Resolution Without Revolution: Green Capitalism, Ecological Management, and the Carbon Dioxide Removal Industry in the United States

Abstract: Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is quickly moving from mere imagination to material reality. As I write, billions of dollars are flowing into this nascent industry from government, philanthropy, and venture capital; this thesis thus attempts to grasp history as it flies. By employing a Marxist theoretical approach, including concepts like the real subsumption of nature and the spatiotemporal fix, I draw a nuanced illustration of the political economy of carbon dioxide removal in the United States. By mapping the organizations and investment flows that constitute the US CDR industry, I show that the industry is both already substantial and less connected to fossil capital than one might think. Instead, I found that tech and finance are the key capitalist economic sectors driving the US CDR industry through their purchases of high amounts of removals from suppliers and through investment spread throughout the industry. By really subsuming atmospheric nature via CDR, I posit, the tech and finance sectors are able to address the crisis in capitalism’s ecological background conditions of possibility without needing to directly challenge the hegemony of fossil capital. They can instead strive for negative emissions and “net-zero” while postponing the devaluation of fossil assets, a defensive spatiotemporal fix that preserves existing lucrative accumulation strategies. The tech and finance sectors are for solving the ecological crisis (not against fossil fuels) and can be said to be pursuing a green capitalist project to manage the crisis towards capital’s ends.