Thread by @mclaren_erc

In my chapter for “Has it Come to This: the promises and perils of geoengineering on the brink” rutgersuniversitypress.org/has-it-come-to… I seek to explain why promises of enhancing justice through #geoengineering are delusional in contemporary politics

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2/9 Right now, geoengineering techniques are being co-constructed with political regimes inside the dominant (neo)liberal social imaginary, as sustaining innovations for the political and cultural maintenance of elite privilege and Northern domination.

3/9 Current geoengineering research and advocacy typically fails to properly recognize all those that would be affected by it, and consistently presumes and privileges certain (Northern, liberal) forms of knowledge, expertise, moral theory, and subjectivity.

4/9 Justice is seen in utilitarian ways with procedural and distributional dimensions. The very idea of justice as recognition is marginalized in the dominant social imaginary, treated at best merely as a step of moral or political inclusion in the existing system.

5/9 (Mis)understood this way, recognition is also rejected by radical scholars who portray the pursuit of inclusion, as opposed to transformation of the system, as a betrayal of class or group interests.

6/9 I offer instead a political account of justice as recognition which centers the quest for justice as the primary task of politics. Victims of injustice deserve recognition as full moral equals, and political voice and agency to achieve restorative justice.

7/9 From this perspective, the history and impacts of climate change suggest demands for restorative justice on two dimensions: in the relationships between humans and the planet; and in the relations between the beneficiaries and victims of colonialism and industrialization.

8/9 In neither case is geoengineering the first, or obvious answer. Just geoengineering may not be impossible, but in its current configurations geoengineering (and even much geoengineering research) is likely to hinder the quest for restorative justice, not support it.

9/9 For the full argument see 'Has it Come to This: the promises and perils of geoengineering on the brink' rutgersuniversitypress.org/has-it-come-to… Thanks to editors JP Sapinski @hollyjeanbuck and Andreas Malm