Climate Engineering as the Anthropocene 2.0 [Klimaengineering als Anthropozän 2.0]

Abstract

Although climate engineering is a field with the highest political stakes, one that attracts vast investment sums, we know relatively little about its potential or accomplishments. It does, however, exist as a political reality and as an area of scientific inquiry. The scale of risk it involves is hardly contentious. The debate is rather about whether alternative options still exist in the face of impending climate catastrophe. The thriller genre in particular negotiates the underlying political interests and mechanisms at work in climate engineering. This article analyzes how three recent German ecothrillers—Uwe Laub’s Sturm, Heiko von Tschischwitz’s Die Welt kippt, and Marc Elsberg’s Celsius—present the stakes involved. As widely read fictional accounts of a topic of major significance, they play an important role in informing and shaping public attitudes toward strategies that are still in the making. Beginning with an introduction to the debates around climate engineering, the article moves to a discussion of the intentions, possibilities, and limitations of the thriller as a genre. An analysis of the presentation of power and politics in the three ecothrillers follows, focusing on military, geopolitical, and financial interests and on the attendant implications for democracy. The article then turns to investigating how discourse (in Foucault’s sense) is presented in the novels, before drawing conclusions about the hopes, dangers, and fears surrounding climate engineering, and how fiction can offer prospects and visions of this complex technological and political topic of the most pressing global concern.