UnEarth Magazine.

Words by Cecelia Kirchner, Art by Defne Celiketemur

There is a concerning, pertinent tinge in the air of governmental climate response. A prominent contributor to this is Trump’s second administration, where he purposely, and explicitly so, is “focused on reversing Washington’s course on climate change.” In the name of reforming federal spending and reshaping American bureaucracy, he has slashed the American government’s fiscal support of renewable energy and climate research in a clear effort to deprioritize a governmental response to climate change. The administration is projected to cut $100 million of funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with the aim of eliminating the NOAA’s climate research branch.

Last spring, the administration issued a stop-work order on the Revolution Wind farm, which was already eighty percent finished. Not only is this demonstrative of a refiguring of federal priorities, but this order is symptomatic of a Trumpian purge of climate responsibility. Similar trends are concurrently unfolding beyond American borders, such as Brazil’s recent approval for its state-run oil firm, Petrobras, to drill near the mouth of the Amazon river. Recently, members of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) voted to delay its adoption of policies targeted at diminishing shipping emissions (due to pressure from the Trump administration). These are worrying signs that climate accountability is not only regressing, but that global powers are working to expunge these efforts from their agendas. There are many testimonies of this rejection of climate political gravity to explore, but I’ll turn to Trump’s intention to defund Climeworks for our current purposes.  

Climeworks, the first company to practice Direct Air Capture (DAC), is suffering in this administration’s “economic uncertainties and shifting climate policy priorities,” as it has halted plans to build a DAC plant in the United States and expressed the need to cut back its workforce by ten to twenty percent. Direct Air Capture could be a highly efficable enterprise in the US, with DAC plants effectively operating as massive vacuum cleaners to strip out CO2 from our atmosphere via amine compounds. Yet the administration’s undermining of Climeworks has devastated the company’s global impact. Climeworks fell 35,895 metric tons short of its 36,000t capacity of captured CO2 in the previous fiscal year. Because the Trump administration is deviating from climate crisis policy, Climeworks notably has opted to privatize its funding. In raising $162 million from private investors, the Swiss company hopes to escape its sabotaged state by satisfying its existing DAC capacity and scaling its scope with new DAC plants. Is this a marker of climate response swinging towards privatization?             

Privatization is not a new topic within the conversation of climate response. The UK government itself has avowed that “public finance alone is not going to fund” global counter-responses to climate change. This governmental ineptitude works to fuel growing political de-prioritization of these matters. Thus, “private sector development is increasingly seen as an integral part of sustainable development.” We’ve already seen private supplementation of government initiatives, such as the European Union’s security regulation including the cooperation of private companies (i.e. airlines, Facebook, Google). In many circumstances, private enterprises can prove more effective than public ones: private behavior is more economically efficient and more responsive to its incessantly changing environs. But this privatization avenue cannot be a clean-cut replacement for governmental action. Governmental oversight is meant to enable this activity to function in accordance with national or international goals, facilitating that private behavior acts to fulfill its respective objective. Political de-prioritization of climate change is not conducive to privatizing consequent responses, leaving the door open to private mismanagement and general backsliding of the global reaction to the climate crisis.  

If the privatization movement of climate reaction predominates within this context of government deprioritization, climate change’s “structural injustice” stands to be escalated. Although the effects of climate change leave nothing immune, they are not equally inflicted. Typically, the globe’s most vulnerable nations are those with the least resources, which typically already lie on the periphery of global power politics. Private roads of climate response appear more readily than public ones, with foreign direct investment as the “the largest component of the increasing private capital flow” to such nations. But in this hierarchical scheme of climate impact, vast inequities fester and power dynamics within the global climate response are increasingly skewed as disasters heighten.

The form climate policy takes matters, especially as this terrain becomes continually more uneven. Actors, regardless of their status of governmental or private, share the responsibility to react to climate change. Yet these respective reactions wield influence in different ways and through different frameworks, with private ventures lacking “judicial oversight and accountability”. This governmental shift away from climate responsibility accentuates the risk for unfettered behavior of privatized climate response, as a gap will manifest in relevant political power, leaving private actors to insert themselves as that source as create a “legitimacy deficit” in their practices.  

Although climate privatization stands to fill growing cracks within the world’s governmental response to climate change, specifically in under-resourced areas, unchecked privatization under government deprioritization of these initiatives could manipulate global climate power inequities and injustices in their favor. But in the face of governmental regression in climate accountability, must private ventures assume the reigns?