Distinguished Visitors Talk by Michael Levien, Associate Professor of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University

Talk on Thursday, April 3 at 4:30pm in LUT 200 (tea service at 4:15pm) 

“Reactionary Decarbonization: Carbon Capture and Structural Racism in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley”

This talk will draw on one year of ethnographic fieldwork and 150 interviews focused on the carbon capture and storage (CCS) boom in Louisiana. Focusing on the case of Freetown—a Black community in Cancer Alley slated for a “blue ammonia” plant—it shows how the subsidies for CCS in the Inflation Reduction Act interact with the racial geography of the petrochemical industry to expand racial inequality in toxic risk. Drawing on the history of the region and the theory of W.E.B. DuBois, it further shows how these inequalities are rooted in the legacy of slavery and the failures of Reconstruction. Developing the idea of reactionary decarbonization to explain the unjust non-transition promised by CCS, it concludes with analysis of the conditions of possibility for emancipatory decarbonization.

Sponsored by the Department of Sociology in conjunction with the Distinguished Visitors Program.