School of Social and Political Science

Description

Abstract:

In light of the hysteresis and acceleration of the climate crisis, climate overshoot has only recently been acknowledged as inevitable. As the IPCC belatedly reports, current pledges are not even remotely on track to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Further, no amount of future emission reduction can suffice to avert climate overshoot. Thus, the rapidly dwindling options to avert runaway climate change appear to have been reduced to a climate change technofix – namely Negative Emission Technologies (NETs). However, not only is the efficacy of NETs to reduce sufficient greenhouse gas concentrations highly dubious, but any such technofix requires gambling on a host of unknown unknowns – namely, the inexorable complexity of the Earth System, coupled with planetary-scale interventions in the crisis.

In this presentation I critically analyse the risk ethics of imminent climate overshoot, in relation to the interventionist gambles proposed by NETs through Synthetic Biology and Climate Engineering. Given the scale of the unknown unknowns unleashed by the Anthropocene, I present gambling as the most apt analogy for both the absurdity (and denied imminence) of the existential predicament, as well as the sheer improbability that any technofix can be invented in a sufficiently short time and implemented on a sufficiently large scale. That is: when potentially efficacious action has not only been reduced to gambling, but a manner of gambling where predictability and probability exceed the limits of what can be known, in conjunction with what can be known about what can be known… Therein, the presentation contemplates the unthinkable questions that our current situation demands we ask, and perhaps even try to answer.

Brief Biography

Dr Joshua Wodak is a researcher, writer, and artist who works at the intersection of the Environmental Humanities and Science & Technology Studies. His research addresses the socio-cultural dimensions of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene, with a focus on the ethics and efficacy of conservation through technoscience, including Synthetic Biology, Assisted Evolution, and Climate Engineering. He holds a BA (Honours) in Anthropology (Sydney University, 2002), a PhD in Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Research (Australian National University, 2011) and has exhibited his media art, sculpture, and interactive installations in art galleries, museums and festivals across Australia and internationally. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, and a Chief Investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence in Synthetic Biology.

If you would like to join online, please contact stis.seminars@ed.ac.uk for details.