Frontier

Frontier Climate: a bug report

NOTES: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/titipi.frontier.report.intro

This bugreport is a direct action against Frontier Climate's advanced market commitment (AMC) for carbon removal. We call for businesses, institutions, communities, science labs and consumers to de-invest their money, time, energy and trust from this enterprise.

Instead of payment systems for carbon removal, we call for an immediate halt to the racial capitalism of fossil fuel extraction; to work towards the abolition of computational infrastructuring and to creatively engage with the establishment of mutual-aid and propositions for instituting otherwise.

Context

In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that exceeding 2°C of planetary warming would have catastrophic impacts. To keep the planet stable, they argued, Global warming needs to be kept at 1.5°C.. Because the world is currently on track to surpass those limits, the reduction of carbon emissions only will not suffice. The IPPC therefore proposed that the removal of current carbon from the atmosphere would be required.

The circulation of the IPCC 2021 report at COP26 brought renewed attention to Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). In the context of the intensification of state reliance on technology during COVID-19, CDR quickly garnered EU support and lead to a surge of financial activity by both political and corporate climate actors. Their actions were not aimed at reducing fossil fuel emissions, but instead on investing and building infrastructures for the removal of carbon to balance their carbon budgets. By April 2022 the IPCC had released explicit support for “the deployment of carbon dioxide removals" and within two months Frontier Climate had launched.

The speculative technosolutions proposed by Frontier are explicitly **not** focused on reducing emissions from fossil fuels or halting new carbon extraction. Instead, they are being used as justification for corporations and governments to continue to grow fossil fuel use and carbon extraction (see for instance the promise of new carbon removal for balancing the emissions from new expansion of coal and gas extraction in the UK). This solutionist take continues business-as-usual by means of techno-fixes.

Concretely this has resulted in:

• an investment market for carbon removal (companies can now invest in carbon removal as a way to increase oil and gas revenue, because they are the largest owners). This gave the opportunity for investors to symbolically de-invest from oil and gas markets, and reinvest in CDR.
• the building of a number of new large scale carbon removal infrastructural experiments
• the circulation of greenwashing narratives such as: net-zero, carbon removal, carbon neutrality, carbon positivity
• new regulations and policies around certification, validation and carbon removal
• the investment in oil and gas, big tech and metal mining companies involved in carbon removal technologies and infrastructures
• the emergence of a number of Big Tech-led initiatives to manage these processes via computational infrastructures. Including Microsoft climate, Stripe Climate, Amazon Sustainability, Google Sustainability, Meta Sustainability, as well as coalitions or consortia such as Frontier Climate.
• a speeding up of the effort of making life "platform ready"

The Frontier narrative is constructed around the supposed need for Carbon Removal (scientists would call it CDR) as the core solution for Climate Change. Carbon Removal is different from carbon capture, in the sense that it is promising permanent storage of carbon (for 1000 years or more). To do so involves many yet untested technologies, risky interventions that have yet to scale.

What is Frontier

Frontier Climate is an enterprise solely owned by Stripe, a company developing computational infrastructures for on-line payments infrastructure. Legally, it is set up as a LLC for profit social interest company, and has as founding members Meta, Alphabet, Shopify, and Mckinsey. Together they constructed a platform for gathering more than 10 billion dollars, a sum aimed at accelerating the testing and scaling of Carbon Removal. Instead of calling for donations, they use the construction of advance market commitment (AMC) which allows partners and members to invest in start-up companies that pledge to remove amounts of carbon at an agreed price in the future. Stripe also created an API for their business clients as a way to call in donations from their customers.

Why this bugreport

We are writing this bugreport as a direct action against Frontier Climate's advanced market commitment (AMC) for carbon removal. We launched this bugreport because we think it is urgent to collectively signal 'bugs' in enterprises such as Frontier Climate, to address them collectivelly and transdisciplinarily. To make evidence on their operations and implications, and also to join forces and report widely on these bugs which are active across computational infrastructures that monetize climate as the most profitable of damages.

This report is published out of concern about:

1. The normalisation and financialisation of carbon removal as justification for further 'frontiers' of fossil-fueled accumulation. (→ Planetary prototyping, Knowledge gap reversals)
2. The move of big tech initiatives to gain leverage on the management of planetary resources and climate governance. (→ A consortium from hell)
3. The use of the global climate crisis to generate over 10 billion US dollars in donations, absent transparency or oversight. (→ The Dark Kitchens of climate change, A CRaaS Fata Morgana market)
4. The deployment of an overarching financial infrastructure to funnel research and capital away from addressing core drivers of this crisis, erasing the socioecological impacts of fossil fuel extraction through the narrative hegemony of infra-solutionism. (→ A digital wallet for carbon removal)
5. The use of the narrative of carbon removal to create new financial mechanisms and market expansion for both big tech and big oil. (→ The conflation of Big Tech and Big Oil)
6. The extension, instrumentalisation, and intimate impacts of computational infrastructures from smart phones to vast sensor networks of carbon measurement, not least through the massive implementation of an online payment infrastructure. (→ A digital wallet for carbon removal)
7. The manufacture of dependence for collective survival on systems of computation, financing, and management that are fundamentally colonial, extractive, and opposed to the flourishing of life. (→ Creative accounting narratives, The Dark Kitchens of Climate Change)
8. The capture of other sociotechnical futures by the imaginative monopoly of carbon removal, repackaged according to the size and manners of US-Silicon Valley cosmovisions. (→ Capturing other futures)

Areas of evidence

Knowledge gap reversals

NOTES: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/frontiergaps

Frontier invites readers, users, interested researchers, potential clients and/or stakeholders to "Explore a database of 100+ knowledge gaps across the field of durable carbon removal." The database is actually an advanced spreadsheet, and for its pretentious interface, contains in fact surprisingly little entries, categorised in five areas or types of gaps, ranging from "fundamental science" to potentials for novel carbon removal pathways.

The first category, fundamental science contains all possible hard science issues related to the upscaling of Carbon Removal; there is no presence of social sciences nor any entries on contestations of the desirability of CDR. The second gap is called ' standardizing MRV ' and deals with the standardisation efforts for measurement, reporting and verification (MRV). The prioritisation of MRV is unsurprising, as Frontier is trying to become the one stop place for the quantification, validation and financialisation of carbon removal. The third gap is an overview of technology & engineering needs, compiled in direct connection to the startup tissue they themselves are generating. The fourth gap is how this will be governed; as can be expected (xxxx?). Last but not least, gap five speculates about additional Carbon Removal pathways that can be experimented with in the future.

A gap is a negative volumetric entity, a lack of occupation, or rather: something which gets to be considered empty by the tools in use, despite what could have been there, or what is there that does not count. A knowledge gap is hence a sapience void.

By positioning the knowledge around CDR as in need of being filled, Frontier ignores the long history of Carbon removal, but also all present and historical intelligences around planetary survival, ecosystem care, practices of survival and of (partial) repair. The rendering of these knowledges into gaps while a full industry is being invented "from scratch" is epistemicidal. There is no such thing as a void (especially if you are accepting the enormous agencies of intangible matters such as air or ground, and inventing a machinery to value their density!) nor a "from scratch", but a continuation of erasures, dispossessions and depletions on the one hand, and a continuation of accumulations, densifications and super-impositions on the other.

As we have learned from the thick legacies of colonialism, exploration does very rarely imply care nor reparation. To explore a database addressed at a group of such diversity (readers hand in hand with users? interested researchers shoulder to shoulder with potential clients and/or stakeholders?) clearly sets it up as either a challenging operation, or a scam circulating in plain sight.

Why does this project try so hard to look like research? How did it arrive to understand itself as an optimal place to compile knowledge and fill gaps? Why does it need to self-legitimize as a structure for para-scientific research?

these lines need to turn into a paragraph: The [slick, infrastructure aligning with Cloud norms, capturing unknown, para-science (not as para-academic or disobedient, but pseudo in the sense of not-discussed, not peer-reviewd, not subjected to thick discussion nor dissent etc), arrogance of proposing the framework for these issues to be addressed (including the option/form to ' propose gaps ' ).

A consortium from hell

NOTES: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/aconsortiumfromhell

Frontier Climate is a for-profit limited liability entity solely owned by Stripe. It was founded together with a group of powerful, US-based actors: Alphabet (tech company), Meta (tech company) and McKinsey Sustainability (global consultancy). This initial consortium from hell was later joined by JP Morgan (banking), H&M (retail), workday (management of human and financial capital) and Autodesk (3D engineering software). Between them, these actors have an obvious invested interests in streamlining finance, narration, infrastructure building, tech-labour, computational infrastructure and software production.

While Stripe is busy setting up an infrastructure to become the main supplier for digital payments, McKinsey is serving big tech making green transition stories. The consultancy firm set up its sustainability branch for building the narration towards net zero and posing carbon removal as the only option in climate change. Workday signed a multiyear sponsorship deal with the McLaren motor racing team as an official partner. Alphabets' advertising income is largely built on adverts by Big Tech companies for carbon removal and net zero technologies.

We could add many more unsurprising contradictions to this list, but you get the point. The power grab that this consortium represents is immense. It positions Big Tech and friends as the central drive towards addressing climate change, bringing them in a unique position to bargain.

A CRaaS fata morgana market

NOTES: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/titipi.frontier.report.craas

CRaaS = Carbon Removal as a Service | Capitalism Removal as a Service

"Μαζί με το βασιλικό ποτίζεται και η γλάστρα" (Together with the basil, the pot is also watered)

Frontier describes its mission as building a new market for carbon removal for investors, researchers and entrepreneurs. This involves the scaling up and development of payment apps and carbon removal infrastructures across the planet to cover the potential future demand for carbon removal. Frontier promises to have the planetary reach and global financial infrastructure, and the geopolitical access to operate its building blocs.

Like delivering education over Zoom/Teams, health care over QR code apps, Microsoft Teams for border control, Google forms for signing statements or the digitization of payrolls (or covering?) any other essential public service, Frontier consortium takes the already-legitimized, recognisable role of a Big Tech consortia "as the one to provide the service"(reference here?). The same way that Microsoft or AWS have positioned themselves as the only one's to be able to deliver services for education or health, Frontier places itself as the only one with the possibility to fill the research gaps, fund, and scale up carbon removal. Like healthcare or education they describe they will sell climate change mitigation as a service (facilitated by API, dashboards and compute). Frontier's mission is Carbon-Removal-as-a-Service, business as usual, however this mission is a mirage, a fata morgana! Just like heat-induced hallucinations or deformations of what's there, CRaaS emerges in an overheated world view as a mirage that floats over the horizon of all that's at reach. We might speculate that Frontier is not the climate saviour they claim to be, perhaps they care as little about carbon removal as they do about education or about health care.

Why is this a mirage? Through their development of 'carbon removal technologies' Frontier have developed a computational payment system to buy and sell carbon removal in tonnes. We might assume that Frontier is proposing a future service in which businesses can buy carbon removal and then sell carbon removal to other businesses and buyers. However, carbon removal is just a mirage which floats in front of the core aim of frontier which we believe is to create a monopoly of financial infrastructures of digital wallets and future capital purchase capabilities. Frontier has received 'XX billion' (amount?) of donations since launching in 2022, and that large pool of money now exists somewhere or rather is being used to do something else. Analysing the purchase agreements and other contracts available on the Github has shown us that only a small percentage (maybe 10%- check) of the pool of money has been paid out as capital investment to carbon removal companies. 90% of the donations seem to be somewhere else. So the question is what is it being used for, is it being used to directly expand and support more software development.. and if so what is it doing? We might speculate that Stripe have used this pool of money in their recent payment company acquisitions as they have purchased/taken over all of the key payment infrastructures globally during this time, including Paystack a Nigerian financial technology company, RunKit, Indie Hackers, Index, Touchtech, Kickoff, Totems, TaxJar, Bouncer, Recko, Payable, OpenChannel, quickly securing themselves a global financial infrastructure monopoly. Or we might also speculate that the pool of money has been used to develop the new Stripe API dashboard (see above) to allow businesses to capture future payments, digital wallets needed for Carbon Removal trading. Wherever the money is and whatever its being used for, Carbon Removal is a mirage that floats in front of the expansion of software development for financial payments and the making of a transnational monopoly which is fully owned by Stripe.

Check some facts here: https://research.contrary.com/reports/stripe

A digital wallet for carbon removal? (or: NO to a digital wallet for no carbon removal)

NOTES: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/titipi.frontier.report.api

Is it possible to speak of a political economy of carbon removal? If so, what are its main operations, areas, and shapes? How do ((extractive, platform capitalist)) corporations speculate on the creation of a new market? In Frontier Climate's planning for a market beyond carbon offset credits, it is already possible to see technical strategies and techniques of capture being put in place for this market in the making.

Most prominent at the moment is the integration of a "Counteract climate change" payment product that can be enabled within Stripe's API (application programming interfaces) for e-commerce websites and mobile applications. Frontier Climate centers Stripe as a single solution for on-line payment, and given Stripe's position as an established provider of a software as a service model for financial services, the role of Stripe as a leading actor in this consortium begins to become clear.

Stripe's payments product APIs provide an existing, relatively ' seamless 'capacity to manage the flows for committing resources to markets that are not yet established (carbon removal credits, carbon capture certificates, or whatever form this market's traded goods tradition will take). In doing so, Stripe, and by extension, Frontier Climate, can fold in the creation of an advanced market condition for carbon removal into their platformized payments system, paving the way for a massive market and infrastructural advantage in which Stripe and the Consortium will be in a dominant position as both a go-between for users/buyers and products/suppliers, as well as a large funder/investor of these technical fixes for the climate crises, present and to come.

The seemingly trivial function for a digital wallet (a centralized device for monetary operation involving banking entities, sellers and a userized client) to offer carbon removal options for future payments becomes in the Stripe climate payment function a package deal for a ready-made (specifically platform-ready) infrastructure. Given this consortium's well established legacy in regards to their digital offerings, its renewed hegemony in this market of carbon removal in the making will very likely result in modes of operation oriented towards further extracting and monopolising. The financialization and subsuming of climate issues into corporate cloud infrastructures will represent yet another of this consortium's ongoing capture of so many domains of life.

Dark kitchens of climate change

NOTES: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/titipi.frontier.report.darkkitchen

Creative accounting narratives

NOTES: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/creativeaccounting

The narrative Frontier Climate builds around accounting needs to do a lot of heavy lifting. I.e. if the narrative they produce is able to be accounted for within its own logic, then it maintains an image of Frontier as a viable economic and material solution within the rampant climate crisis. However, as Frontier Climate operates according to a propositional logic, that means that as long as they are able to account for their own narrative premise, and maintain the logic of their own narrative, they are able to function by receiving large sums of money and holding onto it indefinitely.

Drawing the comparison with financing the development of vaccines feels manipulative and inaccurate because it draws a direct equivalence between human life and earth life. At the same time, what is backgrounded is the way that Big Pharma profits from AMC's, by refusing to produce medicine for all at a fair price, unlike previously developed vaccines. The actual point of equivalence between vaccine production and Frontier's use of AMC is that they function to reproduce — and scale-up — the harms that they claim to be eliminating, by turning techniques for life preservation into yet another occasion for market exploitation.

Frontier insists on climate change as a budget issue, both in terms of carbon removal and of the money needed to address it at scale. It allows for gross simplification of the issues (social, economic, environmental effects) which are blended into a logic that makes Frontier the one and only actor able to offer solutions to these distorted issues. Transparency and accountability issues are included within that logic as simple budget questions like everything else, so that in the end you only need to address that single budget. Accountability has been reduced to accountancy.

Frontier is both a narrative and a specific legal construction that allows them to receive large sums of money under the guise of charity, accumulate profit under the framework of business, and hold the profit under the logic of future innovation. The way that business-charity-innovation triangulate means that the accountability linked to each of the three constructions can be deferred according the other two (i.e. receive money as profit at the same time as donation).

The conflation of big tech and big oil

NOTES: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/titipi.frontier.report.bigoil

"the use of the narrative of carbon removal to create new financial mechanisms and market expansion for both big tech and big oil." reuse of infratructures of big oil fo..

Planetary prototyping

NOTES: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/titipi.frontier.planetaryprototyping

Frontier proposes a form of prototyping and test-bedding at the scale of an entire planet, using extreme language as if it was a mundane conversation. In other words, it proposes technologies that are basically drilling the f*ck out of volcano formations to lock something 'bad' in it, and then wait to see if it's okay. The consortium painfully normalises techno-solutionism and innovation as the only way out. Innovation, when nested in the fantasy of planetary prototyping, replicates the very old rational colonial logics of the pioneers, the inhabitants of the ever-reinvented last frontier. It reproduces an imagination which approves that a 'new' planet B can be beta-tested and then just pop up from a lab; namely Frontier's lab.

Let's take for instance the story of Cella, a start-up from which Stripe pre-purchases 333,000 dollars worth of carbon removal tonnes. Funded by Stripe donations, Cella begins to inject CO2 into the voids of a basalt mass located in the Kenyan rift, a 'Carbon Valley' to come. In this story, the injection destabilizes the underground and makes new giant cracks emerge that rip through peoples houses. In response, Frontier funds another start-up called Aperture which is funded to drill these cracks, to inject them with more CO2, and conduct large scale experiments on them. This is what is called in-situ carbon mineralisation. In Cella's own words:

"Carbon mineralization involved the formation of solid carbonate minerals through reaction of captured atmospheric CO2 with rocks rich in calcium or magnesium. We inject CO2 deep into volcano rock formations underground (like basalt), where CO2 reacts with water and minerals within the rocks and turns into stone. Our novel in-situ mineralization technology enhances these natural geologic process by speeding up chemical reactions with subsurface minerals to permanently lock away atmospheric Co2 and mitigate the worst impacts of climate change."

The imagination of a planetary laboratory is, unfortunately, not a new fantasy. What is new is maybe the scale afforded by technology which delusions us into thinking that effectively removing extreme planetary damage is possible.

Capturing other futures

NOTES: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/titipi.frontier.report.capture

Frontier promises the capture, removal, and enclosure of carbon. But which are the resources for alternate futures that are also captured by the very apparatus of Frontier? Beyond the ostensible target of carbon removal, what else is removed? How, in other words, does the future promised by Frontier depend on the permanent closure of a plurality of futures, including the (techno)political imagination necessary to make these other futures possible? How does the capture of these futures affect communities on a local scale, even though Frontier's services function on the level of an institution or company?

The solutionist and market-oriented approach that Frontier offers has, already, a huge effect on the possibility of a plurality of post-carbon practices. The examples set by corporations also affect the ways in which the public understands their role in contributing to climate solutions. This turns Frontier into a cultural device which participates in the determination of what gets to be imagined.

In the face of climate chaos, local communities are attending to a variety of ways to organise and resist. Caring for the closures that are needed by delinking and forging new solidarities, energy realities, and food practices. Collectivities from the bare bone of existence.

As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says "We already know that the revolution won't be funded" but on an everyday level-instead of institutions (schools, health, universities, etc.) considering funding a community farm, forest or pedagogies of grounding projects will sign-up and a percentage of their income will go directly to Frontier - to meet their 2030 goals and the demands of the banks to prove their resilience, they will trust Frontier and the alike. Just like they did with Microsoft Teams or Zoom for their everyday organizing. Frontier will quickly become the answer for the market they unwillingly committed to create.

Signatures

• Aggeliki Diakrousi
• Jara Rocha
• Femke Snelting

This bugreport was prepared by Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, an association that tries to stay attentive to technopolitical concerns in the public interest in collaboration with