Notes made at/for Groundings, December 1-2, 2022: http://regenerative-energy-communities.org/groundings
The script for the talk can be accessed here: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/titipi.frontierreport.talk
Frontier Climate: https://frontierclimate.com/
More on bugreporting: https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/Bugreporting_how-to


NOTES ON ISSUES WITH FRONTIER CLIMATE

Unreliable and irresponsible
"the financial tumult battering the high-profile coalition for advancing carbon-catching technologies illustrates the danger of relying on corporations to fund climate innovations that scientists say are essential to prevent the worst effects of warming. Companies facing economic headwinds often consider spending cuts on initiatives outside of their core business, but they also “will weigh that against the harm to their reputation from backing out of a commitment,” said Bill Weihl, the executive director of ClimateVoice, who previously led the environmental programs at Facebook and Google."
https://www.eenews.net/articles/tech-companies-driving-co2-removal-are-in-financial-free-fall/

Capturing imagination for other futures
In the face of climate chaos commuinities are attending to other ways to organise and resist. Caring for the closures that are needed, delinking and forging new solidarities, energy realities and food practices. Collectivities from the bare bone of existence.

The solutionist approach that frontier offers will have a huge effect on the decades of resistance and also the possibitliy of a plurality of post carbon practices
As ruth wilson gilmore says "We already know that the revolution won't be funded" but on an everyday level-  instead of  institutions (schools, health, universities, etc) considering funding a community farm, forest or pedagogies of groundings institutions will signup a percentage of their income to Frontier - to meet their 2030 goals and the demands of the banks to prove their resiliance. Just like they do with Microsoft Teams or Zoom. Frontier will quickly become the answer.

Institutions will imagine they are financing netzero and the impact on their support for creative life will be huge. 
It is removal of community accountable approaches
Removal is not just sucking carbon out of th air but also re-forrestation, both of which require huge land grabs.
If carbon removal discussed in relation to communities which are grounded, it would look very different
if it was not grounded in silicon valley
if you look at what the cloud is doing, holding in place racial capitalism. It promises putting things underground but can never do that. It also uses some well known resistance methods - of speculative fabulation, circular economies, the carbon removal dream.
it has the poetry of grounding ... Appropriating poetics of resistance.
Actively occluding the possibility for language of tending to material resistance

Ignoring the long history of Carbon Removal
In the frontier promotional materials there is a Lack of acknowledgement that there are workers and that there is resistance and that these have history.
Digging where we stand, understanding Cloud ecosystems as absolutist producers of contemporary presence and limitants of action.
Not the same as partial perspective, studying with boots in the mud, or even situated knowledge in the orthodox terms. 
-- selling it as innovative and new 
-- no refererences to critiques
-- no reference to prior work

Distance from the damage
 -- appearance of harmlessness
 -- removal of response-ability
 -- removal from the equation of its own impact (also in transforming forms of manufacturing and consumption in ways that are not tenable/sustainable??) -- "don't look back" attitude
 -- undoing damage
 -- Rendering fossil fuel acceptable 
 -- negative externalities, leaks
(see also: CRaaS)

Trustful techno-solutionism
 -- overstepping governance, negotiation in favor of financialized solutions
 -- compatibility with Modern Capitalist Extractivist regime
 -- imagination/fiction of just doing it, no questions asked
 -- instantly trustable
 -- "ethical fathers" 
 -- hope is wicked
 --> see stripe becoming the one and only

Removal, but no transformation of emissions or extraction
Frontier promises removal but not a transformation of politics and racial capitalism based on oil economies.
Too often in debates on extraction, exploitation and oppression, racialized peoples are relegated to an abstract ‘there’, but the ‘there’ is also ‘here’. Or as Sivanandan (1982) phrased it, and Frontier makes clear one more time, ‘we are here because you were there’. 
CR needs lots of energy - which will in part be provided by large scale wind farms and solar arrays
continued mineral extraction on a massive scale - which the cloud further obscures and distances some from and brings it closer to others
"everything that melts into air as solid"
moving away from discussion a transformational relationship with the geochemistries, matter and energy.. 

The Dark Kitchen of climate change
Frontier: "Takes advantage of carbon sinks and sources less constrained by arable land"
less than forest plantation
DAC (Direct Air Capture) and REDD+s (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) do need land
need a functional infrastructure, stability
agile geopolitics -- do air-mining in quite unstable places
Agile trading due to API (application programming interface)
you do not need any other infra
ready for disaster, switching in and out
gaming community resistance
supply chain gambling

Frontier centers Stripe as the single solution for on-line payment
By mixing in Carbon Removal with financial transactions, Stripe becomes indispensible
 -- cancelation of accounts (like sexworkers)
 -- power to define how payment is done for who by who
 -- An incentive to move all accountancy to the cloud
 -- a package deal
(it would be interesting to look at how much stripe is also trying to capture the money that went into "cryptocurrencies". Is this (facebook) Libra reinvented but this time with a market to function in?) 

Calculation, validation and standardisation of Carbon Removal, all in the hands of Frontier
 -- Standardisation of a single "solution" in the hands of Stripe + co
 -- Parallel infrastructuring (counterbalancing)
 -- each of these operations drives users to depend on more compute
 -- and to create "controlled" environments through compute

The end of the world, as a market
 -- speculating on the end of the world
 -- venture capitals
 -- It might look like necessary gambling with urgency -- but establishing a market/future that can keep fuel and continuing after
indebting institutions, companies, collectives for Carbon Removal

Timely extraction
making delaying damage easy to do
blueprinting for repair, backward-oriented design?
permanence / durability
(more than) that which should have had to happen
Clouds of Rocks -- Carbon removal techniques include mining rocks, generally in open site quarries and/or utilising existing stockpiles of rock dust, haulage of raw materials to processing sites, grinding rocks into a fine powder and transportation to croplands where it is spread onto soil, injecting carbonated water into porous basalt for enhanced mineralization.

Setting research agendas, and defining what counts as a knowledge gap
 -- A lot of money going towards the imaginary of Carbon Removal
 -- gambling with urgency 
 - academics ushering it in ("science")
 - managing what counts as a knowledge gap (see database)

Carbon Removal as a Service (CRaaS)
 API, dashboard
 -- de-investment from community mobilisations
 -- replacing with an extractive process (of accumulation by dispossession)
 -- extending/reproducing the logic of agility
Carbon-Removal-as-a-Service binds geological time to hypercomputation, by inventing a dependency on calculating the volumetrics for removal, the detection and visualisation of relocation spots and the monitoring of holes to fill or volumes of rocks to crush. Carbon Removal is the anti-thesis of Cloud Abolition; instead it becomes a venture vector for investing in a future with more computation, and for providing the models to validate the investment.

Non-disclosed transparency
 -- NDA's
 -- Open Source?! but API that can freeze and suspend accounts
 -- but not accountable
 -- Secret formula for sorbents (?)
-- many numbers but what happens when this is underground

"Photosynthesis on steorids"
-- Naturalizing software metabolism
-- metaphors

Instead of bringing it down, Carbon Removal moves the cloud forward
This is the Anti-thesis of Cloud abolition (continuities and discontinuities)

SUCKING IT UP

Proposing a new planetary order
 -- Big Tech leverages global infra !!! OMG, yes, create the default infrastructure for managing carbon emissions... yes and displace oil giants 
 -- Almost infinite scalability and standardisation
 -- Naturalized Universality
 -- loads of money, resources
 -- no hesitation
 -- North-South unbalance
 -- accelaration, scale, agility

There are certainly other ways with scale, but their ways of growing, dissolving/distributing, offshoring/outsourcing, thickening/densifying/intensifying is preventing the communal anthropocene backloop, blocks investments in other systemic infrastructures. Their contingent politics of scaling rely on a type of underdevelopment (of course) and hermetically seal off the possibility for an otherwise.

Why not Capitalism Removal?
CRaaS as in Capitalism Removal as a Service (?)... no transformative politics can happen as a service. The point is to overthrow capitalism, not to join it in the name of carbon removal
instead we need the removal of capitalism and the cloud same effort, more fun
strikes, etc etc
"What are some ways that activists could force the Global North to take faster action in reducing emissions? RESPONSE: Sabotage of fossil projects? Occupations? General strikes?"
https://www.american.edu/sis/centers/carbon-removal/upload/march-23rd-webinar-q-a.pdf
What we are talking about here is hijacking jeff bezos yacht, setting it on fire and dancing in its ruins.??!! 

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STICKERS

elastic solidarities
undergrounding with my comrades
tech where you stand
antifa infra
abolish removal
cloud abolition
the end of the worlds has never been more profitable
almost infinitely scalable
hope is weird
climate tech mob
Less ethics, more politics
infrastructure re-generation
feral computing
hope is wicked
take care, not land
imagination slipping into everyday business
From cloud to crowd
Clouds are not an option
How fragile is agile!?
Dancing on the ruins of Big Tech
Cloud Abolition
Scaling through and trough
Paris is burning
NO BIG TECH SUCK UP
NO SUCKERS
NO MORE SUCKING IT UP
writing recipes for the dark kitchens of the future
solidarities of removal
carbon compost pretenders
frontiers of appropriation
hubris on steroids
institutional disobedience
desperation capitalism
local clout, not global south
more commons, not more factories
big tech takes care, of itself
tech offenders, learn consent