Looking back at Baku — an excerpt
Below is Chapter 8 of After Geoengineering, published in 2019 by Verso. This manuscript was written at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018.
Since 2018, a lot has happened in carbon removal. It became a thing, with a rise of hundreds of startups using myriad approaches. A lot has happened in climate politics too: a wave of net-zero targets, a war that drove up energy prices, covid, inflation, new obstacles. So it’s a bit strange to revisit 2018 when it comes to carbon removal — a moment in time when things felt more open.
The chapter is a warning about fossil fuel co-option of carbon removal — and a call to action to help shape its future. It talks about the need to make just carbon removal into a political demand.
Mostly, that didn’t happen. The climate left — who I imagined as the audience for that book — didn’t really engage with carbon removal, for a variety of reasons which I won’t get into here. That’s not to minimize the great work some people have been doing to put forward progressive versions of carbon removal. But it never became a political demand in any meaningful sense.
What happened instead was kind of strange — consultants stepped in to articulate the issue.
The Boston Consulting Group wrote in a 2024 report that “Unlike other climate technologies, CDR could primarily be considered a public good. As a result, there are barriers to scaling CDR demand that are unlikely to be overcome without government policy demand drivers.” It suggests policies like direct government procurement, compliance regulations, and defining long-term targets for durable CDR. These sound boring when written into a report, but are actually quite large state interventions that will require voter buy-in. McKinsey too discusses government procurement as well as carbon credits to scale CDR. The problem with these reports is that demand for carbon removal at a planetary scale has to be a social demand with majority public buy-in to work. There’s not really a way around dealing with the electorate, their beliefs, and their priorities.
I wouldn’t have written this chapter in the same way today, six or seven years later, but the main problems articulated in the chapter still stands: there isn’t really a vision for what to do with fossil fuel companies, especially nationally owned ones, and this is an analytic gap. And there’s no organized actor with the interest and capacity removal a popular demand.
8 Co-opting
Baku, Azerbaijan, 2010, pleasant weather, with oil prices over $100 a barrel
I was strolling along the edge of the Caspian Sea when I happened upon the setup for Oil Worker Appreciation Day. Along the trimmed lawns of a quiet park, wall-sized photos of oil infrastructure had been erected — gleaming refineries, offshore rigs, compressors.
National patriarch Heydar Aliyev was photoshopped into some of them, looking inspired or determined in his tuxedo, with the blue-red-green of the Azeri flag rippling behind him.
Breaking up the infrastructure panoramas were images of seedlings being replanted in depleted oil fields, scenes from new hospitals, and a map of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.
The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) had also constructed stages for evening concerts in the park. The bands would play against backdrops of oil rigs and tambourines. I tried to picture people dancing into the night, courtesy of SOCAR.
In some places, oil connotes regeneration. Shining blue-glass skyscrapers were being sculpted in the shape of flames. Versace and other fashion houses were popping up with silent boutiques, and the streets were jammed end to end with Mercedes SUVs. Resplendent fountains and gardens appeared in the new plazas; more were under construction.
Traveling out beyond the capital, to the oil fields of the Absheron Peninsula, I walked through a different picture: people living among unfettered extraction. Baku, like many capital cities, is an anomaly. Out near the oil fields, children played in the streets, indifferent to the puddles of pitch-black oil seeps. Women strung up laundry to dry between pieces of decaying oil infrastructure, red-and-white striped towels fluttering among empty cylindrical tanks. Rusting pipelines, no longer connecting anything with anything, crisscrossed bare earth or shrubs. A newer set of pipelines, mustard yellow, connected the pumps that were still sucking. Everything was drenched in the smell of naphtha. In the midst of it all, under the flat, dusty-blue sky, women carried home loaves of round bread.
Azerbaijan relies on energy for 70 percent of its income; oil makes up 95 percent of its exports. Now, with oil prices half of what they were a few years ago, the country faces the task of developing non- oil sectors. Yet oil is so embedded that the fifty-manat banknote features a diagram of the benzene molecule, C6H6: six carbon atoms, six hydrogen atoms, arranged like an esoteric star.
A key question behind decarbonization is this: How does one get companies to walk away from their assets? Or: How does one get countries to walk away from assets they are counting on? For three-quarters of the oil extraction is done not by international companies like ExxonMobil and Shell, but by national oil companies like SOCAR. (The latter are actually entangled with private companies — BP owns a 20 percent stake in Russian firm Rosneft, for example.) Oil-producer governments still capture a large part of revenues — on average, 70 percent of net revenues, from 40 percent in the United States to 95 percent in Iran.(1) Geographers Gavin Bridge and Phillippe Le Billon break down the oil value chain: with oil at one hundred dollars a barrel, 20 percent of that goes to cover costs, 33 percent is gained by producer governments, consumer governments earn 40 percent, and companies get 7 percent.(2) Note also that privately held companies aren’t simply private; investment by pension funds in fossil fuel companies means citizens are caught up in their fates.
If oil prices were back up to one hundred dollars a barrel, the 1.7 trillion barrels of oil in reserves add up to $170 trillion of unburnable carbon — two years of global GDP.(3) The infrastructure at stake is also worth tens of trillions. That is a lot of revenue, not just for companies, but for nation-states like Azerbaijan, to turn away from. In many cases, citizens aren’t profiting from these revenues, though in some areas they are. All this entanglement means that the dilemma of what to do with these fossil fuel entities isn’t a simple one of fighting against a few corporations we don’t like. We need to understand it as a social question, not just a business or economics or political question, and despite the stirrings of discussion about a fossil fuel “exit” or “phase-out,” this question still needs to be pushed into the mainstream. So far, the literature on “de-risking” pathways for companies is very corporate, originating from think tanks and research institutions, and aimed at fossil fuel companies. It is not a social question — despite how socially embedded these fuels are.
The entanglement of states, citizen investors, and fossil fuel producers also means that if the narrative flips and the turn away from fossil fuels truly happens, the public could suddenly be holding a lot of debt and liabilities. If we are serious about getting off of fossil fuels, we may be headed for a bailout that makes the industry bailout following the 2008 financial crisis look like crumbs. For example, consider Peabody Energy — responsible for 1.16 percent of global greenhouse emissions, and number sixteen of the 100 top producers of greenhouse gas emissions according to a list compiled by the non- profit CDP.(4) Its predecessor, Peabody Coal, went bankrupt in 2016, when coal prices dropped and they were stuck with $10 billion in debt — and their executive walked away with significant compensation. Then, the reformulated Peabody Energy “exited bankruptcy” in 2017, back in action. Meanwhile, Peabody was one of thirty-seven fossil fuel companies being sued by municipalities in California for damages due to climate change. However, a judge ruled that they weren’t responsible for climate impacts incurred before their 2016 bankruptcy; they got a clean slate. It’s not hard to imagine this maneuver becoming part of the playbook. Indeed, immunity from climate change lawsuits for fossil fuel companies is shaping up to be a part of any compromise legislation on climate change.
There’s another reason what to do with fossil fuel entities is a complex social question, which is that these revenues are sometimes used to fund mitigation and adaptation to climate change. For example, the state of Louisiana is rapidly losing land to coastal erosion. The state’s master plan for coping comes with a $50 billion price tag, and, as journalists Kevin Sack and John Schwartz report in a 2018 article in the New York Times and New Orleans’s Times-Picayune, “the only dependable financing model has been catastrophe”: the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.(5) Offshore leases were also budgeted in at $176 million a year, to help pay for adaptation, but those revenues have fallen with oil prices. That $50 billion is twice the state ’s annual budget, and a federal bailout seems unlikely: there will be competition from other coastal areas, like South Florida and metropolitan New York. Oil and gas, Sack and Schwartz report, are the only industries flush enough to fund some restoration, and despite some politicians’ reluctance to hold a main source of local income accountable, Louisianans “seem newly receptive to holding the industry accountable for the consequences of its activities.” In a Times-Picayune poll, 72 percent agreed that industry should help pay, and another 18 percent said that industry alone should bear the cost; only half of individuals were willing to pay higher taxes for coastal restoration. But they already do: state taxpayers spent $588 million to repair oil-and-gas-related damage along the Louisiana coast, which perversely goes to benefit those very industries, as they own or lease much of the coast.
Examples like this illustrate three things. First, the cost of these climate-related, slow-onset disasters is staggering, and it will soon be a ballooning public burden. Second, people do support making the industry who created the problems pay, to some extent. Third, despite this idea that polluters should pay, the risk seems high that it is taxpayers who will end up bailing out the fossil fuel industry — perhaps even in ways that serve these companies. They are not going to go gently into that good night.
This social question of what to do with fossil fuel producers intersects carbon removal on the deepest levels. Carbon capture and sequestration could be a way to allow fossil fuel companies to slip into something different. Bridge and Le Billon, in their study of the political economy of oil, write that for oil producers, “serious efforts to stem the accumulation of atmospheric carbon raise the interesting prospect of them becoming stewards of underground carbon stocks rather than extractors of oil.” The oil production network could become a carbon conveyor, they write, and a new class of end user could be created: those actors who own or control carbon sinks.(6)
Consider the remarks made by Charles McConnell, who was head of the US Department of Energy Office of Fossil Fuels during the Obama administration, at a December 2018 oil industry conference in Midland, Texas.
What’s the Paris Accord and what does it really do? It gets you about 0.4 percent of what’s absolutely necessary to achieve two degrees by 2100. Fundamentally, what I am saying is that it doesn’t do anything. It would delay getting to four to five degrees by 2100 by about four years. And it’s trillions of dollars. It doesn’t talk about technology; it doesn’t really talk about CCUS [carbon capture, utilization, and storage].(7)
Here, the narrative maneuver is that the Paris Agreement is weak, unambitious, ineffective. There is a fair argument there. But then McConnell goes on to describe fifty to one hundred years of oil production from enhanced oil recovery, a technique of getting more oil out of depleted oil wells, which is supposed to be a bridge to some other future. What he closes with is also interesting: a warning that both national and international oil companies are pointing their strategy toward CCS with EOR and eventual decarbonization: “These companies are planning for a decarbonized future, however that gets envisioned. And the smart ones are the ones who are out in front. They are going to create their own world and they are not going to be victims to someone else ’s.”
We’ve been hearing about the need to adopt CCS for years: Is this time different? It might be. The oil industry is moving into a defensive crouch. As the secretary general of OPEC said at the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos, regarding climate change and pressure from investors: “Our industry is literally under siege and the future of oil is at stake.”(8) The head of state-run Saudi Aramco stated, “We need to boost efficiency or get rid of CO2 by technology.” Even though the world failed to invest in CCS for decades, the moment of this narrative shift — where fossil fuel becomes something dangerous to invest in — might place pressure on oil companies to take the lead on carbon removal, if only to preserve investor confidence (whether or not they actually follow through on doing it).
What if fossil fuel companies transform into carbon management companies? How would that shape the future of carbon removal?
In a worst-case scenario, oil companies will adopt the logic and argument of negative emissions in order to keep producing oil with enhanced oil recovery, employing a discourse of “carbon management.”
To see a more specific, less speculative example of how policy for CCS is in thrall to vested interests, take the response to the FUTURE Act in the United States. This legislation was passed in February 2018 as part of a federal budget bill. It reforms “Section 45Q,” the US tax credit for carbon capture and storage. Previously, CCS projects received ten dollars per ton of carbon captured and used for enhanced oil recovery, and twenty dollars per ton securely stored. The revision increases these sums to thirty-five and fifty dollars, respectively, and eliminates a volumetric cap of 75 million tons of CO2. Following the successful changes to the credit in the new US budget, a new coalition was launched: the Carbon Capture Coalition, which is the rebranded National Enhanced Oil Recovery Initiative. The group boasts forty-eight members, including companies like Archer Daniels Midland and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America, fossil fuel companies like Peabody Energy and Shell, think tanks like the Bipartisan Policy Center, and unions like the AFL-CIO, the National Farmers Union, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. But it lost a member — the Natural Resources Defense Council, a green group that doesn’t support incentives for enhanced oil recovery.
There are some reasons to celebrate the legislation: it was a rare bipartisan effort, and it is a performance-based tax credit, meaning that something measurable has to actually happen for it to be claimed (though these companies don’t pay a whole lot of taxes to begin with). But the whole idea of having tax credits for EOR illustrates the challenge: the polluters are first in line to benefit from carbon capture. A letter signed by organizations 350.org, Greenpeace USA, Clean Water Action, Friends of the Earth International, and others called the act a “handout to oil companies.” They also pointed out that EOR negatively affects people of color and environmental justice communities, who disproportionately live near oil fields.
If there ’s no progressive vision about how to use CCS, including a clear set of demands about how we want to use this technology, the oil companies can essentially take us hostage. For if we don’t need them for fossil fuel extraction, we will need them for removal services, since they have the very technical capacity that’s needed to inject CO2 underground: the drilling and seismic expertise, the work in offshore environments, and so forth. They are the ones that have developed and pioneered this technology — with heavy government subsidies and investment, of course. It’ll be: Everyone knows climate change is bad; the international agreements aren’t strong enough and aren’t achieving enough; this carbon needs to be removed; and we’re the only ones with the expertise, know-how, and get-things-done spirit to accomplish it. It is better to meet these prospects head on, in an anticipatory way, rather than pretend we can wave a magic wand and ban all fossil fuels, or vigorously oppose all forms of industrial carbon capture. What’s needed is a specific set of terms for CCS — to start, I would personally throw out “no CCS with coal,” but it’s clearly a collective conversation. We can see the fossil fuel industry organizing to take charge of the narrative shift towards acceptance of carbon removal. There is already bipartisan legislation introduced in the US Senate to incentivize large-scale carbon removal — but it’s called The Enhancing Fossil Fuel Energy Carbon Technology (EFFECT) Act, which has been introduced but not turned into law yet. It defines “net-negative carbon dioxide emissions technology” as technologies that co-fire coal and biomass and places ensuring the continued use of coal as a goal — this is the bargain that Democrats are asked to sign onto to get a cross-cutting carbon removal program funded. We need to organize an alternative narrative about how we think carbon removal should proceed, before the line that “there is no alternative” to the vision set out by the fossil fuel companies rears its ugly head. The longer we wait, the more entrenched their vision will be.
Retiring entrenched powers
Fossil fuel companies aren’t the only actors that might co-opt carbon removal efforts. Once there is a price on carbon, and a value assigned to it, then the jostling will begin in earnest. First, there’s industry, responsible for about 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, with heavy contributions from cement, steel, and fertilizer, in particular. This sector has a history of lobbying against a price on carbon, yet it may eventually embrace carbon removal as a way of continued existence, getting exemptions for “residual emissions.” Next, there ’s the farm lobby. Journalist Stephanie Anderson’s book One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for Regenerative Agriculture explains the political work to be done to move toward regenerative agriculture: the farm bill needs to fund research in regenerative agriculture, the land-grant universities need to be redirected and freed from corporate influence, the Cooperative Extension Service needs to be retooled, and subsidies for farmers need to be changed.(9)
Then there are the indirect threats to scale-up of carbon removal. At first glance, defense contractors don’t appear relevant to this topic. But in the United States, we fund the military to the tune of $500–700 billion each year, a significant proportion of which goes to contractors, who in turn lobby for more. Can we afford to keep paying off these behemoths, and still have enough public funds to instantiate a massive decarbonization and carbon removal program? Tech companies are another group of actors that could confound a socially just version of carbon removal, though this, too, is a very indirect link. My concern is that tech companies could put forth a set of proprietary tools for managing carbon before we have time to invent messier but more democratic alternatives — thus providing a captive platform upon which carbon transactions take place. It sounds a bit far-fetched right now, since by and large tech companies show very limited interest in environmental management. But once there ’s a price on carbon, there ’s a rationale for them to engage, and they have far more capacity to do some of the data management that would be involved: companies like Google, for instance, already have an incumbent’s advantage when it comes to geospatial data. Tech money has poured into precision agriculture, and it seems a reasonable step from precision agriculture to carbon management. In their book Climate Leviathan, social theorists Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann describe a planetary sovereign, “a regularly authority armed with democratic legitimacy binding technical authority on scientific issues, and a panopticon-like capacity to monitor the vital elements of our emerging world: fresh water, carbon emissions, climate refugees, and so on.”(10) If their vision comes to pass, it will be tech companies who deliver those capacities. Who writes the code, and how they do it, matters to the outcomes.
It ’s exhausting to think about all these entrenched power interests; clearly, the path toward any socially just form of carbon removal is fraught. But thinking critically about the power of all these sectors is important, because it illustrates how significant levels of carbon removal will require more than just business as usual. They will require taking back our democracy and the levers of power from Big Agra, Big Oil, beltway bandits, and the like.
Putting carbon removal into the Green New Deal
The good news is that all kinds of people are already fighting on all of these fronts. In Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything, she describes “Blockadia”: interconnected pockets of resistance to extreme fossil fuel extraction. “Blockadia is not a specific location on a map but rather a roving transitional conflict zone that is crop- ping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill, whether for open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands oil pipelines.” Blockadia is a critical emergence, and it demonstrates a valuable set of tactics. What Blockadia does, write environmental scholars Marco Armiero and Massimo de Angelis, is shatter the universalism of the Anthropocene narrative and bring attention to race, class, and gender (as well as settler colonialism).(11) And yet, many of the victories thus far — in terms of extraction plans being shuttered or squashed — likely have to do with low oil prices. When prices rise again, we can expect a more voracious extractive advance upon areas that aren’t currently economical to develop, including more CO2-EOR projects — that is, unless public opinion and legal pressures transform the picture dramatically. I personally believe there is a gradual movement in public opinion taking place: there will be more lawsuits, more divestment, more shaming, and a shifting tide. We’re not quite there, but by the time this book is printed, it will be even closer.
We need Blockadia — it’s helped transform the scene to the point where OPEC appears to be under siege. But for handling carbon removal, we also need a resistance that is more than reactive. We have to move from reflexive opposition of new technologies toward shaping them in line with our demands and alternative visions. To realize a just form of carbon removal, we need to challenge fossil fuel extraction differently — to take the question of what will happen to these companies head-on, and transform them ourselves. What does that look like: Nationalization? Negotiation of allowable “residual emissions” for the sectors we decide are key? Public subsidies for carbon removal infrastructure; public orchestration of certificates of obligation for carbon disposal? Or more radically: Requiring emitters with historical responsibility to pay for carbon removal? These processes may not be as photogenic or emotionally legible as Blockadia, though with some creativity we could make them so. In general, environmentalism has focused on consumption, local alternatives, and to some extent, companies — but fossil fuels and industry are more structurally integrated than these approaches alone can address. We need to discuss nationalization, as well as strategic diversification into other areas; while companies haven’t done so well with diversification into alternative energy so far, in a low-carbon scenario, it may be the best option for them. Or, why not combine those options: nationalize these companies, and turn them into combined energy / carbon removal companies? What’s clear is that there needs to be a broader social discussion that (1) recognizes how entwined these companies are with the state; and (2) anticipates bailout actions or clean-slate bankruptcies in a forward-thinking, offensive way, rather than reacting to them as they unfold. Collective decision making on demands for the arrangements of drawdown and regeneration will be critical if we are to see carbon actually get cleaned up.
Nina Power, a cultural critic and philosopher, points out that to make a demand from somebody is often to accept the broad outlines of the existing situation: “To demand something — better working conditions, political representation, compensation — is at the same time often to recognize the framework and the institutions that could (but most often will not) acquiesce to that demand: employers, the government, the state.”(12) The process of articulating demands is worth doing, because it helps us understand which institutions won’t acquiesce to the demands, and think about how to deal with them.
Of whom do we demand carbon removal? The state, first and foremost. We can also issue demands related to carbon removal toward politicians (on various scales), investors, and companies with relevant expertise. Specific demands could include near-term policy actions, as well as public investment. Changing the subsidies for fossil fuels is what people point out as the first and most obvious step to decarbonization: the world currently subsidizes fossil fuels at $500 billion per year, or $15 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions. We should be paying for the damages instead of subsidizing what’s driving them. We should also be continuing the pressure to divest from fossil fuels, while pointing out social investment opportunities in carbon removal. Right now, there’s an awareness problem: investors aren’t aware that carbon budgets exist, or what they mean for high-emission companies.(13) Therefore, we need to create comprehensible accounts of the risks to investors — and many are working on this — while also suggesting carbon removal among a range of long-term things to invest in. In California, Assembly Bill 1550, building on Senate Bill 535, requires that 25 percent of funds from the state’s cap-and-trade program go to projects within disadvantaged communities, and another 10 percent go to benefit low-income households and communities. These types of legislative action, driven by many environmental justice advocacy groups, can provide ideas for how carbon removal funding could proceed. Actions like these would be initial steps toward making the benefits from carbon capture programs accrue to people who have suffered from environmental injustice, and toward alleviation of inequality during the transition to a carbon-negative society. In short, we need anticipatory engagement that doesn’t simply anticipate carbon removal as an emerging technology in need of R&D or investment; we need anticipatory engagement that can also anticipate its co-option. In this regard, climate restoration requires an expressly political engagement.
The risks that attempts at carbon removal will fail are grim, as a chorus of analysts warning about “betting on negative emissions” have noted. And those risks are only compounded by another prospect on the horizon: solar geoengineering.
