Underground jurisprudence: A counter-hegemonic appraisal of carbon sequestration

This article interprets the geological sequestration of carbon dioxide as an opportunity to re-imagine the appropriability of nature and its resources. While the extraction of hydrocarbons was historically supported by radical innovations in the definition of legitimate ownership – most notably the relentlessly expansive interpretation of the ‘rule of capture’ in the United States – the need to inject billions of metric tonnes of CO₂ into the lithosphere to achieve any measure of climate stabilization has not generated any meaningful change in juridical reasoning. Legal and economic constructions of geologically sequestered carbon are for the most part parasitic on the measures of value and the modes of appropriation that legitimize fossil fuel mining. An examination of the spatial, temporal and material properties of CO₂ under conditions of ‘permanent’ subterranean storage offers clues, however, for a counter-hegemonic discourse.