Negative emission technologies

Strategies for mitigating climate change today include plans for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through “Negative Emissions Technologies” (NETs). NETs create new opportunities for scientific research, technology development, and the development of financial products, but also new conceptual possibilities, for example of declaring one’s ambition to become “climate neutral.” NETs thus constitute a novel frontier in climate science and politics whose conditions of possibility, characteristics, and consequences can be studied by social scientists and humanists. For environmental sociologists, NETs pose numerous opportunities for engaging with questions around future-making, imaginaries, promises, expertise, markets, infrastructure, justice, publics, and generally, the shape and role of science and technology in a form of social life that is increasingly organized around “planetary” concepts.