skelton@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Short Vita
Florian holds an MA in Political Theory from the University of Frankfurt and the Technical University of Darmstadt, as well as a BA in Political Science from the University of Zurich. He is interested in environmental politics, environmental humanities, and the history of political ideas. He has also worked on democracy studies and on urban policies as a student research assistant, and spent a semester at the New School for Social Research. Before joining the RTG ‘Fixing Futures’, he was a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Zurich’s Chair for the History of the Anthropocene and a trainee at the Swiss Federal Office of Energy.
Project Description
Moving and storing carbon has become a key challenge in European climate policy. Over the next few decades, hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon will need to be moved and stored every year. To date, there is no infrastructure available to accommodate these gargantuan quantities. There are however a plethora of policies, actors, scenarios, artifacts, discourses and sociotechnical imaginaries that anticipate the making of an economy that could soon move and store carbon at clime-relevant scales. Disparate elements across Europe are being assembled to this end, entangling exhaust streams, pipelines, aquifers, slag, soil and many intermediaries both below and above surface with each other. The characteristics of this economy-to-come are however still very much under contestation. In my thesis, I study different approaches to building an economy around moving and storing carbon, including developing the subsurface for carbon waste management, producing industrial commodities out of captured carbon, and removing carbon physically to sell offsets. This way, I seek to uncover the distinct set of actors and logics that are building Europe’s carbon transport and storage economy.