The colonialism of carbon capture and storage in Alberta's Tar Sands

Abstract

This essay considers carbon capture and storage (CCS) in relation to struggles over value and territorial jurisdiction in the Alberta Tar Sands. Critical engagements with CCS have pointed to the legitimising function of the technology and highlight its role normalising extraction in the tar sands. We suggest that neither the significance of CCS nor the legitimation function it performs can be fully understood absent an analysis of settler colonialism. CCS we argue is a colonial flanking mechanism directly centred on the governance of harm that construes harm in ways that reproduce settler colonial entitlements to Indigenous lands, bodies and ecosystems and helps to consolidate state jurisdiction and power in the tar sands. This construal of harm also productively intersects other colonial strategies of harm reduction relative to the tar sands, including the criminalisation of Indigenous jurisdiction, and is part of a broader relational context that prioritises settler colonial futurity.