Document Type
Article
Original Publication Date
2024
Journal/Book/Conference Title
New Formations
Volume
112
Issue
02
First Page
31
Last Page
50
DOI of Original Publication
10.3898
Date of Submission
October 2024
Abstract
Net Zero ideology promises that current and ongoing emissions can be partially offset by ‘negative emissions’ strategies such as carbon capture and sequestration, allowing carbon intensive firms to narrate themselves as agents that are solving – not causing – the climate crisis. This represents a shift in liberal and corporate environmentalism away from both denial and delay, towards a new strategy acknowledging the need to end fossil fuel use while urgently deferring transformations to a future made possible by not-yet developed technological innovations. This paper argues that a through-line of settler futurity provides affective infrastructure potent enough to transect opposing positions in minority world eco-politics, from pro-market green growth champions to pro-growth, anti- market ecosocialists. Settler futurity offers visions of possible and desirable futures where the affordances of modernity persist unchanged. Unsettling settler environmentalism may require experimenting with approaches to confronting climate crisis that do not shy away from the difficult entanglements of life making and industrialised production, and that grapple with the affective work required to allow other futurities – and therefore other ways of living well with, against and beyond the fossil-fuelled, imperial-capitalist present – to exert their orienting presence.
Is Part Of
VCU Sociology Publications
Included in
Environmental Studies Commons, Place and Environment Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons
Comments
This is the accepted version of the article. The published version is available at https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/newformations/vol-2024-issue-112/abstract-9996/ (DOI: https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF:112.02.2024)