Carbon Consequentialism: Climate Technoscience and the Morality of Methane

This essay examines the moral undertow of North Atlantic climate technoscience through a consideration of methane, or “natural gas.” From the late Cold War, a CO 2 -centric conception of global warming has valorized methane as a low-carbon energy resource whose extraction could secure the Earth's future. I trace this fantasy of a world-saving fossil fuel from the late 1980s to the present-day “methane crisis.” Reading documents of science and policy, I explore how dominant conventions of climate inquiry and intervention have advanced new frontiers of hydrocarbon violence—among them, US fracking. In turn, I identify a carbon consequentialism woven throughout North Atlantic climate praxis. This conceptualizes a planetary moral calculus that motivates destruction in the present through appeal to a forecast of future climatic devastation, which today's harms will supposedly preempt. As climate-altering methane now streams skyward from US fracking zones, an unusual question suggests itself: what does climate science do to the Earth?