“Net Zero and Settler Futurity”

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. Supporters see this as a sign that industry and governments are meaningfully considering the need to decarbonise, yet for detractors there is little faith in these narratives. 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. To show how this infrastructure settles pro-capitalist and anti-systemic thinkers alike, I examine a variety of texts, from an industry-funded docuseries and a climate solutions book published by Bill Gates, to the ecosocialist work of Matt Huber. These strangely resonant environmentalisms comfort the discomforted, offering ontological security that ‘this’ life need not be undone in the pursuit of a viable and just future that extends abundance to all. Accordingly, settler futurity can be seen as an affectively charged presencing of the future, mobilising feelings of purpose, hope and confidence through promises to (eventually) become green, clean and carbon neutral. This raises important questions about what it might mean to work against/despite the allure of these pervasive narratives, which eliminate space for situating alternative visions, decolonial to degrowth. 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.