Carbon Omissions: Toward a Toxic Stratigraphy of Tocopilla, Northern Chile

Hybrid event - in person and online

Cristobal Bonelli, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Damir Galaz-Mandakovic, Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile
Valentina Figueroa, Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile
Marina Weinberg, University of Amsterdam; Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile
Gabrielle Hecht, Stanford University, USA.

Carbon neutrality, as an abstract environmental intangible, has become the mantra of 21st century capitalism. An overarching abstraction that promises a livable future everywhere, it renews modernity’s favorite perspective—a detached and objectifying view from nowhere—by executing it as a cosmic balance sheet and by neutralizing carbon on a global scale. Yet to achieve this goal through the deployment of zero emissions technologies unevenly distributed, requires materials such as lithium and copper. Which, in turn, leads from the purported universal impartiality of a view from nowhere to a situated and specific somewhere: northern Chile, the world’s largest producer of these elements which are currently considered to be quintessential materials for the so-called energy transition. Yet, at ground level, and far from the carbon neutrality as abstraction, the port city of Tocopilla and its power plants remind us that the beautiful dream of energy transitions would not exist without the burning of fossil fuels; the gigantic copper tailings of this region, belies the neutral imagination of a clean transition towards a decarbonized world.

This presentation complicates the hegemonic and globalizing project of corporate carbon neutrality by visualizing Tocopilla’s ashtray (sp, el cenicero de Tocopilla), a sedimented volume of fly ash resulting from the combustion of coal and petroleum coke during the last four decades. Through a transdisciplinary exercise mobilizing anthropological, historical and archaeological methods, in this presentation we want to visualize the Tocopilla ashtray through a toxic stratigraphy which works as a) an index of carbon omissions, namely, those destructive material transformations strongly omitted by the net zero emissions project of corporate carbon neutrality, as well as b) the product of residual governance, a deadly form of rule in which the management of waste and discards relies on tactics such as simplification, ignorance, and delay, treating people as waste and places as wasteland.

Note: This work is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. [853133]). www.worldsoflithium.eu