Preempting the Second Contradiction: Solar Geoengineering as Spatiotemporal Fix

Kevin Surprise

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2018, vol. 108, issue 5, 1228-1244

Abstract: Climate change is increasingly understood as a potential crisis for global financial stability and thus liberal-capitalist hegemony. The primary crisis management strategy is “green capitalism”—renewable energy, carbon markets, natural capital, and so on—that aims to ameliorate the climate crisis while opening new realms of commodification and accumulation. A central obstacle facing this ad hoc strategy is the temporal disjuncture between its decades-long instantiation, the increasing rate of climatic change, and potential for vast climate-driven costs and losses. In this context, I examine solar geoengineering—specifically stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI)—as an emergent tactic. Previously considered an “emergency Plan B” should mitigation efforts fail, leading centers of geoengineering research increasingly frame SAI as a mechanism capable of slowing the rate of climatic change. Examining research at Harvard University, which suggests that—paired with substantial emissions cuts—SAI can potentially “buy time” for mitigation and adaptation, I argue that SAI should be understood as a preemptive spatiotemporal fix for the second contradiction of capitalism. Second contradiction theory contends that capitalist-driven environmental degradation can engender systemic crisis, and climate change is currently its most expressed manifestation. In modifying planetary albedo to expand the atmospheric waste sink and thus decrease the rate of change, SAI can potentially preempt the emergence of the second contradiction. This framework expands connections between spatiotemporal fixes and socioecological crises by focusing on systemic underproduction and argues that SAI should be understood not as an aberrant “emergency” measure but as an increasingly normalized tactic emerging within existing forms of hegemony.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2018.1426435

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