Carbon Dioxide Removal Technologies and the Politics of Transformation Delay in the EU

Mitigating the climate crises rapidly and effectively requires radical socioecological transformation, i.e., transformational change which is not limited to technological innovation and efficiency gains but alters societal and economic power relations, including the dismantling of fossil capital. At the same time, most climate models suggest that in order to limit global warming to 1.5°C or at least below 2°C, we not only need to reduce emissions, but must also remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a large scale. As a result, carbon dioxide removal technologies (CDR, also referred to as negative emission technologies) figure prominently in climate change mitigation pathways and, increasingly, climate policy – even though their availability at scale remains highly uncertain. As a result, expectations of future large-scale availability of CDR technologies may provide an unwarranted justification – particularly for fossil capital and ‘hard to abate’ sectors – for delaying mitigation and, ultimately, socioecological transformation. However, how such mitigation deterrence and transformation delay effects actually occur, and how this changes the politics of decarbonization and transformation, has hardly been investigated empirically to date. In this contribution, we introduce, first, a conceptual methodological approach to systematically study mitigation deterrence and transformation delay in climate policy-making processes related to CDR technologies. The approach integrates literature on sociotechnical imaginaries and the cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence with historical-materialist policy analysis. It follows within-case process tracing to uncover whether and how expectations of CDR technologies either weaken ‘conventional’ mitigation targets in policy formulation or encourage policy designs which treat ‘conventional’ mitigation and CDR as equivalent. Focusing on critical instances of contestation in the policy process, this approach also allows us to identify nascent constellation of actors and material interests as well as emerging fault lines related to CDR technologies. Second, to unpack initial mitigation deterrence and transformation delay effects in the EU climate policy empirically, we focus on the EU ‘sustainable carbon cycles strategy’ and the current negotiations on the EU carbon removal certification scheme. Our main contention is that even though it is too early to pin-point clear-cut instances of mitigation deterrence and transformation delay in EU climate policy related to CDR technologies, critical opportunities to prevent such effects have already been missed in both climate target formulation and policy design. Regarding the constellation of actors and interests, we find that although fossil capital is already organizing policy support for CDR technologies, agribusiness and the biomass sector have so far been the main driving force behind CDR policy integration.