The Climate Justice Movement And the Hegemonic Discourse of Technology

Abstract

Climate justice has become a central discursive element of a wide variety of actors, expression of various, and contrasting, social and political visions. Indeed climate justice can be understood as a field of discursivity, susceptible to a multiplicity of articulatory practices. The climate justice movement offers a system-critical articulation of climate justice, hinging on what I call boundary-lines of critique. The central argument of this article is that technology, one of these boundary lines, eludes radical critique and enjoys rather a hegemonic position within the discourse of the climate justice movement. Distinguishing between polluting and climate-friendly technologies - between false and real solutions - in fact misdirects attention. Drawing on Hornborg's work on the relation between global patterns of resource extraction, unequal social and exchange relations and technology, the article emphasizes how reducing the critique of technology to a positional analysis measured against a boundary rhetorically constructed on a false/real solution dichotomy is not sufficient for a critique which aims at being radically system critical. Indeed, it may have the paradoxical consequence of further legitimating those processes of accumulation, appropriation and depredation crucial for industrial technology (whether or not "green") to work and at the root of the socio-ecological and climatic crises.