A comparative study of the sociotechnical imaginaries of marine geoengineering

In this report, we claim that although there is no national deployment or consultation program for OceanNETs in the US, Germany, or Australia, the very idea is sufficiently open-ended to accommodate and even federate different development pathways for industrial-scale emissions reduction. We use the “sociotechnical imaginaries” concept to show how existing moral and political outlooks can, concretely, support the more abstract “need” for OceanNETs within overshoot scenarios. Thus, even without an endorsement of the feasibility or desirability of OceanNETs—as a matter of transnational climate negotiations, for example—it is possible to observe openings for large-scale transformations in ocean use under the description of “climate action.” Such changes are patchier than the imagined research-to-deployment pipeline considered in conventional depictions of OceanNETs, and, indeed, may take the form of those techniques often deemed most marginal to the OceanNETs research agenda, such as “carbon capture and storage” or “seaweed afforestation.” Moreover, the difficulty of engaging local communities in these ongoing changes is a structural feature of negative emissions technology development more generally. This difficulty can be understood not only as a matter of geography, but of the assumptions of net-zero politics, in particular the abstraction of the global carbon budget. This exposes OceanNETs to considerable political and moral instabilities expressed in—yet not reducible to—concerns over the “hype cycle” or “rogue action.”