Dr. Jeroen Oomen, assistant professor at the Urban Futures Studio at Utrecth University, will present as part of the Solar Geoengineering Research Program Lunchtime Seminar Series.
Lunch will be provided.

Abstract: Environmental politics is unraveling. At the heart of this failure lies the political capture of ideas about the future. Many actors play a role in reproducing this capture: scientists funnel narrow policy futures through their models; activists adopt politically expedient language; policymakers look for safe, technologically sound win-win solutions. Based on his upcoming Captured Futures: Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics (with Maarten Hajer, e-book out late April 2025), Jeroen Oomen argues that ever larger, ever riskier, and ever more speculative technological ‘solutions’ now maintain the legitimacy of politics as usual. Increasingly, interventions such as solar geoengineering appear as a political necessity to maintain the suggestion that climate politics can still succeed – inhibiting both political and scientific deliberations about the feasibility and desirability of these technological inventions.

Bio: Jeroen Oomen is an assistant professor at the Urban Futures Studio, where he focuses on the social, cultural, and scientific practices that create societies' conceptions of the future. His main research interests are climate politics, geoengineering, and social theory, specifically where it concerns questions of sustainability. Jeroen is the author of the book Imagining Climate Engineering: Dreaming of the Designer Climate (Routledge, 2021) and he was a key author on the proposal for a Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering. Abstract: Environmental politics is unraveling. At the heart of this failure lies the political capture of ideas about the future. Many actors play a role in reproducing this capture: scientists funnel narrow policy futures through their models; activists adopt politically expedient language; policymakers look for safe, technologically sound win-win solutions. Based on his upcoming Captured Futures: Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics (with Maarten Hajer, e-book out late April 2025), Jeroen Oomen argues that ever larger, ever riskier, and ever more speculative technological ‘solutions’ now maintain the legitimacy of politics as usual. Increasingly, interventions such as solar geoengineering appear as a political necessity to maintain the suggestion that climate politics can still succeed – inhibiting both political and scientific deliberations about the feasibility and desirability of these technological inventions.