3. Quick thoughts on how to read Yale's new FedEx Center for Natural Carbon Capture
For-profit academics, knowledge prioritization, and rendering cultural problems technical
Today Yale announced that FedEx had donated $100 million to start a Center for Natural Carbon Capture “focused on developing natural solutions for reducing atmospheric carbon.” How should we read this?
Entanglement of the academy and for-profit business
On one hand, it’s good that a company like FedEx is responding to what they define as the problem of climate change, which is like, uncomplicatedly: there is carbon in the atmosphere if we remove the carbon we’ve solved the problem. And it’s like, sure. We need less carbon in the atmosphere, and quick so, thanks FedEx.
On the other hand, what this event should illustrate is the deepening entanglement of for-profit business in the affairs of the academy. There’s this whole set of mainstream critiques about “college being bad now” that mostly orbit around the idea of it being way too expensive, which is true. But this thing that’s happening here with FedEx is the actual problem with higher ed these days: that every year business interests have more say over curriculum, whether implicitly or explicitly.
Implicitly, this happens via Deans and administrators who inhabit the perspective that the primary purpose of college is to “prepare students for the workforce.” Thus, they redesign curriculum to prepare students to, you know, be good complacent employees at Google, or Pfizer, or Epic Systems. In this sense, the needs of for-profit companies exert a sort of soft power over American colleges that really has reshaped our institutions.
But then there’s the explicit shit too. And here it is: FedEx endowing a Center for Natural Carbon Capture. The likelihood that there will be research findings that are inconvenient for FedEx coming from this center is deeply unlikely in the years to come. And the way you do this as a for-profit company is by restricting the types of knowledge that qualify for funding. And here, like many places, for-profit institutions support the sorts of knowledge that is focused only outward on the world out there because to focus on the human world in here be to open themselves up for critique. How scary!
Filtration of knowledge types
The process of knowledge creation will be filtered at a handful of points here. The first filtration, as I mentioned above, will happen in what sort of knowledge types are financially supported by this Center, to begin with. According to the press release, these have already been decided: “science and engineering.” Later they note that the “key departments [are] Earth and planetary sciences, ecology and evolutionary biology, chemistry, and chemical and environmental engineering.” All fields of course focused on the world out there.
The second filtration will be as to whether the research has obvious practical implications or not. It’s worth noting that using ctrl+F on the original Yale News article renders 17 instances of the word “solutions” and 2 instances of the word “problem” which is indicative of a chronic disease of the climate politics genre: prioritizing solving things over defining the problem in the first place even if the solutions we “find” actually make the problem worse and worse and worse…whatever, at least we felt like we were doing something!
But, so the research has to be “applied”. But what counts as applied? Well, one way to think about this is that the knowledge has to be attached to a clear technology. The wedding of science and technology in the 1800s that precipitated the Industrial Revolution is where the sentiment of “applied research” still anchors itself. But in this way, the need for something to be applied filters out all sorts of knowledge that are central to our understanding of the problem of climate change, from knowledge about social movements and organizing to knowledge about policy.
You know, there’s also the obvious third filtration too which is just like do you think any research is going to come out that in any way undermines FedEx’s profits? But I want to go back to that second filtration and talk about the mental constellation of appliedness, solutions-oriented thinking, and
Technical, institutional, and cultural problems (& gross and net good)
What people mean when they say “climate change is an existential threat” is that it is rooted in a deep cultural problem which like, for me, is that we just don’t care at all about nonhuman life nor future generations it's just all about me consuming as much as possible now and growth and GDP and shit. But like, it’s hard to talk, let alone think about those cultural problems that are leading to planetary-scale environmental degradation because they scare most of us because they implicate us hugely and they can honestly be exhausting conversations. But it’s true: climate change is a cultural problem that manifests itself in our institutions and in real material-technical problems every day.
And so here’s this FedEx-sponsored Center for Natural Carbon Capture at elite-ass Yale that focuses entirely on one tiny aspect of the technical problem of climate change: Carbon. I feel like the question we fall into often is, is this good? So…is this good? I think using the concepts of gross versus net good here might be useful. In a gross sense, of course, taking carbon out of the atmosphere is good! We actually need to do that. But rendering problems technical is net good insofar as it does not fully distract or obscure the institutional and cultural aspects of the problem. And like, that is what this merger of Yale and FedEx clearly does.
The real problem here is climate change is in fact the sort of problem people always loosely call it: it is an existential crisis. Climate change is a philosophical problem that has manifest in material symptoms like there being too much carbon in the atmosphere. None of this is to say that the establishment of this new Center is bad for Yale or for the world, it’s just that the problem definition that it’s born out of, though pragmatic and needed, is only partial.
I’m not going to be one to judge the intentions of FedEx nor Yale here. It would be easy and reductive to say that FedEx’s only intention is profit, and it would be equally easy and reductive to say that this is just the market generously improving the world. But the ultimate effects of rendering this problem technical and then pouring money into STEM solutions to the climate crisis over and over again are enormous.
The first effect is of course that these sorts of things render the academy actually less intellectually free and more open to bad-faith attacks that “everyone in academia is just an elite fucking asshole that does science to support progressive things.” Entanglements like these between powerful private interest and the academy are central to the populist distrust of science. In other words, our reputation is on the line, and these sorts of relationships don’t help.
Then there is just the effect of financial inequity within the academy that these sorts of intrusions from business generate and exacerbate. In 2016 non-science and engineering programs received only 2% of NSF’s overall budget. In 2020, while the National Science Foundation’s budget was $7 billion, the National Endowment for the Humanities got just 2.5% of that, at $162 million (FWIW, the largest since 2010).
The final effect of these sorts of STEM-technical-business-climate solution sets is perhaps the most obvious: they will not solve this fucking problem! It’s so fucking obvious, but bandages don’t work forever, but they sure make caretakers feel like they’re doing something.
Alternatives
I would be remiss though, or rather just a fucking ivory tower critic, if I were not to offer some at least cursory alternatives. I mean, what are institutional or cultural solutions anyway?
Let’s start deeper and work our way up. One can think of the new podcast with Obama and Springsteen as a partial solution to the cultural problem of racism. These are two trusted individuals, one white, one black (both male) that are having public dialogue and disagreement about race in America and in doing so shifting people’s emotional and personal position on these issues.
An example of a Federal cultural project was the New Deal’s Federal Art Project. Though it was ostensibly a simple effort to employ artists of the time, its effect was to reimagine American’s relationship to the Federal government and to one another, let alone make iconic and traumatic the woes of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl through photography.
I think that with something like the Green New Deal, we got the cart before the horse. We should have done the cultural work first to prep Americans for this toothless nonbinding proposal-turned boogyman that you know, if you read it, is pretty awesome and would help a lot of rural populist folks. But anyway: Netflix, YouTube, media is the solution space for cultural problems.
And then there is the institutional layer to this climate problem that is stuck between the deeper cultural aspects and the more superficial technical aspects. Here, these are our agreements with one another: laws, policies, mission statements, etc. In some ways to make institutional change requires either a) power or b) good organizing.
And like, at Yale here all the people in power are really afraid of protest. Dean Indy Burke has literally said she doesn’t think protest is a legitimate way to make change. This sorta shit scares people in power, but like, if we’re taking problems like climate seriously we actually need to give that shit up and instead institutionalize these sorts of solutions in our education system.
Hey FedEx, how bout you start a Center for Climate Organizing at Yale and endow positions for all the top scholars and practitioners of social organizing? How bout that? But this doesn’t happen. And it won’t, and the fact that it won’t is part of the problem with shit like FedEx being involved in the academy.
And that fact that it won’t means that we’re failing our planet. It means that we fall prey to the limited perspectives of rich companies and their Congressional and increasingly academic arms that constrict their thinking to only the sorts that are convenient to their other goals.
Maybe the best way to read the bizarre relationship between Yale and FedEx and climate change that they’re calling the Center for Natural Carbon Capture ultimately as just an intersection of three huge trends: an actual rapidly deteriorating planet, the unmitigated expansion of private interest into every cell of our being, and a powerless academy that’s been so gutted for decades that it has to make obviously necessary practical financial decisions at the expense of remaining a real space for knowledge and young people to flourish and redefine “the good life.”
As always, please feel free to disagree or foreground other aspects in the comments! And please sign up to get more of these and share if you can!
I work in corporate sustainability and can share the corporate perspective on this.... because I think it's both fascinating and super-fraught/complicated. "Net-zero" emissions is the hottest thing now since Larry Fink pushed it in his Blackrock letter at the beginning of the year (urging all companies to align their business for a net-zero economy, and to set net-zero goals). Unlike "carbon neutral" or other vague terms, "net-zero" actually has some definition to it, with strict rules set by the Science-based Targets Initiative (SBTi). To achieve "net-zero", you have to count all the emissions from your entire value chain (including the things that you purchase, employee's commuting, use of products sold, etc.)….reduce emissions to the maximum that you can, and then pull an amount of CO2 out of the air equivalent to your 'residual emissions' (those you can't reduce).
Every company is setting Net-Zero goals for 2030-2040, but nobody really has a clear roadmap to achieve them, because direct CO2 removals (bio or tech-based) is just not done at scale. That's where this FedEx investment comes in....companies truly committed to "net-zero" are investing huge chunks of money at various areas of venture capital and academia, hoping that they bear real options for carbon removal solutions in the next 10-20 years. It's a pretty liberal use of voluntary capital investment with no guaranteed pathway to payoff. In that sense, it's kind of stunning.
The more cynical view focuses on what it means to 'reduce emissions to the maximum possible' before doing removals (as required in Net-Zero). FedEx may mitigate/reduce all sorts of CO2 emissions and then says 'hey we've got no way to decarbonize this overnight air flight for rush shipping, we'll do some CO2 removals elsewhere.' The other way to 'zero-out' that shipment is to...not fly the plane (!). Certain business models may be fundamentally out of alignment with a net-zero world, and that's the problem. From that view, the investment in new tech for CO2 removals becomes a license to continue to operate. On the other hand..."it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism"...and so an investment in these CO2 removals seems practical, prudent, and urgently necessary.
The context here was actually laid out pretty well in the WaPo today with a nice little quote from our dean Indy Burke:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/03/05/more-than-50-companies-have-vowed-be-carbon-neutral-by-2040/
Great post! I enjoyed reading your ideas/perspectives. However, not everything exactly landed with me - in particular, your perceptions of people. I was saddened by your beliefs that people don't care about nonhuman life nor future generations. I know people from all over the world, of many backgrounds and life experiences - and I don't know any that don't care about clean air, fresh water, healthy forests, healthy wildlife, healthy ecosystems, and future generations. Yes, they may have different political views/backgrounds or "solutions" to "problems" - but at the core - I'm not sure I believe people simply don't care? I think that's actually something between and shared across many cultures, communities, and populations. As for people's consumption habits, yes, I cannot justify everything nor exempt people from all accountability. But I don't think that's evidence of a lack of care. While I can't justify everyone's actions - people are "consuming" for a lot of reasons. And given that so many people do not have the ability to overcome/dedicate ample time and resources on their mental/emotional health, physical health, financial security, and life's abundant stresses/responsibilities - it's understandable to me that people react/cope in many ways (consumption or otherwise) - and that their dedication to the environment/climate change over more imminent personal concerns wouldn't seem logical to me. That kind of dedication often requires "more" from people - more research, more time, more effort - when maybe many don't have "more" to give. Yes, of course, there are exceptions! Anyway, just wanted to share some food for thought. Thanks, again for the piece!