Carbon Capture and the Future of Environmentalism

In Carbon Capture and the Future of Environmentalism, Morten Tønnessen applies environmental ethics and philosophy to assess the efficacy of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) - a controversial climate measure which involves use of advanced technology and engineering. Many researchers, politicians, and industry representatives regard CCS as necessary if we are to reach internationally agreed upon climate goals however, in the environmental movement, opinions differ sharply on whether CCS is a sustainable and genuinely green climate measure.

This book investigates how CCS holds up considering classical norms and principles in environmental ethics and philosophy. Two approaches to environmentalism, deep ecology and ecomodernism, are contrasted. These differ in their views on the value of nature, economic growth, the role of technology in the environmental crisis, and on what qualifies as good climate change solutions. The book defends a deep ecologist outlook on the environmental crisis and contributes to developing a deep ecologist perspective on climate change. Through this view, the book argues that making CCS and associated technologies central to the solution of the climate crisis is a high-risk strategy, and ethically unfair to future generations of humans by locking us into a high-tech trajectory for future societies. Tønnessen ultimately concludes that in order to transition to a genuinely sustainable society, focus should be on phasing out fossil fuels, as opposed to gambling on the safe implementation of CCS.