, as citizens and as members of large-scale societies, are running out of time. No wonder, then, that many, both inside and outside of academia, have begun to ask whether democracy must go to secure our childrens’ survival. Is now the time to give up on democracy as the preferred mode of government?
In this article, we explore how the roots of this question are both more fundamental and more open to change than existing approaches to democracy and climate change are willing to acknowledge. On the one hand, we argue that skepticism about democracy arises not only from a concern about its efficacy but also from a fundamental shift in temporal orientation. As climate change expands the scales of temporality from a purely societal concern to both planetary and microscopic processes (and everything in between), democracy is thrown into crisis due to its own image of time as linear and progressive. At the same time, however, we also argue that future-oriented responses to this crisis are beginning to emerge in a manner that often gets sidelined in the critique of democracy. Here, we focus specifically on three democratic responses to climate change, which have gained increasing attention in recent years: climate citizens’ assemblies, community organizing, and more radical types of green activism. While these responses entail different political logics, we see them all as experiments in extending democracy’s image of temporality beyond its current remit. We do not deny that the contours of this image remain blurred, but we also it plausible that this can be seen as a whole new organization of democracy. Grappling with how this might be the case – and with what consequences – seems crucial to any discussion of democracy’s role in responding to the climate crisis.
In what follows, we begin in section 2 by outlining the links between democracy, climate change, and temporality. Sections 3, 4, and 5 bring out the images of time associated with, respectively, climate citizens’ assemblies, community organizing, and radical activism. Finally, section 6 discusses the tensions between them, as well as their shared contributions to a layered and complex organization of democracy appropriate for the challenges posed by climate change.
Bio: Mads Ejsing is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of political science at the University of Copenhagen, where he is affiliated with the research projects 'Democratic innovations in a Green Transition' and 'Climate Justice Temporalities in Denmark'. His research interests lie at the intersections of democratic theory and the politics of climate change. NB: The paper in question is co-authored together with Lars Tønder (University of Copenhagen) and Janus Hansen (University of Copenhagen), who unfortunately won't be joining the conference.
Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen: Negotiating justice and temporality: Danish climate urgencies
The Danish Climate Act of 2020 states that Denmark has a "historical and moral responsibility to take first steps" in leading global climate change mitigation. Alongside this abstract connection between time concerns and justice concerns, the Act included a new reduction target with a 2030 deadline, which was the result of pressure from a large alliance of grassroots and NGOs in Denmark that had pre-negotiated the deadline and succeeded in making the question familiar to a wider public.
Since 2020, changing governments and parliamentary situations have failed to provide a trustworthy pathway to reaching the goal (Climate Council 2023). This has prompted new and radical temporal discourses to emerge within different climate political groups. These discourses are divided in terms of justice orientations, providing a local case for ongoing international debates on mitigation pathways. While civil society forces in this field are explicit about their commitment to climate justice and solidarity with poorer countries, scientists and think tanks have suggested taking inspiration from temporary covid-legislation to suggest crisis management with urgency and a strong precautionary principle.
The paper investigates the recent historical background of the temporal discourses in the Danish context with a focus on the interpretation of global developments and debates on climate emergency framings. Drawing on recent research in discourses of climate delay and justice (Lamb et al. 2020, Jacobsen & Hunt 2022, de Moor 2023), the paper will use the Danish case for providing new insights on the connection between emergency climate politics, risky technological fixes, and depoliticization.
Bio: Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen is director of the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking, Faculty of the Humanities, University of Copenhagen. His research interests center on ecocultural climate futures and the history of environmental movements. He has worked with the political development of the global climate justice movement with a focus on economic, cultural and political ideas emerging from campaigns and grassroots mobilization