The politics of negative emissions technologies and decarbonization in rural communities

Non-technical summary Technologies and practices to remove carbon from the atmosphere ('negative emissions technologies') will be challenging to scale-up. Efforts to incentivize or govern their scale-up globally risk failing if they miss the social challenges. This paper analyzes prospective challenges for negative emissions through examining how decarbonization practices are evolving in one particular landscape: the Imperial Valley in southeast California, a desert landscape engineered for industrial agriculture. Based on semi-structured interviews and site visits, this paper examines how community actors have received, participated in, imagined or contested new energy technologies and climate practices, and draws out takeaways for negative emissions policy. Technical summary This article examines prospective challenges and opportunities for scaling up negative emissions technologies (NETs) through examining how decarbonization practices are evolving in one particular landscape: the Imperial Valley in southeast California, a desert landscape engineered for industrial agriculture. Local officials, community activists and business ventures are re-imagining the valley as a renewable energy landscape, some with interest in carbon-negative technologies. At the same time, aspects of this strategy for economic development via green energy are often contested. Based on semi-structured interviews and site visits, this paper examines how landscape-level actors have received, participated in, imagined or contested new energy technologies and climate practices. Through analyzing local perspectives on climate change and emerging energy technologies, the paper draws out three takeaways for the governance of NETs: (1) entrenched interests can play a role in shaping how particular NETs compete; (2) environmental justice concerns around NETs should be viewed as more than not-in-my-backyard-ism; and (3) incentives for NETs must be tailored to local contexts. The conclusion discusses two crosscutting challenges: the lack of institutions to build out new infrastructure and the challenge of generating narratives around invisible 'negative' emissions.