I’m attending a conference in California in a couple weeks. The last time I presented a scientific poster, I believe I was 12 or 13. Learning from my mistakes then (not preparing whatsoever), I thought I’d write a little bit about what I’ll be trying to get across (and some extra stuff, as a treat), and how it relates to other projects and other things I’ve written on here.
The poster I’ll be presenting at the conference will be titled ‘Disenchanting Direct Air Capture and Storage.’ For those understandably not au fait, Direct Air Capture (DAC) is a set of technologies which seek to pull down carbon dioxide (or, rarely, some other greenhouse gas) from the atmosphere—all without being attached to a ‘point source’ of CO₂, like a factory or power plant as is commonly the case with other systems. Coupled with geologic storage, it becomes DAC+S, or DACS, or whatever acronym you want to use.
DAC+S slots into a much wider range of techniques and technologies called Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) or Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), which are sometimes clumped even further (controversially so) into categories like ‘geoengineering’ or ‘carbon management’ or ‘climate solutions.’
The idea with NETs/CDR is simple. We’ve emitted far too much CO₂ already for future reductions alone (renewable energy, EVs, vegetarianism, etc.) to keep us within safe climate parameters, so we also need to start taking some out of the atmosphere. To keep the tub from overflowing, you need to start draining it even when you stop pouring as much water in—as the analogy usually goes.
There are two more analogies people also like to make about the development of NETs. The first is that it’s like trying to create ‘fake trees’: “don’t we already have big things that take CO₂ and store it? What are those called again?”
The second analogy takes a theological rather than a biological tack, and has to do with how these techniques generate credits for sale, commonly called ‘carbon offsets’ or ‘carbon credits’: “aren’t these just like indulgences?”
In a book called Carbon: A Biography, published in French in 2018 but only released in English last year, philosophers Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Sacha Loeve put it thus: the term ‘carbon neutral’, they say,
“suggests impunity. Any carbon-neutral person would have nothing to be ashamed of. It is a climate absolution device; carbon offsetting is often compared to the system of indulgences, the forgiveness market set up long ago by the Catholic Church. Cashed-up climate sinners can wash away their sins (greenwashing) by financing ‘green deeds’ carried out elsewhere”1
The first person to make this comparison in print seems to have been our old friend George Monbiot, in 2006. The authors of Carbon: A Biography, for their part, instead cite a 2007 report, ‘Offset Indulgences for Your Climate Sins.’ That report alludes to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, wherein a seller of indulgences proclaims For myn entente is nat but for to wynne / And nothyng for correccioun of synne, “For my intent is only to win [profit], and not at all for the correction of sin.”2
We emit carbon, we commit sins. You buy credits, you buy indulgences. QED.
Like the tree example, it actually doesn’t really matter who came up with it first, because these aren’t particularly difficult comparisons to come up with. Rather, the problem is that these analogies rely on questionable biology and questionable theology.
I won’t spend too long on the tree analogy. Trees are ‘more than carbon sticks’, and reducing the complexity of a forest (or, worse, an unforested area targeted for tree planting) to its perceived carbon value—so-called ‘carbon tunnel vision’—is often the wrong approach, both for biodiversity and for climate impact. Many people have made this argument very well in different ways.3
Some who accept this critique-of-the-critique, however, still subscribe to the indulgence analogy—or, at least, to its secularised bedfellows, moral hazard and mitigation deterrence.
Moral hazard “refers to the tendency for persons to engage in higher levels of risk-taking if they know they are insured against losses.”4 Moral hazard is usually deployed in the context of medical and other insurance, where the onus is (in theory) on the individual.
But, for NETs, CDR, and offsets, moral hazard is scaled up to global climate policy and corporate behaviour. ‘Persons’ (states, corporations, and the Jet Set) take higher risks (continuing to emit massive amounts of greenhouse gasses) because they are ‘insured’ with the promise of eventual climate remediation, to which they have duly contributed financially through the purchase of carbon credits. Because of this dynamic, efforts at climate mitigation (i.e., emissions reductions) are ‘deterred,’ hence ‘mitigation deterrence.’ And, in the process, both the buyer and seller are morally compromised.
My argument is not that this kind of thing is not happening. It is, unintentionally and intentionally5, but it is also clearly not universal. And, I can’t shake the feeling that the constant invocation of mitigation deterrence in academic circles and the press risks deterring certain kinds of mitigation in its own way.6
Those arguing for a strong line on mitigation deterrence usually claim that they are grounding themselves in an analysis of the lopsided ‘political economy’ at work. However, because of debt to the moral hazard concept, sometimes this actually more closely resembles the type of behavioural economics that, despite all the Nobels and airport bestsellers, really doesn’t seem to have advanced much since Martin Luther’s day.
This is where we get to the questionable theology. Indulgences, sadly, cannot ‘buy one’s way into heaven.’7 They are, if you like, an optional ‘second step’ to the Sacrament of Penance, commonly known as ‘confession,’ which is where absolution actually takes place (and has always been offered without payment).
Instead of forgiveness, indulgences offer remission, or the cancelling of the requirement for sinners to enact specific regimes of penance even after they have been absolved. This penance, importantly, can continue after death into purgatory.
There could be no ‘forgiveness market’ because the supply of indulgences is not limited. There is no opportunity for derivatives trading. The sale of indulgences was a reflection of their worth, not their rarity. As Pope Clement VI proclaimed in 1343, the “consumption or diminishing of that treasury ought not to be feared in any way.” Indeed, Clement dispensed indulgences freely to all victims of the Black Death.
The historian of Christianity Diarmaid MacCulloch writes that “there were good reasons to cherish indulgences and their sale,” even if the obvious opportunities for abuse and deceit led Pope St. Pius V to ban that practice in 1567.8 They were not, however, abolished altogether, as some still assume they were. In 2020, the Apostolic Penitentiary, the body now responsible for indulgences (acting in the name of the Pope) followed in Clement’s footsteps and granted indulgences to all suffering from COVID. The Jubilee Year of 2025, meanwhile, includes indulgences for pilgrimages to certain destinations—including, in a lovely twist, the Mission in the city where this conference is going to be held.
I would be surprised, to say the least, if carbon credits were ever so dispensed.
Here, we see the strict analogy between NETs and indulgences begin to falter. Exaggeration of supply, questions of validity, coercion to purchase, and the connotations of shame and forgiveness simply do not apply in the same way. Nevertheless, the analogy is valuable because it points to the mode which I believe has been prematurely applied to NETs: disenchantment.
Disenchantment is famously associated with the sociologist Max Weber, who introduced Entzauberung (‘de-magicification’) in 1918. In literary scholar Jason Crawford’s words, “enchantment is that old magic, the spell modernity has broken,”9 or, rather, has to expend continual effort to break over and over again.
In philosopher Charles Margrave Taylor’s longue-durée analysis of disenchantment, ‘Reform’ is the key engine,10 which goes well beyond figures like Luther, Calvin, or Wycliffe—i.e., beyond the canonical Protestant, and Catholic, Reformations. The key feature of Reform, Taylor argues, was ‘simplification,’ by which he means the casting off of practices and beliefs perceived as ‘irrelevant’. Those irrelevances were often later scorned as idolatrous, even evil.
Thus indulgences come to be seen not just as secondary but contrary to the pursuit of the good life. Reformers like George Monbiot task themselves with castigating carbon credits as “pernicious and destructive nonsense.” It would not be difficult to place him in the early 17th century, where he would be warning “against these popish charmes that now flye about the land, least unwittingly thou be inchanted with them.”11
What the ‘strong’ analogy between CDR and indulgences does is not to reveal a direct historical or theological parallel, because that fails. Rather, it attempts to theologise technology and techniques in order to reveal their perverse nature, and thus to disenchant them—in the sense of ‘pre-empting’ a malignant sort of enchantment which will activate if we are not careful.
NETs are Climate Absolution Devices, therefore they are dangerous. Anything which distracts from the narrow path must go. We could, if we really want, associate this with John Calvin’s programme of ‘radical simplification,’12 even though the influential writer Marilynne Robinson has recently cautioned against misusing that particular figure for such polemic purposes.13
Moral hazard and mitigation deterrence create a less radical, ‘weak’ analogy between NETs and indulgences, (seemingly) stripped of theological content. However, I think, they actually effect a stronger form of disenchantment.
Here, Martin Luther himself actually sets a pretty good example. His goal was to make indulgences seem irrelevant, not diabolical. The 41st of his 95 Theses: “Papal indulgences must be preached with caution, lest people erroneously think that they are preferable to other good works of love.”
In other words, the moral hazard must be protected against. Indulgences risk creating Virtue Deterrence, and need to be contained—but not necessarily eliminated.
This weaker analogy aims to steadily whittle away at the affective appeal of NETs, to strip them down to the cold, bare metal, to limit what Bensaude-Vincent and Loeve themselves call affordances, or the ‘field of possibilities’ which is configured by the relationship between objects and subjects—in this case, technologies on one hand and policymakers, researchers, publics, and individuals on the other.
This process of simplification is often referred to in the literature as ‘disaggregation’ or ‘finding the right framing’ for NETs—which always means a smaller and smaller framing, of course.
We find another curious commonality between Luther and the ‘weak analogy’ here. In the ‘Sermon on Indulgences and Grace,’ given not long after the Theses were put forward, Luther carves out a technical exception where indulgences might still be useful: “sinners with punishment still outstanding should be shown the way towards purgatory or towards indulgences.”14
That word ‘outstanding’, vberingen (übrigen), is sometimes translated as ‘residual,’ which is the exact same term used to describe so-called ‘hard to abate’ or intractable greenhouse gas emissions. Residual emissions are often put forward as the right ‘target’ for NETs.
Interjection: Leaving your amateur philology behind for a moment, what even is the problem with disenchantment in the first place? Have we not learned from our past failures to anticipate the side-effects of novel technologies? Surely you can’t be saying that we would want to ‘enchant’ technology, to have it put us under its spell.
I am saying that, actually. The issue, after all, with Luther’s attacks on indulgences is that he doesn’t—can’t—solve once and for all the moral question at hand, which is ‘how do we best get people to do good things and repent of bad things?’
Rather, he deprecates one of the techniques which the Church uses to do so, and thus limits the options available to the laity, pushing them towards a simpler—but not necessarily better—moral life. Centuries of theological debate aside, that presents problems.
The legal scholar Tom Baker, in an oft-cited article, points out that the original proponents of the moral hazard concept, who were nobly trying to “exorcise the specter of immorality from the insurance trade,” set up a deep irony which continues to the present:
“The concept of moral hazard has been enlisted in support of an effort to reduce the public and private benefits available to the sick, the injured, and the poor. By ‘proving’ that helping people has harmful consequences, the economics of moral hazard legitimate the abandonment of redistributive policies . And, by providing a scientific basis for this abandonment, the economics of moral hazard legitimate that abandonment as the result of a search for truth, not an exercise of power.”
‘Legitimating abandonment’ is what disenchantment seeks to do. In flowery social science parlance, it ‘forecloses certain futures,’ and, in the theological one we’ve been using so far, it can ‘absolve’ us of the responsibility to care about the technologies and techniques we develop and use.
There is a way, just maybe, in which a different analogy of indulgences, this time based on generosity and excess could provide a model for the voluntary carbon market (VCM) which offers an alternative to tit-for-tat, ton-for-ton miserliness on the one hand and complete abandonment on the other.
“Dr. Frankenstein's crime,” Bruno Latour wrote in 2012, “was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that he abandoned the creature to itself.”
We find it hard, Latour points out, to accept an approach to technology that falls ambiguously between the extremes of mastery and abandonment, and so we oscillate dangerously between the two. That’s the challenge. To quote the critic Lauren Berlant: “the question is not how to lose an object but how to loosen it, how to make it available for different kinds of attachment, use, form, concept, scene, world.”15
I’ve gone on for a while, and haven’t actually talked much about Direct Air Capture and Storage yet. Let’s leave this here for now, and see you in part 2.
Page 171, mostly my italics
Prologue to the Pardoner’s Tale, lines 403 and 404
‘The ethics of moral hazard revisited’ by Rutger Claassen
Haven’t figured out how to phrase this. Mitigation deterrence deters mitigation? Mitigation deterrence deterrence? Mitigation deterrence mitigation deterrence? Whatever
See MacCulloch, ‘The World Took Sides’
A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, pages 258 and 184
Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics, page 2
A Secular Age
A passage Crawford quotes in the above, page 8
A Secular Age, page 78
Honestly, ‘The Sum of our Wisdom’ is a strange little essay. In some ways, I’m trying to do something similar to Robinson here—seeing how people use and misuse ideas passed down from the Reformation for contemporary critique—but she goes off in a completely different direction. She is completely dismissive of Weber (“Why German thought of his period has retained such status and influence, I can’t imagine”) without any real explanation, even as she goes after people who dismiss Calvin for reasons that seem suspiciously similar. She also says the doctrine of predestination was ‘universal in Western Christendom’ even without Calvin, which to me seems like a kind of ludicrous misreading. In trying to do an affirmative reading of Calvin in what she perceives as a viciously anti-Calvinist culture (like Weber, too persuaded by the hegemonic Lutheran and Catholic positions), to my eyes she reveals nothing that makes him any more appealing or useful. The project of radical simplification simply didn’t produce the type of holy people it was intended to—which is, after all, Weber’s great insight.
On the Inconvenience of Other People, page 124