What happens to dreams of the future that never arrive, yet still affect our society and culture so deeply? Is it possible to be haunted by failed visions or our own anticipations, and what does that mean? Today, Dr. Holly Jean Buck, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo and author of the new book, Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough, comes back on the show for a bonus episode to explain the concept of "hauntology", its origin in Jacques Derrida's writing and later popularization by Mark Fisher in his book, Capitalism Realism: Is There No Alternative?, and to what degree these ideas might help us understand the worlds of carbon removal, climatetech, and our shared planetary future.
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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
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Resources
Dr. Holly Jean Buck on Reversing Climate Change S2 Bonus
Dr. Holly Jean Buck on Reversing Climate Change EP103
Dr. Holly Jean Buck on Reversing Climate Change S3E4
After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration by Holly Jean Buck
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m Nori’s creative editor. Today I have with me Dr. Holly Jean Buck, back again so soon, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo, author of Ending Fossil Fuels, Why Net Zero is Not Enough. And I cribbed this from your last appearance. Most importantly, the co-host of the Carbon Removal Newsroom podcast, because it was so recent. Didn’t we, it was the last week we spoke? Two weeks?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Feels just like yesterday.
Ross Kenyon: Feels just like yesterday. We had talked in the aftermath of recording that podcast, but there’s still much more to be said. What do you want to talk about today, Holly? What are we following up on?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: We’re going to talk about capitalist realism and hauntology and how they relate to carbon removal and climate action.
Ross Kenyon: I’m so excited to release a podcast called The Hauntologies of Carbon Removal or something like that. I don’t think that combination of words has been said yet. Essentially, all the discourse, a lot of it feels kind of exhausted. This feels somewhat new to me.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: It’s probably been said on some corner of the internet that we’re not hip enough to be in.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, what’s the hashtag we need to access that sort of highbrow leftist intellectual culture? Where do we go for that?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: It’s secret.
Ross Kenyon: It’s secret. We’re just not invited yet. I feel like you would probably be invited. I don’t know if I would get to be in the Cool Kids Club just yet. Well, let’s assume that someone knows nothing. They don’t know who Mark Fisher is. They don’t know what capitalist realism is. Why don’t we start there and start working our way through?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, well, I’ll start with capitalist realism, I suppose, because that was his earlier book. I just reread two of his books, Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of My Life, last week after speaking with you. So capitalist realism, and this is a quote from him, the widespread sense that not Only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it. And so we’ve heard formulations of this a lot of places, right? It’s kind of familiar. And so I was thinking about that with regards to climate change and how it intersects this capitalist realism.
So on one hand, there’s kind of these emergent forms of Climate realism slash climate doomerism, you know, it’s not realistic that we’re going to mount an effective response to climate change. We can’t imagine the response. We’re just kind of stuck in this, watching it play out. Because a lot of this is like the shift from being engaged or believing in something to being a spectator. This is something he writes a lot about. And on the other hand, there may be this emergent fossil realism, which is a line of thinking that it’s unrealistic to think that we can imagine an alternative to fossil fuels.
They’re so embedded in our lives, in the financial system, in our social fabric that they can’t be removed. And I don’t think we’re there, importantly, right now, but I could see this happening pretty soon. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Would you consider it an example of fossil realism where we swap out the feedstocks of fossil fuels for something that’s more renewable and society looks pretty much the same as it is now and we don’t recognize what changes might be wrought by changing those feedstocks? Is that an example of this?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I think that could be a form if it took place under the discourse that, you know, we can’t get rid of any of this. So we’re just going to kind of tweak it a little bit, make it a little bit less bad. The decarbonized fossil fuels imaginary.
Ross Kenyon: Is the mirror image of that also an example of fossil realism where it’s too optimistic that it’s hard to imagine we actually wouldn’t face severe peril or doom?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Maybe. I haven’t thought about that yet. This is all like, you know, thinking aloud in progress, right? I just think there’s so many variants of realism abounding right now, and some of them are entirely inconsistent with one another, especially when it comes to carbon removal. We see a lot of this playing out. So with carbon removal, there’s this kind of techno-economic realism, which is like carbon removal isn’t realistic. It’s not mature. It’ll never be built at scale. It costs too much. It’s magical thinking, like We’ve heard those sort of critiques, right?
And then the same people might have a sort of entrenched interests realism. So carbon removal could happen, but if it does, it’s only by fossil fuel interests because they’re so powerful. They own it. They’re going to control it. You’re not being realistic if you imagine some other formulation of it.
Ross Kenyon: Is this... Is this appendage of realism inherently a criticism of a way of thinking? Is there like a positive version of realism where you see things as they actually are?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I think that, I mean, in this kind of post-truth moment, there’s just all these different claims to reality that sometimes aren’t very empirical and sometimes are at odds with each other. So you’ll hear those sorts of realism, but then they might not be applied in the same way to full decarbonization. They’ll say wind, water, and solar are totally realistic, but carbon removal, not. So it’s like a selective realism. I don’t know what’s going on with it. I’m trying to figure it out.
Ross Kenyon: Some of these just overlap in my brain in such a way that it makes it hard for me to parse a really discreet definition of this or a paradigmatic case, which very well could be a failure on my end more than that of the concept. But maybe if I get out of your way and you keep working through some of these ideas, maybe I’ll latch on to it.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Well, I think that, you know, there’s all these contestations of what’s realistic because a lot of the information we have comes from models. Those are kind of viewed as the best basis for various claims, right? I saw a headline yesterday. The other day, that’s like, we’re all realists now, pointing to the geopolitical situation. I don’t know how much we want to talk about that evolving tragedy today.
Ross Kenyon: Today is the morning of February 24th, which, yeah, Russia invading Ukraine. Should we do the show? Does it make sense to do it? Are we distracted? Yeah. But anyways, geopolitical discussion is always welcome here. It impacts everything that we do. So please continue.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Well, I think that we have sometimes a broader failure to draw lessons from what’s going on in the world beyond where we are. Because a lot of us who are activists may be engaged with a community scale, a local scale, thinking about what’s happening where we are, in the places we care about. And maybe we work from decarbonization on that scale out. But I’m just thinking about the past decade of authoritarian consolidation in a lot of places and different movements against that Arab Spring, but also in other places and how those are faring a decade on.
So there’s these geopolitical realities where a lot of places have trended more authoritarian. We’ve seen kind of the promises of globalization we might have felt a decade ago kind of evaporate. I think now we’re in this kind of post globalization moment. Right. And so we haven’t really integrated all of that into climate strategy. So thinking about climate is usually proceeding along local lines, looking at, you know, State level action, smaller scale action. And when we do talk about the global context, we talk about things like solidarity, about climate justice, climate finance for developing nations, all of which are important, but Kind of the theory of change of the climate movement seems to be kind of these mass mobilizations or these protests that might shift government.
And yet those strategies haven’t failed in a lot of places that they haven’t worked. They failed in many nations in terms of delivering change and democracy. So like there’s a tension there. Am I making sense?
Ross Kenyon: I think so. If I read it back to you, you can tell me if I’ve understood you, at least partially, that great power politics do not seem to play a part in many people’s carbon removal imaginaries.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, climate action generally, but we could also talk about, you know, the geopolitics of carbon removal and what it means for carbon removal specifically, because we are imagining these kinds of Global markets and stuff that would come out of this lineage of kind of globalist thinking that was kind of set in the 90s really and kind of the Rio framework about sustainable development and how we think about cooperation and stuff like that. And so carbon removal gets integrated into that and in how we imagine it taking place. In terms of, you know, nations being able to exchange emissions and removals through some kind of global scheme where there’s no corruption or the corruption is minimal enough that the thing can keep working with some legitimacy, right?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot today too, especially in the context of Germany’s reticence to sanction Russia as readily as other NATO powers because of the natural gas connections. There’s a 19th century classical liberal free trade economist named Frederick Bastiat. You ever come across his stuff?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Remotely, but I’m not an expert.
Ross Kenyon: He’s a libertarian favorite and has a lot of... Quite useful thought experiments for explaining microeconomics, but I believe it’s attributed to him of if goods don’t cross borders, armies will. And that’s a famous argument for free trade, right? You’re unlikely to fight someone that you’re trading with and you’re both mutually benefiting, but then you wonder, In the case of Russia and Germany, this might have prevented a more united front earlier because of their dependence through trade. It almost made me understand the autarkic economic models of you do everything yourself so that you’re not dependent upon outsiders in case something bad happens.
So that’s one of those lessons that I’ve been thinking about today. I’m not sure how relevant this is to you, but certainly geopolitical in nature.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Well, I’ve been thinking about how much these net zero schemes depend on all of this because most countries, I mean, some countries are expecting to fulfill all of their carbon removal needs within their own borders, but then it really favors, you know, a country like the U. S. that has a large landmass or whatever. Some countries like Switzerland are looking to procure abroad, right? Right. And most countries haven’t figured it out. Granted, they kind of leave this blank so far in the first versions of their long-term strategies. But there is a dimension of this where geopolitically countries with certain geographic attributes would be favored.
And no country that I know of is really planning to kind of overproduce removals and sell them like explicitly.
Ross Kenyon: So I don’t even know how all of this is going to work, but I don’t know if you heard the recent show we did with Alden and Paul. Did you hear that one?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, well, I heard about mercantilism, right?
Ross Kenyon: Mercantilism, yeah. And them also being worried about export controls for carbon removals being a thing in the future where those are not traded internationally.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, well, I mean, it would make sense too, I think, for that to be the case. But yeah.
Ross Kenyon: That changes the equation.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Well, should we talk about how haunted carbon removal is?
Ross Kenyon: I really want to name the show The Hauntologies of Carbon Removal, just because outside of that little weird aforementioned niche of the internet, this is our thing that we just did, which makes me very happy. What is this term? I imagine for most people listening who are not theory nerds, they don’t know what a hauntology is. Where should they start?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Well, you could start with Derrida, who was talking about Marx, but I’m just going to say, you know, give a kind of a shorter version. So Mark Fisher is also writing about this. And hauntology has to do with the agency of the virtual. So something that’s acting without physically existing, kind of like a ghost. And people talk about finance, about capital. They don’t have bodies, but they act on our world and produce effects. And you can think also when you go in the direction of carbon removal, thinking about the idea of overshoot, the various promises of emerging technologies, the models, those are all acting also without physically existing.
And so Fisher talks about two different directions in ontology. One is visions from the past or the ways that people in the past imagined the future, that which is no longer but remains effective, that’s still acting on us. And he talks about that which has not yet happened, but which is already effective. So different anticipations of the future, you know, how we imagine the future is already acting upon us, too.
Ross Kenyon: I think a good example, at least of the first kind of visions of the future from the past that never materialized yet still affect us. I think maybe we talked about this last time retrofuturism. And basically visions from the Jetsons of this nuclear utopia with cheap, free, clean energy. If you played the Fallout games, they’re essentially exactly this. Is that a good example of this?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I think so. I mean, I think that’s basically where the imagination of the future kind of stalled out. And so Fisher writes about this too, like kind of dating that halt. But it was probably starting in the 60s, 70s, 80s. And now the future is just kind of exhausted or slowly canceled.
Ross Kenyon: What were other visions of the future in the past that never materialized after that? Suspect Flower Power’s vision of the future. I mean, the cliche, I think it was probably from Hunter S. Thompson that the hippie movement crested at Altamont when Hell’s Angels are beating up people and they killed a guy at the Rolling Stones concert, right? And then it’s like heroin. It’s no longer LSD and Flower Power. It’s hard drugs and needles and scary things. I don’t know. Is that a failure? Is that a hauntology there?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I think so. At least that’s the one I’ve been thinking a lot about too, is I’ve been thinking about environmentalism specifically. But yeah, as Thompson wrote, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high water mark, that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Ross Kenyon: Did you just look that up or did you have that in your head?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: No, it’s in my notes for this piece. I was going to try to work it in somewhere.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, what? I must have missed that. That’s hilarious. Maybe I saw that and just seeped into my subconscious then. I don’t know. So yeah, this vision of the future where I think of the 60s, I think of like a back to the earth kind of small communitarian living rejection of white bread and modern technology and a crunchier version. That’s sort of the stereotype of hippies. And for whatever reason, that never showed up. And yet it still acts upon our culture very strongly and is a massive archetype and reference point.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, well, I think that’s what I think is going on with carbon removal. I think it’s haunted by boomer environmentalism. I mean, climate action generally, it’s haunted by this previous generation’s dreams of what a good environmental future would look like. Yeah. That’s, you know, focused on the individual consumer. It has this individual subjectivity kind of. There’s a threat of self-development and self-actualization also present in the psychedelic movement, which I think is wrapped up in this. But it’s anti-modern in a way. It’s local. There’s folk politics. Small scale. Small is beautiful.
And kind of this rural slash suburban idyllic thing. And it also upholds this nature society or natural artificial binary system. And so what good environmental future is that looking towards? It’s like a little bit green consumerists, local food. It’s not industrial. It’s not really urbanized. It’s kind of village scale and inflected by communes, even though communes failed. So that’s kind of the vibe that’s still haunting our imagination of like the environmental future, even today. And it’s impacting carbon removal, I think.
Ross Kenyon: It’s fascinating to make that link because I think when people think of hippies, they think of a really strong collectivist vision for the future. But when they called them the me generation, they’re like, just drop out, just be a draft dodger individually, abandon your duties to your country or whatever, do whatever makes you happy, secede from civilization and do your own thing. And I think people attribute that start of a really strong individualist consumer culture with hippies. I don’t know. I know that’s a thesis at least. Is that kind of what you’re saying?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, well, I think so. I had the misfortune to pick up a copy of On the Road last night. It was the worst book I’ve ever read. I don’t remember reading it that way the first time, but last night, I mean, it was just totally this individual protagonist with no regard for anybody but himself.
Ross Kenyon: I’m trying to remember any relationship that happens. I guess there was a couple with, I forget their made up names and who they stand for. But they’re like, we’re going to Mexico now. Oh, now we’re in Denver. Oh, we met so-and-so and we did this. I have a hard time. I think I’ve read that book like twice. I don’t even remember what happens really. Maybe that’s a good sign that it isn’t a great book.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: It’s a terrible book. But I mean, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything collectivist in there, I think.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, or this is like false notion of community. As you get older, I find the number of people, I used to think I had a circle of friends that were really tight. And I keep in touch with functionally like four of them. I used to think there was a couple dozen people that cared if I lived or died or that we were tight. And now that there’s no reason for us to interact on a regular basis beyond proximity like we once had, you’re like, oh, that wasn’t actually like a strong collective unit.
That was just people who were near each other and for convenience sake had relationships together. That strikes me as like on the road. They’re just people who party together and travel together seemingly for the most part. Yeah. Wow, we just ruined that book. And the beats, the hippies, we threw them all under the bus. Sorry, guys.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, but I mean, in some ways they threw us under the bus because we can’t like make progress because we’re haunted by their ideas. So it’s fair.
Ross Kenyon: I certainly am. I mean, we talked about this last time. I think even privately I’ve mentioned that. I feel either called... I mean, Nori too is very much a commodity market centric, that’s global, that’s at scale. Personally, I feel called to lots of crafty, small scale things. I would probably live out in the countryside if I really could. I recognize in some ways that might be an abandonment of duties I have to the larger society of opting out of intellectual combat for things that might be right, of making peace. It’s almost like a doomer attitude.
And once you get out into the country, Why not just be a prepper? Why not just go off the grid entirely and secede from civilization? Am I haunted, essentially?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, but you know it’s not going to work. No, but I started thinking, okay, is this really a fair critique? Because don’t we now have kind of a new urban intersectional environmentalism that’s like, City-centered, like let’s build livable cities and let’s center justice and frontline communities. And people actually care about environmental justice in a way that I think maybe even five years ago, it wasn’t front of mind for environmental organizations, maybe. And so I do think that there are new movements and a new focus that is remaking the Established environmental NGOs and policy and probably environmental justice is the biggest thing to shake up environmentalism in decades.
But then I thought, okay, but does it have a different vision of the good future? And I’m not sure. This is like where I’m conflicted.
Ross Kenyon: Is the framing of this being between a truly individualistic or collectivistic ethos? Is that the correct dialectic to be setting up here? Are you trying to pose them as being a viable collectivistic alternative?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Well, I’m just trying to figure out if, you know, the dominant vision of what we are striving towards in terms of the future environment has changed at all if we’re still in kind of what the boomers imagined as the ideal way to live on Earth.
Ross Kenyon: You’re wondering if the environmental justice community is going down a similar path as flower power in the boomer politics.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: There’s a few different possibilities here. One is that there is a new vision of a specific environmental good future that’s animating people and building a cultural form. And my sense of that is just off. It’s also possible, though, I think that not enough funding and resources have actually flowed to environmental justice groups and groups led by youth or indigenous people or people of color. So I still think most of these groups are under-resourced. And often in a defensive position in terms of fighting existing and upcoming polluting infrastructure. So what limited resources they have often go towards defense rather than detailing some other cultural imaginary of what they’re working towards.
I mean, generally it’s been like, Artists in society that have a lot of, you know, capital, right, and extra time that go to produce these sorts of imaginaries. So that’s one question I have. But I also think that maybe the funding that does go to these groups and communities is controlled by philanthropies at foundations made up of boomer environmentalists. And so that might actually act on the cultural production in subtle ways.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a lot for me to chew on there. I sort of want to try an idea out on you. I mentioned recently, but I think you balked at it a little bit. Let me try and reformulate this and see if this is helpful or maybe just introduces some more entropy in here. I find a lot of the left-wing visions of the future to be... Sorry, this is already a thing, but if socialist realism weren’t already an aesthetic movement that had a long lineage, we applied it here. A lot of the left-wing politics I see are a lot of them feel like the Great Society or the New Deal sort of warmed over.
I don’t always feel like there’s a lot of new life breathed into that. I see some people that are genuinely communistic, like very comfortable with The excesses, one might say, of someone like Mao or Stalin. I don’t see a lot of love for Tito or I guess Chavez and Castro get some love sometimes too. But I don’t see a lot of like genuinely new left-wing imaginaries. It seems like it’s either social democracy like Europe or the New Deal and great society, or it’s much more radical communism, which I find frankly terrifying.
Are there actually new visions that are substantively different that break us out of a, if you’ll allow it, socialist realism?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I mean, for me, the most interesting stuff might be in the realm of like Afrofuturism or indigenous science fiction or things that I don’t think have become really mainstream imaginaries yet, which I think is also kind of this resource question among the arts. Because, yeah, I think that right now the most identifiable vision of the future that’s been articulated is the Green New Deal. And that’s something that a lot of kind of new intersectional environmentalist organizations are talking about, right? I think that short film that has Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in it, you know, is like the short form vision.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that one was... Very powerful use of propaganda used in a neutral sense. Like it is a very effective mobilizing tool, I would say. It’s a beautiful video.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, but even now I just feel like I screened that with my students last semester and they thought it was good, but they also thought it was lost already now because of where we are with politics in the U. S. and politics. Joe Manchin and all the rest. And also most, they hadn’t seen it before either. So it was new for them, right? So it makes me wonder like how wide the Green New Deal imaginary actually went.
Ross Kenyon: Did they concur that it was cringe or based?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I think based if they had to pick one. They didn’t find it cringe. They just find it kind of sad because they could see that we talked a lot about the infrastructure bill and build back better and stuff. Over the last semester as all of that was playing out and they just felt sad, right?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And that one, I mean, it’s right in the name, right? Are we haunted by the New Deal? It’s almost inherently backward looking, which might be comforting. It also gives it a strong continuity in American politics. There’s good reasons, I think, for doing so. But it doesn’t make me think towards the future as much. Right. I mean, that’s the point, right? It is sort of leaning into that really strongly and saying like, we’ve done this before. Here’s a new version of it with different goals and it’s going to work. And it’s supposed to be comforting rather than looking like some scary new form of socialism, maybe.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I think that’s true. But I mean, it kind of goes back to what Mark Fisher was writing about more broadly is just this Exhaustion where new things are not really being generated. And so the environment is just one more instance of that. As he writes, we remain trapped in the 20th century. The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.
Ross Kenyon: Is that just what doomerism is at this point? Is that the clearest example? Yeah.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I think that leads to the doomerism, but he makes a really interesting observation about it, which is that, and I quote, environmental catastrophe provides what a political unconscious totally colonized by neoliberalism cannot, an image of life after capitalism. Because, you know, there’s some people who are kind of seeking this and looking forward to it, right? And I was always trying to like understand why that was the case. And I think that’s why I think he explained it. It’s just easier to imagine doom than actually transforming into something else capitalist.
Ross Kenyon: I frankly have a really strong problem doing this too. We talked about this last time, but a world where prices are not nearly as important or private property doesn’t matter as much. I think a lot of those institutions, I have a hard time imagining what the world would look like. Or if I do imagine them, it doesn’t look that good to me. It looks more anarchic and not anarchic in a self-organizing, beautiful grassroots kind of way. It looks more like Mad Max or Walking Dead or something scary. But I’m open to that being a failure of my intellect and not one of anything else.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: You didn’t watch Star Trek The Next Generation when you were a kid?
Ross Kenyon: No. Star Trek is like classically the like one of those like left wing science fiction where basically like all of matter can be transformed into anything else. Right. There’s we’ve gotten rid of scarcity and we have like one world government. Right.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. It’s a post-scarcity society.
Ross Kenyon: I think capitalism only makes sense as a way of addressing scarcity. Like prices and property are important for reasons of scarcity. I realize what I just said is such a thing to lob at you that you might reject all of those claims I just made. But if you live in a post-scarcity society, I don’t even know if those things are important anymore. How could they be? Is that a possible imaginary? I mean, that was the whole like zeitgeist movie series, right? Like a resource-based economy, like going beyond scarcity. Is that something that left-wing people should investigate?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I find the writing in that direction interesting and the post-work stuff too. I mean, I think it goes together. And it goes also with like solar power, right? I mean, there’s like this thread of like abundance there.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I’ve always wondered to what degree left-wing people are fond of saying that wage labor is necessary for capitalism. And I wonder what it would look like if you did have I mean, I think people are motivated by different things. You have haunting number three, which we haven’t done yet. Do you want to launch into that?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, so this is speculative. So there’s a sense of, you know, being haunted by events that had not actually happened by futures that failed to materialize and are still spectral. You know, in a sense, we’re haunted by boomer environmentalism, right? But I also think that in the future, we may be haunted by carbon removal in that way. And that future people may know that we could have organized to put carbon back in its place, but didn’t. We failed at geospheric return. They’ll look back at like our archived websites of carbon removal startups and just be like, oh, that was quaint, but those people, you know.
So that’ll be really sad in some ways.
Ross Kenyon: If we fail, there’ll be a melancholic archaeology department looking back through these failed carbon removal imaginaries from startups, essentially.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. Or from whatever cultural forms we have about it, which is not many. I don’t know. I walked down Abbot Kinney yesterday and saw a bunch of writing about regenerative this and that on shop windows. But that’s what we’ve got in terms of cultural forms. We’ve got like This capitalist version of regeneration that’s embedded in products and a lifestyle brand or something. We don’t really have cultural forms around carbon removal yet, although we could in the future. I look back at the choice to pursue petroleum rather than biomaterials in the 30s and 40s, and I feel sad about that.
Ross Kenyon: I’m so fascinated by the fact that you locate this future in art, mostly because given your intellectual heritage, I associate you probably somewhat appropriately as a materialist. Art does not seem to be operating on that same kind of plane, or maybe that’s just a superficial reading of your tradition.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: No, I actually think it’s central. I mean, I think that carbon removal and, you know, climate action will fail without cultural forms, cultural imaginaries. Sorry, I keep using that word, but, you know, kind of a science and technology studies term, but ideas about what a good future is, what our place in it is, what we have to do. It’ll fail without that because It’s such a big project that it needs broad social support.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve read a fair amount of indigenous horror fiction recently, which I find a fascinating genre. I don’t know Afrofuturism as well, but are there other movements like this or places people could start to read, listen to that might give them something useful in the tank? Oh, wow. Look, I just used a fossil fuel idiom. Wow.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I’ll have to look up some things and put some links in. Nothing top of mind.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I know. I saw Grist was running a contest for cultural work like this too.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, people are on the hunt for it. That’s the kind of interesting thing. Within design or speculative architecture or various sorts of domains, people are actively searching out visions of a livable future. It’s kind of interesting. Like you have to hunt so hard.
Ross Kenyon: What motivates you? Is there a vision that makes you keep working on this rather than doing something else with your time?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think carbon removal is possible. I also think phase out is possible, but I’m having like a longer term horizon. Like I’m not assuming that I’m going to be around to see either of those two things, but it’s more about like, how do you put the conditions in place? It’s more of an obligation than anything else.
Ross Kenyon: You don’t think you’re going to be alive in 2100? Aren’t we all going to be immortal at that point?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I’m okay with living out my natural lifespan. I’m not really looking to be an H plus or whatever.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, God. What is H plus? Is that a human plus? Is that what they’re calling it? Sure.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Isn’t that like the shorthand for the whole life extension deal? I’m not up on that. It creeps me out because I know that the autocrats are going to have it before the rest of us. And it all seems like a bad idea then.
Ross Kenyon: I wonder, I wonder what changes if someone lives forever because it could make them more and more avaricious and horrible. But I think if you weren’t going to be like, well, I’m going to be dead. So I don’t really care. Maybe it makes people think in a more longer term fashion if they have to be around.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Maybe they’ll like carbon removal better.
Ross Kenyon: If they got to stay here, if they’re not just going to die, then maybe so. I have no idea, though. I don’t feel like I’m intellectually prepared to grapple with that future. That surely must happen this century, though, right? Like that’s going to happen in tandem with carbon removal.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, no, that’s true. I think there’s going to be big advances.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s going to be, what, general AI. There’s going to be people living beyond 100 as a regular course of action. There’s going to be large-scale carbon removal. What other things are going to interact with this?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Climate change.
Ross Kenyon: I thought we were just fantasizing. Are you going to bring us down?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Well, no, I mean, I really wish there was more analysis of how climate change will impact soil carbon and forests and all the rest. I mean, we kind of know, but I feel like it could be more prominent than it is.
Ross Kenyon: Those concerns are big. I see many people talking about Well, the most critical take that I’ve seen on it is that we shouldn’t bother with any ecological storage at all because at the rate it’s warming, we’re not going to stop it and all of us can get released all over again. And then we’re in for a real hard time. Do you generally buy that or do you think that’s overblown?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: No, maybe. I think it’s like a question that deserves peer reviewed research. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: So you don’t want to play the like speculate with Ross game with wild visions into the future.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I mean, there’s some value in storing some carbon for the next 20 years with what we can do, but there’s no value, I think, in making your long-term strategy hinge on that, with the assumption that in 2050 and beyond, this is the problem with a lot of these net zero strategies is they don’t specify whether net zero is a temporary state or something that’s going to need to be maintained by In perpetuity. If it’s a stopgap, I think about it differently than if it’s like a long-term plan.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve seen it pretty much as, or I see it as a chance to bias that time. So if it’s going to get released in 20 years at current trajectories, then that’s our window to get lithospheric storage up and going. Or am I right or am I using motivated reasoning because I work at Nori?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: No, I mean, that’s how most people in the field see it, I think. But it hasn’t filtered into kind of the long-term plans of countries is what I mean. Like the people in the field see it that way, but then the long-term strategies don’t reflect people building a big geospheric return enterprise. They just say, and in 2050, our forest sink will be X amount of tonnes and that’s it. So we’ve still got some work to do.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know why that is. I think maybe companies or people making these net zero claims are hoping that someone pulls a rabbit out of their hat in time, or they just don’t realize the extent to which they’re on the hook for storage. This isn’t a one-time storage event. And this is one of the benefits, at least as I see it, of 10-year accounting, is that you’re thinking in terms of how many years of storage you’re doing here. It’s not one and done.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. Well, I think they’re also hoping the state will come in and Do a lot more, right? They’re betting on it. But yet for the state to do that, the voters have to be on board. And so that’s why the cultural piece is central.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think is the best piece of climate art that’s been produced?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I’m thinking, I mean, I’m thinking about all the climate fiction novels I’ve read, maybe none that I’ve loved.
Ross Kenyon: I find most of them pretty didactic, I must say. It’s almost like eating vegetables. I like eating vegetables, but it feels like I’m doing homework. I’ve read nothing that was joyful for its own sake within the world of climate fiction or climate art.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. I mean, the best stuff is probably not tagged as like climate, right? The climate’s probably a background to a story about social relations. Yeah. You know, this might be a controversial opinion, but I actually did like Snowpiercer.
Ross Kenyon: I thought it was kind of a fun movie, too. Do people just hate on it in your circles or what?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I guess, you know, within the geocleak, it’s ridiculed a bit.
Ross Kenyon: I guess the idea of a train just moving around the world constantly is a bit contrived, maybe. I think it’s based on a graphic novel, though, right? I don’t know. I thought it was it was more about class than geoengineering. It almost felt like geoengineering was in the background and it was more about just a world in crisis and inequality.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I think that’s what climate change is about. So I think that works of art get at that are going to be better than ones that don’t.
Ross Kenyon: Interesting. OK, so I read the movie correctly, in your opinion.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: So in your opinion, this isn’t really about climate change. It’s about inequality.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Well, climate change is a byproduct of inequality and colonialism and so on. So I think, you know, works of art that help you get to that are going to be more useful in building durable responses to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Isn’t it just about managing the byproducts of industrial emissions?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I have a book on this. It’s called Hending Fossil Fuels.
Ross Kenyon: I said it with a straight face too. Maybe I should re-watch Snowpiercer. Geostorm though. I don’t think that probably. Are you going to take a revisionist take on that one?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I couldn’t watch it.
Ross Kenyon: You couldn’t watch it?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: No.
Ross Kenyon: Just horrified Exante or what?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Some things you just know better than to do.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I watched it. I think I like Snowpiercer more. I thought it was all right. I understand why people don’t like these, though. I imagine if they don’t understand why they resent these movies consciously, it’s probably because it introduces these concepts to the masses in ways that are too theatrical or dramatic or not nuanced enough. Is that it?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I think so. I haven’t really figured out what to do because you can’t just... Wish a cultural movement out of thin air. So like, what are the conditions that produce interesting cultural movements, interesting visions of the future that also resonate in a wider way? I don’t think anybody’s figured out that recipe. And if they did, I wouldn’t trust them because they were probably using it for nefarious ends. I don’t know, maybe there’s some programmers at Twitter that have figured this out. But I think I would concentrate on a few things, maybe.
One is dealing with this problem of the platforms, which I talk about at length in various places. But I think that one of the challenges is that the sort of brand building and influencing that’s done on the platforms is Narrow casting, not broadcasting. So it’s like, you know, you have a niche audience, you build that up, you’re not trying to reach multiple groups in the way that you need to for politics. And so that’s a limitation. So I think dismantling the platforms we have and building platforms that work in different ways using different algorithms is kind of a climate objective, number one.
I think that putting more funding into creative spaces, into the arts, into cultural production is actually a climate objective number two. And so these things aren’t thought of as like climate programs of action, but they should be.
Ross Kenyon: This is the first time I’ve heard anyone’s take a claim that strong about it. It’s not common.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, no, I mean, the media ecology and the way it’s biased towards a few huge tech companies are That aren’t making profits off of our division. That’s like a big climate problem.
Ross Kenyon: Big everything problem.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: It’s weird that I am involved as I am in communications and marketing work since I find most of the platforms insufferable and don’t really spend any time on them unless I have to. I find that they just make me angry.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: That’s what they’re designed to do. They’re hacking everybody’s brains. All these people that are like, we only want natural solutions. We don’t want these techno fixes. They’re saying that on a platform that is like producing dopamine and weird chemical reactions in their brain. It’s just very odd. I’m concerned about this. And so I think that, you know, I think that’s one of the main spaces of focusing action right now.
Ross Kenyon: We’re never going to get to this, how Twitter broke science, are we? Eventually.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Eventually.
Ross Kenyon: I just keep teasing it at the end of every show we do forever. Well, Holly, I think that’s a good place to leave it. There’s definitely more to be said here. I don’t think we’re going to hear from you for a while probably though, right? I don’t know how long you’re anticipating going on a podcasting hiatus. Do you happen to know? Are you able to say?
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I’ll be on sabbatical probably till next January.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, we’ll miss you. Thanks for coming on and sharing your thoughts. Links to everything we talked about are a good chunk of which you can find in the show notes. And if you like what we’re doing, please give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And thanks for listening. And thanks again, Holly.
Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Thanks so much for having me.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori. com, follow us on social media, and we will catch you next time.
