Manuscript available upon request
Abstract
The risks stemming from anthropogenic climate change have prompted companies to invest in technologies that mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon emissions. However, developing these products and markets presents challenges, such as points of contention arising from uncertainties about their effectiveness and their ability to scale up quickly to prevent further global warming. To tackle these challenges, participants involved in the creation of carbon-related markets seek to gain support by producing compelling narratives that moralize their technological solutions and engage in relational work with stakeholders to ensure their emergence. By examining carbon capture and removal technologies and leveraging in-depth interviews with key informants in the industry, along with a corpus of news articles reporting on the carbon capture sector, I reveal how startup and policy actors navigate the moral tensions of using technologies and markets to transform carbon into a resource. The findings indicate that both informants and the media portray carbon capture as a uniquely beneficial technology, envisioned to function like an oil company in reverse and to address industries that would otherwise be challenging to decarbonize. This process of commodifying carbon and establishing markets around it generates tensions regarding its capability to address emissions at scale and the negative effect of delaying the energy transition. To mitigate these tensions, innovators in this field engage in relational work with policy actors and investors to help alleviate uncertainties. This, in turn, shapes how they frame the technology’s purpose and uncovers tensions between their vision and the broader institutional landscape. These findings are significant for analyzing the emergence of green technologies, enhancing our understanding of the role of expectations in the social construction of markets and technology.
