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Concerns have been raised that a focus on greenhouse gas removals (GGR) in climate models, scientific literature and other media might deter measures to mitigate climate change through reduction of emissions at source – the phenomenon of ‘mitigation deterrence’. Given the urgent need for climate action, any delay in emissions reduction would be worrying. We convened nine deliberative workshops to expose stakeholders to futures scenarios involving mitigation deterrence. The workshops examined ways in which deterrence might arise, and how it could be minimized. The deliberation exposed social and cultural interactions that might otherwise remain hidden. The paper describes narratives and ideas discussed in the workshops regarding political and economic mechanisms through which mitigation deterrence might occur, the plausibility of such pathways, and measures recommended to reduce the risk of such occurrence. Mitigation deterrence is interpreted as an important example of the ‘attraction of delay’ in a setting in which there are many incentives for procrastination. While our stakeholders accepted the historic persistence of delay in mitigation, some struggled to accept that similar processes, involving GGRs, may be happening now. The paper therefore also reviews the claims made by participants about mitigation deterrence, identifying discursive strategies that advocates of carbon removal might deploy to deflect concerns about mitigation deterrence. We conclude that the problem of mitigation deterrence is significant, needs to be recognized in climate policy, and its mechanisms better understood. Based on stakeholder proposals we suggest ways of governing GGR which would maximize both GGR and carbon reduction through other means.

What are ‘disruption’ and ‘disruptive innovation’? And what relevance do they have for energy transformation? Ten critical perspectives offer ten contrasting responses to these questions. The relevance of Christensen’s canonical definition of disruptive innovation is highly contested in its applicability to energy and climate challenges, as is the usefulness of analysing discrete business models or technologies rather than socio-technical systems. Further research on disruptive innovation and energy transformation needs to tackle: (i) the social, systemic and emissions impact of widespread adoption; (ii) how to mitigate the adverse distributional consequences of disruption; (iii) the consumer appeal of ‘good enough’ products for users marginalised or excluded from mainstream markets; (iv) the role of incumbents in system transformation; and (v) the reasons for geographic variation in disruption processes currently underway.

Disruptive innovation offers significant promise regarding expedited global low-carbon transition, set against currently inadequate efforts. In order to appreciate its significance, however, disruptive low-carbon innovation must be analysed in the light of three key shifts in perspective: to an analysis of system transition and low-carbon innovation itself in terms of power/knowledge; to appraisal of the significance of digital innovation (similarly reconceptualised) and its embryonic convergence with disruptive innovation; and to a geographical focus on innovation happening not (just) in locations usually presumed as leading in hi-tech, but to developing countries and especially China. Indeed, exploring disruptive innovation in this way shows that assenting to the commonplace discourse through which Silicon Valley Tech innovation is identified as ‘disruptive’ is to conflate problem with solution. Conversely, this approach shows just how significant disruptive innovation is likely to prove to low-carbon transition, effecting a disruption of innovation itself, and thence of capitalism, from which any such transition must ultimately emerge.

This paper argues that existing critiques of technical fixes are unable to explain our simultaneous enamourment and distrust with technical fixes, and that to do so, we need a political economy analysis. We develop a critical, theoretically grounded conceptualisation of technical fixes as imagined defensive spatio-temporal fixes of specific political economic regimes, and apply it to the case of geoengineering, or ‘clean fossil’, as an attempted technical fix of the climate change problem. We map the promises of clean fossil as a proposed solution to the problem of climate change in discrete episodes since the 1960s.

Negative emissions techniques (NETs) promise to capture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and sequester them. Since decarbonisation efforts have been slow, and the climate crisis is intensifying, it is increasingly likely that removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere will be necessary to meet internationally-agreed targets. Yet there are fears that pursuing NETs might undermine other mitigation efforts, primarily the reduction (rather than removal) of greenhouse gas emissions. This paper discusses the risk of this phenomenon, named ‘mitigation deterrence’. Some of us have previously argued that a cultural political economy framework is needed for analysing NETs. Such a framework explains how promises of future NETs deployment, understood as defensive spatio-temporal fixes, are depoliticised and help defend an existing neoliberal political regime, and its inadequate climate policy. Thus they risk deterring necessary emissions reductions. Here we build on that framework, arguing that to understand such risks, we need to understand them as the result of historically situated, evolving, lived practices. We identify key contributing practices, focussing in particular but not exclusively on climate modelling, and discuss how they have been reproduced and co-evolved, here likened to having dug a hole for ourselves as a society. We argue that understanding and reducing deterrence risks requires phronetic knowledge practices, involving not just disembodied, dispassionate technoeconomic knowledge-making, but also strategic attention to political and normative issues, as well as emotional labour. Reflecting on life in the hole hurts.

The ascendancy of sciences capable of grappling with complexity is undoubtedly to be welcomed, not least in this moment of profound and overlapping systemic problems. Yet the emergence of sciences with a more sophisticated epistemology alone offers no reassurance that such knowledge will then primarily, or better, serve emancipatory and/or critical purposes. Rather, such knowledge must be treated as neither good nor bad per se, but dangerous. From this perspective, the paper explores the knowledge politics of the present conjuncture, the context for this rise of the complexity sciences. It discerns a new politics of security and “preparedness” that could well serve to construct a new dominant paradigm of complexity sciences that, to the contrary, serves primarily to construct a new “scientific” legitimacy for the egregious inequalities of the age of neoliberalism-in-crisis.

•It is unclear how ‘sustainable industrialisation’ in the Global South could look like and what role digitalisation will play in development processes in the Global South.•Digitalisation and industrialisation need to be made environmentally sustainable if UN Sustainable Development Goals are supposed to be met.•Research and action at this intersection of digitalisation and sustainable industrialisation should be framed around the digital rebound effect, rather than treating the rebound effect as a possible side effect.•Alternative research question are proposed that could help to generate knowledge to contain digital rebound.