The Taken-For-Granted Transition: How Talk of Decarbonization Shifts Attention Away From It

Ankit Bhardwaj, NYU

States are declaring targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, indicating growing support for decarbonization. In a novel ethnography of the deliberations to achieve New York’s climate target, one of the world’s most ambitious, I find that climate politics is not just characterized by disagreements over whether or not to decarbonize, but how to sequence actions to reduce emissions. Expanding beyond accounts of climate obstruction, delay, and “fantasy” technologies that justify the combustion of fossil fuels, I show how norms of deliberative talk shape how people temporally coordinate action to reduce emissions. In a micro-interactional analysis of more than 300 hours of deliberation from 2020 to 2024, I point to a yet-considered challenge of decarbonization: agreement on near-term action such as the urgent buildout of renewables can be taken-for-granted, shifting attention to disagreements over later steps of action. For example, energy firms pointed to the lack of reliability of a renewable-heavy grid with less dispatchable energy. State officials shifted attention to the later target, expressing confidence in the achievement of the 2030 goal, but also to prudently plan. Climate advocates were split in their focus but were drawn to disagree over the “false solutions” for zero-emissions proposed by energy firms. Even when groups agreed to build renewable energy, they focused over disagreements of the challenges once they were built, with no focus on the headwinds that wind and solar projects soon faced. Less attention on the short-term targets meant planners could not guarantee their achievement, while focus on long-term concerns persisted due to irresolvable uncertainty. State officials eventually concluded that achieving the short-term target was in jeopardy. By understanding decarbonization as a challenge of temporal coordination, I offer the insight that our cultural norms of talk to drift to long term disagreements can be bound by focusing on short-term targets.

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 Presented in Session 188. Social History, Environmental History, and Complexity