Lecture by Jan Gilles (LSE)

Date: Thursday, 5 Feb 2026, 2:15pm
Location: Seminarhaus SH 0.106

The talk will be followed by short comments by Dr. Julia Schubert (postdoc Fixing Futures RTG).

The talk takes place in the context of the MA seminar “Ecological crises, economic fixes? Sociology of nature, economy and society”, led by Vicky Kluzik, Institute of Sociology, Goethe University, associated member of the Fixing Futures RTG.

This talk examines the politics of carbon dioxide removal as a promissory technology of climate change mitigation. According to the IPCC a 2-degree limit to global warming is increasingly unachievable without massive deployment of methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere to address residual emissions and counter temporary overshoot of temperature goals. Based on fieldwork amongst carbon dioxide removal experts, the talk examines how CDR’s technological promise serves as a tool to circumvent political disputes over distributional problems of climate change mitigation. Rather than addressing the contradictory relationship between society and the environment, CDR appears as a promise of emancipation from environmental factors through the control of the carbon cycle. This manifests in a technocratic political imaginary, a strong belief in marketisation and technological optimism.

Jan Gilles is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His dissertation project explores the politics of climate change mitigation technologies through the case of carbon dioxide removal. Apart from this project, his research interests include environmental history, the role of normativity in social theory, and the sociology of expertise.