When: 1 September, 12:00-1:30 pm
Where: Room 441, Social Sciences Building (A02), University of Sydney
Speaker: Dr Natasha Heenan
Following decades of climate denial, obstruction and delay, we find ourselves in an “overshoot conjuncture” where the absence of a coordinated global phase-out of fossil fuels is justified by the promise of novel climate technologies. Central to this conjuncture is the movement of geoengineering from the fringes of scientific inquiry into mainstream climate policy discourse. As governments and corporations invest billions in technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere and research ways to potentially reflect sunlight back into space, critical questions emerge: Who creates and owns these technologies? In whose interests will they be deployed? In this seminar, I propose a framework that seeks to move beyond debates that treat geoengineering as either a catastrophic technofix or unavoidable salvation. Instead, I argue that geoengineering is simultaneously an alienated form of our collective capacity to produce the climate and a more transparently social form of climate production, necessitated by an epochal crisis in the conditions of capitalist production. I propose climate repair as a radical ethic, politics, and historical process that is latent within but not guaranteed by the overshoot conjuncture, requiring a third pillar of climate politics alongside adaption and mitigation.
Dr Natasha Heenan is a Postdoctoral Research Associate working across the disciplines of Political Economy and Human Geography. She is part of a multi-disciplinary team investigating Australia’s emerging climate economy (2025-2028). Natasha’s PhD, awarded in 2025 by the University of Sydney, examined the development of climate engineering technologies in Australia, including engineered carbon dioxide removal (CDR).
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