Deconstructing Decarbonization

“Instead of slowing down the decarbonization of the global economy, now is the time to accelerate the energy transition to a renewable energy future. Fossil fuels are a dead end – for our planet, for humanity, and yes, for economies” – United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres

At the 27th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, November 11, 2022 was observed as “Decarbonization Day,” replete with sessions on eliminating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the steel, oil and gas, cement, and fertilizer industries. From COP27 to corporate press releases to university syllabi, it seems like decarbonization is everywhere these days. But where did the concept come from, what does it mean, and where is it heading? In this keyword essay, I trace the origins of decarbonization—from steam engines to internal combustion engines to the global economy—considering the object, means, and end of decarbonization as a political-economic project.

The Origins of Decarbonization

The root of decarbonization (de-carbon-ize-ation) is carbon, which came to English from Latin (“carbo”) via French (“carbone”), meaning coal, charcoal, or ember (Britannica). Our contemporary, chemical understanding of carbon as an element with an atomic number of 6 and an atomic weight of 12 dates to French chemist Antoine Lavoisier in the 18th century (Marshall). The Oxford English Dictionary includes two entries for decarbonization. The first, dating to the 19th century, is the “Removal of carbon deposit from inside an internal combustion engine.” The second, which the OED only added to its New Words List in October 2021, is “The action or process of reducing or eliminating the fossil fuel use of an economy, business sector, etc., so as to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.”

Frequency analysis reveals four spikes in usage of the term since 1800: around 1835, around 1860, around 1920, and since 2010. Coinciding with the Steam Era, the first two spikes reflect tube cleaning, a process whereby engineers used steam lances and brushes to remove soot and ash from the boiler tubes of steam locomotives. Following the advent of the internal combustion engine in the 1860s and 70s and its ensuing popularization, the third spike reflects the removal of carbon deposits—or coke—which forms in the piston grooves and seizes the piston rings, thus sapping the power and efficiency of the engine (A6S). Engine decarbonization can be achieved mechanically—by manually disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling the engine—or chemically, by adding alcohols and terpenes to the fuel to dissolve the carbon deposits and expel them through the exhaust system (CarDekho).

After a lull in usage between the 1930s and the early 2000s, it is with the most recent spike in the 2010s that the latter sense of decarbonization eclipsed the former. But the second sense of decarbonization is not entirely unrelated to the first. Their juxtaposition suggests an analogy between the economy and the engine: just as removing carbon deposits from the internal combustion engine improves its horsepower and fuel efficiency, reducing the fossil fuel intensity of the economy stimulates innovation and growth.

But why de-carbonization as opposed to anti-carbonization? That is, why the exclusive focus on limiting the consumption (i.e., emissions) rather than the production (i.e., extraction) of fossil fuels? On this question, Leah Aronowsky, Assistant Professor of Climate at the Columbia Climate School, points to the “the complex and even contradictory messages that scientists [of the Climate Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences] were sending” in the 1970s and 80s. Though acknowledging the relationship between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming, the scientists refused to pass normative judgement on climate change before determining the balance of its costs (e.g., sea-level rise) and benefits (e.g., higher agricultural yields). “By encouraging a position of no political action and allowing the fossil fuel-based system to become further entrenched,” she explains, “these scientists rendered fossil fuel phaseout increasingly impossible.” Moreover, she argues that their inaction constrained the political imagination of later climate governance advocates, who would merely argue for limiting emissions as opposed to limiting extraction in the first place.

The Object of Decarbonization

In its second sense, decarbonization is something of a misnomer for its object is not strictly carbon or even carbon dioxide but carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). CO2e accounts for carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases like hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, sulfur hexafluoride, and nitrogen trifluoride. Carbon dioxide equivalency expresses these GHGs in terms of CO2 by multiplying their quantity by their Global Warming Potential (GWP), “a measure of how much energy the emissions of 1 ton of a gas will absorb over a given period of time,” typically 100 years, relative to CO2 (EPA).

However, the supremacy of GWP in calculating carbon dioxide equivalency is not uncontested. Its chief rival is Global Temperature Potential (GTP), a measure of change in the surface temperature of the earth at the end of the specified interval, relative to CO2. Advocates of using GTP argue that it is a “more policy-centric metric,” given the international movement to limit global warming to 1.5°C (Abernethy). However, calculating GTP entails making more assumptions than GWP and hence yields greater uncertainty.

The Means & End of Decarbonization

Broadly, the means of decarbonization are carbon mitigation and carbon removal. Mitigation “refers to efforts to reduce or prevent emission of greenhouse gases” in the first place (UNEP). Mitigation includes such strategies as energy efficiency, electrification, and densification. Carbon removal, or negative emissions, refers to removing GHGs from the atmosphere. Carbon removal includes biological (e.g., planting vegetation), geological (i.e., sequestering CO2 in underground rock formations), and technological (e.g., producing graphene) strategies (UC Davis). But opponents of carbon removal strategies like Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) argue that they present a moral hazard: “In postponing the need for rapid and immediate mitigation, BECCS licenses the ongoing combustion of fossil fuels while ostensibly fulfilling the Paris commitments” (Anderson).

The end of decarbonization is carbon neutrality, or net zero: “completely negating the amount of greenhouse gases produced by human activity” (OED). Implicit in net zero is the notion of perfect GHG inventorying. That is, being able to account for every gram of carbon emitted into and removed from the atmosphere. However, GHG inventorying is far from an exact science. With respect to national GHG inventories, the IPCC conceptualizes good practice in terms of those “which contain neither over- nor under-estimates so far as can be judged, and in which uncertainties are reduced as far as practicable.”

The Political Economy of Decarbonization

The concept of decarbonization is contested terrain between advocates of growth and degrowth. On the one hand, growth advocates have not only rendered decarbonization non-threatening but essential to continued GDP growth. Despite posing a massive disruption to the labor market, McKinsey predicts that decarbonization will create growth opportunities for companies that “reduce the emissions intensity of their processes and products, replace high-emissions products and processes with low-emission ones, and provide new offerings to aid decarbonization including supply chain inputs, infrastructure, and support services.” Conversely, the International Monetary Fund argues that not pursuing decarbonization will hamper growth: “The more difficult the transition to clean electricity, the greater the greenhouse gas tax increase or equivalent regulations needed to incentivize change—and the larger the macroeconomic costs in terms of lost output and higher inflation.”

On the other hand, degrowth advocates reject the premise that we can decarbonize our way out of the climate crisis. That is, at least without renouncing our faith in the deity of Gross Domestic Product (Murphy). As a movement, degrowth “critiques the global capitalist system which pursues growth at all costs, causing human exploitation and environmental destruction” (Degrowth). Instead, degrowth advocates argue for “radical redistribution, reduction in the material size of the global economy, and a shift in common values towards care, solidarity and autonomy.” At the crux of the debate between growth and degrowth is decoupling—the notion that the trajectory of economic growth can be separated from that of GHG emissions (Samuel). While 25 countries have successfully decoupled, it remains to be seen whether the global economy can decouple to such an extent that it can achieve the Paris Agreement’s target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels without some measure of degrowth (Keyßer).

The Future of Decarbonization

As net zero is not a static end-state but rather a tenuous equilibrium between emissions and removals, decarbonization is actually a form of maintenance. But achieving net zero does not mean the end of global warming. Indeed, it would take hundreds of years for sea levels and over a thousand years for temperatures to stop rising after achieving and maintaining net zero (Royal Society). As such, halting and reversing global warming would necessitate decarbonizing not the economy but the atmosphere. That is, reducing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere from 421 parts per million today to its pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million (NOAA).

Decarbonizing the atmosphere would require more than carbon mitigation and removal but also solar geoengineering. Techniques to reflect solar radiation back into space include making clouds more reflective, introducing aerosols into the stratosphere, and even launching reflectors into outer space (Oxford). Skeptics of solar geoengineering, like the Union of Concerned Scientists, caution that it opens a pandora’s box, posing potentially greater risks to the environment than it solves: “Atmospheric and stratospheric [Solar Radiation Management] might succeed in masking the average temperature increase, but temperatures and rainfall will be affected unevenly creating significant changes in atmospheric circulation, with potentially severe impacts on ecosystems and agriculture” (Honegger).

In light of such (literally) outlandish proposals, decarbonization reveals itself to be a phantasmagram: “quantitative practices that are enriched with affect, propagate imaginaries, lure feeling, and hence have supernatural effects in surplus of their rational precepts” (Murphy). Coined by Michelle Murphy, Professor in the History Department and Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, “The term phantasmagram draws attention to the felt and astral consequences of social science quantitative practices, such as algorithms, equations, measures, forecasts, models, simulations, and cascading correlations.” Indeed, what could be more phantasmagoric than an abstract concept—invoked by politicians, scientists, corporations, and activists alike—used to justify the deployment of a giant space mirror? To adapt a question from Murphy, what won’t we do for net zero?

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