Decarbonisation

This chapter argues that critiques levelled at the anthropocene - that it prematurely settles who the ‘we’ are that bear both the historic responsibility and the brunt of the uneven impacts of contemporary environmental crises - also need to be made of decarbonisation as a goal of global climate governance. It maintains that decarbonisation should, similarly to the anthropocene, be thought of as ‘bad universal’, that in fact currently forecloses the difficult political work necessary to address the multiple complex issues of globe-spanning climate change. Its apparently positive conceptual content (the absolute necessity to reduce global emissions) is written precisely through the silences it imposes on the broad array of conflicts, oppressions and impacts that have historically lead to these emissions through the development of fossil-fuel based capitalism. I outline here the processes of exclusion, exploitation and incoherence through which decarbonisation has been developed, institutionally stabilised and propagated, and highlights the incoherencies that this results in. Through this process it aims to point towards the conditions required for an emancipatory and truly transformatory politics of decarbonisation.