Promise,deferral and dissonance: Law,time and environments in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Dominant modes of temporal ordering premised on linear, progressive time are deeply implicated in the production of “Anthropocene” conditions. This article explores how international law is responding to the temporal challenges of the Anthropocene. It describes the deployment of technologies of deferral that attempt to mobilize specific ideas of the future to both delay the transition from fossil fuels and secure, lock in, and maintain belief in a sense of linear, progressive time even as the climate crisis presents a fundamental challenge to this modernist narrative. Dangerously, these technologies of deferral create increased temporal dissonance because they fail to heed the clear warning from climate science that continuing business-as-usual will create a catastrophic future. This article explores these dynamics through three case studies: first, the mobilization of the future promise of—currently untested and unviable at scale—carbon dioxide removal technologies in the international climate regime; second, the protection of future expected profits from fossil fuel reserves and infrastructure in the international investment law regime; and finally the tensions about competing imperatives of continuity and change at the heart of debates about the rights of future generations. Yet this article also suggests a different way in which international law could engage with time, focused less on shaping, standardizing, and synchronizing time, but rather on enlivening trans-temporal obligations in ways that create just relations between plural times and temporalities.

Introduction

Dominant modes of temporal ordering premised on linear, progressive time are deeply implicated in the production of “Anthropocene” conditions. The extraction and combustion of fossilized carbon were essential underlying conditions for the establishment of the “new, accelerated, and linear time regime of capitalist modernity” (Folkers, 2021: 228). The generation of energy from fossil fuels—“literally the decayed remnants of long-dead life-forms” (Klein, 2014: 176) that had been compressed over millions of years—made it possible to escape both from the ecological limits imposed by biofuels and from the cyclical temporality of ecological cycles and the natural world. Now, this dominant mode of temporal ordering and its promise of progress are being undermined by the climate emergency. The accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions, considered a mere “externality” from the combustion of fossil fuels, now threatens the future liveability of the planet (IPCC, 2023b). The warnings have become increasingly shrill: the world is close to “irreversible” climate breakdown (Carrington, 2022c). Business-as-usual has led us down a disastrous trajectory towards “climate apartheid” and “climate carnage” (Carrington, 2022a; United Nations Environment Programme, 2022). There is, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns, only a “brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity” remaining to “secure a liveable and sustainable future for all” (IPCC, 2023a: 23). While there is increased understanding and acceptance of the science of climate change, powerful political and economic interests continue to resist the clear normative implication that new fossil fuel projects ought not to be permitted and the need for a rapid phase-down of existing fossil fuels (Green et al., 2024; Shue, 2023). In this context, where delay is the “new denial” (Shue, 2023) it is not just discourses of climate delay that proliferate (Lamb et al., 2020). Rather, there are a growing number of technologies of deferral that work to postpone a transition away from fossil fuels, by mobilizing ideas of the future to lock-in “business-as-usual” and the status quo that is leading us to climate disaster.

This article explores how international law is responding to the temporal challenges of the “Anthropocene.” International law is deeply imbued with narratives of progress in and through law (Skouteris, 2010, 2016), and modern international law is authorized by notions of development, a teleology of improvement, and a hierarchical temporal ordering of the world (Pahuja, 2011). Thus, international law has traditionally—and in many ways continues to—reflect and help reproduce a sense of progressive and chronological linear time in the world (Cusato, 2025). However, in the Anthropocene, international law's temporal ordering is increasingly challenged from two directions. First, dominant modes of temporal ordering premised on linear, progressive time are deeply implicated in the production of Anthropocene conditions. Thus, as Eliana Cusato writes, “any proposal to devise more-liveable presents and futures needs to reckon with international law's temporal foundations” (Cusato, 2025: 871). Second, international law needs to respond to how these dominant modes of chronological, linear temporal ordering are being undermined by the chaotic ecological conditions of the Anthropocene. The “residuals” from fossil fuel combustion confront us with long-lasting ecological damage (Folkers, 2021). These harms play out with “attritional lethality” (Nixon, 2011), and while devastating impacts have been clearly predicted, the exact scope and scale of harm remain speculative, especially given the real risk that exceeding a certain “tipping point” will drastically accelerate and intensify impacts and consequences (Lenton, 2013). Additionally, petrochemicals have an “extreme longevity” such that they are impossible to remove from the environment, or indeed our bodies, where they accumulate completely (Gray-Cosgrove et al., 2015). The Anthropocene thus presents a “messy mix-up of time scales” (Malm, 2016: 8), where past actions and the historical emissions continue to “haunt” the present (Humphreys, 2014) and will continue to constrain future possibilities (Shue, 2014). Thus, the temporal condition of “fossil modernity” is one in which the “open horizon of infinite options” has been closed down (Folkers, 2021: 238), and the longevity of waste enlivens demands for ecological debts and reparations to be repaid (Mason-Case and Dehm, 2021).

Through three case studies of different facets of contemporary international climate politics, this article explores one aspect of the temporal condition of “fossil modernity.” I focus on how technologies of deferral attempt to mobilize specific ideas of the future to both delay the transition from fossil fuels and secure, lock in, and maintain belief in a sense of linear, progressive time even as the climate crisis presents a fundamental challenge to this modernist narrative. I explore the operations of two such technologies within two different legal regimes: first, the mobilization of the future promise of—currently untested and unviable at scale—carbon dioxide removal technologies in the international climate regime; and second, the protection of future expected profits from fossil fuel reserves and infrastructure in the international investment law regime. Interestingly, these two technologies are both based on and premised on the speculative, anticipatory temporality of finance: the notions of “credit” and of the “asset.” I suggest that even as these technologies seek to maintain a belief in a sense of linear, progressive time, they also simultaneously create increased temporal dissonance. I use the concept of temporal dissonance (Baker, 2021; Selin, 2006; Zivkovic, 2018) to speak to the disjuncture between the anticipated future that is projected by these technologies of deferral and the futures that are actually produced by these techniques of deferral. Dangerously, such technologies of deferral, which operate to lock in fossil fuels and protect capitalist expectations of predictable and continued economic growth, fail to heed the clear warning from climate science that continuing business-as-usual will create a catastrophic future.

This article shows how the contemporary moment enlivens crucial political choices about how legal frameworks respond to the shifting temporal dynamics of the Anthropocene and how law seeks to engage with, and shape, temporal ordering. There is a real danger in forms of legal ordering that seek to maintain the universal, linear, progressive temporality that has characterized modernity, given that this is so deeply implicated in the production of Anthropocene conditions. Between the lines, this article, however, also tries to tell another minor story about the relationship between law and temporality. Law not only produces and constructs ideas of time (Grabham, 2016; Grabham and Beynon-Jones, 2020; Greenhouse, 1989; McNeilly, 2019), including by standardizing and synchronizing time, but law also has a unique capacity to engender transtemporal obligations. In the face of the proliferating plurality of temporalities of the Anthropocene, it is possible to foreground a different legal relationship with time: rather than shaping, synchronizing, and standardizing time, law can also provide a means of holding different times and temporalities in relation. Enlivening trans-temporal legal obligations that enact new relations between the past, present, and future is an unavoidable element of ecological and temporal justice. There is thus a need to foster legal relationships to time that are less focused on shaping, standardizing, and synchronizing time, but rather on enlivening trans-temporal obligations to create just relations between plural temporalities.

The article unfolds as follows. The first section provides a brief overview of the co-imbrication and complex interplay between temporality, technology, narrative, materiality, and law. It thus draws attention to the dense knotting between different forms of legal ordering, temporal ordering, and ways of governing the natural world. The third section describes how the narrative of optimism and progress in the international climate regime has been maintained by the idea of “overshoot” and as yet unproven and unviable at scale “negative emissions technologies,” and explores the dangers of such future projections. The fourth section describes how international investment law is being utilized by fossil fuel companies to protect them against the risk of asset stranding, and how the calculation of damage quantum reproduces assumptions of continued extraction and economic growth. The fifth section explores the tensions at the heart of debates on the rights of future generations in international law, by thinking with and against the idea of “resource sterilization” and of “reproductive futurism.”

Time, environments, and law

There is now a growing literature exploring how law does not just exist in time, but actively produces and constructs ideas of time (Grabham, 2016; Grabham and Beynon-Jones, 2020; Greenhouse, 1989; McNeilly, 2019). This scholarship has highlighted the role played by law in the “shaping of time” and how it contributes to the production of specific forms of temporal ordering and participates in the creation of specific temporal ontologies (Grabham and Beynon-Jones, 2020: 2). Emily Grabham has shown how distinct temporalities, including “progression, likelihood, transition, and balance, as well as their accomplices, are constituted through diverse relationships between people, things and laws” (Grabham, 2016: 6). Kathryn McNeilly has explored the “temporal ontology” of specific legal mechanisms, such as the Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review, and how it is “constituted by multiple internal temporalities” (McNeilly, 2021, 2024). Lara Tessaro has shown how legal categories, such as “injury,” should be understood as giving rise to a specific “material-temporal order” focused on the anticipation ofimminent, but not-yet experienced, harm (Tessaro, 2023). Sarah Keenan has shown how legal devices, such as the Torrens title register, allow “property to be temporally extricated from the material constraints of history and relocated into the future” (Keenan, 2019: 285). Geoff Gordon's work has shown how the hegemonic time scale—Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is “produced and maintained by international law through international administration with social, political, material, and technical dimensions” (Gordon, 2018, 2021: 319). Moreover, Tanzil Chowdhury has examined how legally produced “adjudicative temporalities” operate to frame specific disputes, and thereby also determine the relevance of judicial facts, and thus structure both event and subject formation (Chowdhury, 2020: 2). Thereby, law plays a fundamental, constitutive role in constructing not just visions of the future, but also the way in which the past, present, and future relate to one another and the way in which we experience, relate to and act in relation to the future. Law also plays a key role in facilitating the social communication of future expectations, allowing expectations to be secured as stable over time and in guiding actions in relation to certain expectations (Dehm, 2023; Luhmann, 2004: 142–146). In this section, I argue that this focus on how law produces and constructs ideas of time needs to be expanded in two different directions.

First, while there has been considerable socio-legal work on the connection between law, matter and time (Grabham, 2016; McNeilly, 2021; Tessaro, 2023; Valverde, 2015), to date, there has been little interaction between this body of scholarship and a growing body of work on questions of law, environments and temporality (Cusato, 2025; Dehm, 2022, 2016; Richardson, 2017). Given how environmental change is both a material and a temporal phenomenon, scholarship on law and the environment can benefit from new theoretical approaches to materiality and temporality. Matter, Andreas Folkers writes, “is the intensive texture of time” such that “[m]atter changes with, or becomes with, time” (Folkers, 2021: 226). His insightful analysis highlights how any engagement with the temporalities of climate change must be attentive to the “carbon substratum of modernity” to interrogate the different tempo-materialities arising from the multiple material forms that fossilized carbon takes: firstly as a “resource” that is “explored, extracted, combusted, cracked and transformed”; secondly as the raw material for petrochemical substances used in fertilizers, pesticides, cosmetic and plastics; and finally as the greenhouse gas emissions that are the pollution or waste arising from the use of these fossil materials (Folkers, 2021: 226). Additionally, there is value in scholarship on how law constructs ideas of time engaging more actively with the vast body of interdisciplinary literature on how materiality, narratives, and technologies construct time. There is a rich body of work that has explored how narrative structure (Morson, 1994; Ricoeur, 1980) and technologies (Barak, 2013; Gordon, 2018) have produced forms of temporal ordering. Thus, I suggest there is a need to deepen accounts about the co-constitutive relationship between law and time by examining in a more comprehensive way the complex interplay between temporality, technology, narrative, materiality, and law. The discussion in the sub-section “The Co-Construction of Time, Environment and Law” provides an initial exploration of how ideas of the environment, forms of temporal ordering, and legal regimes have been co-constructed in mutually reinforcing ways, and moreover, how it is possible to trace roughly concurrent shifts across all these domains in periods of transformation.

Second, while there has been considerable attention to how law shapes time and temporality, law's relationship with time is not just a co-productive one. Law has always, as Natasha Wheatley shows, “trade[ed] on a belief in its trans-temporality” (Wheatley, 2021: 326). Thus, in addition to analyzing how law actively produces and constructs time, including by standardizing and synchronizing time, there is a need to be attentive to law's unique role in engendering transtemporal relations. Law has played a key role in enabling the persistence of certain modes of authority across time, as well as fostering the movement of meaning through time. Additionally, law makes possible the enlivening of forms of obligation between the past, present, and future. Law's unique role in engendering transtemporal relations is discussed further in the sub-section “Law, Transmission, and Obligations Across Time” below.

The co-construction of time, environment, and law

The following sub-section provides a brief overview of several key historical periods to foreground the way in which the dominant temporal regime, the predominant legal framework, and hegemonic constructions of the environment co-constitute and reinforce each other. These brief snapshots also show that there are roughly concurrent transformations across all these domains at specific moments. The discussion below traces interlocking changes in forms of legal ordering, mode of economic production, how the natural world is imagined and governed, how the past, present, and future are held in relation and how futurity is imagined, shaped, or controlled.

When the term “international law” was first proposed by Jeremy Bentham in 1789—in opposition to the “law of nations” or ius gentium—it gave rise to a new “physical conception of the world” (Esmeir, 2018: 91). This new conception of international legal ordering was also premised on a modern temporal regime characterized by the “secularization of time” and a profound break from pre-modern conceptions of time involving eschatological expectations of apocalypse, the “end of time,” and salvation. As Reinhart Koselleck famously described, thisnew temporal regime gave rise to novel conceptions of futurity based on rational prognosis and the philosophy of historical progress (Koselleck, 2004: 18). International law, as Thomas Skouteris writes, “continues to construct/to be constructed by the idea of progress” (Skouteris, 2010, 2016: 940). Such narratives of progress in and through law have been central to cultivating and maintaining faith in the “promise of universal justice that lies at the heart of the project of international law” (Storr, 2016). The gradual professionalization of international law as a discipline in the second half of the 19th century (Koskenniemi, 2001) coincided with the rise of “fossil capitalism” (Malm, 2016). The increased extraction and combustion of fossil fuels enabled profound social and economic transformation: “releasing the stored time of fossil fuels established a socioeconomic temporality seemingly emancipated from natural time” (Folkers, 2021: 228). The energy and temporality of fossil fuels were central to the new forms of work discipline imposed on an increasingly industrialized proletariat (Thompson, 1967). It is fitting that the steam engine, the paradigmatic invention that heralded the “fossil economy” (Malm, 2016) is also a key driver of the standardization of time and the construction of uniform, universal time, especially through the railway clocks that governed its timetable (Gordon, 2018; Zerubavel, 1982). The steam engine, as Andreas Fölkers poetically writes, “glazed out all the temporal folds, knots, and wrinkles of geological time to create a smooth temporal surface” (Folkers, 2021: 228). The imposition of modern, Western conceptions and technologies of time was an integral part of the colonial project. The imposition of “clock time,” as Anna Grear writes, “operated as a material practice of colonial mastery and control” (Grear, 2019: 299). However, like any project of dominance and control, this engendered resistance. For example, as Barak's study of the making of colonial time in Egypt shows, this simultaneously produced “counter-tempos” that treated European notions of temporal efficiency, linearity, and punctuality with disdain (Barak, 2013).

The emergence of the nation-state and ideologies of nationalism that created forms of identification with this “imagined community” was accompanied by a distinctive sense of time as “linear, homogeneous and empty” (Anderson, 2006). The centralization of state authority and the emergence of bureaucracy gave rise to new forms of political–ecological relations. These are perhaps best epitomized in the “political forest,” which is “defined by scientific, bureaucratic and institutional practices of forestry” (Vandergeest and Peluso, 2015). Practices of forestry were, as Peter Vandergeest and Nancy Peluso have shown, “a crucial part of colonial-era state making,” given how they enabled both territorialization and the “institutionalization of forest management as a technology of state power” (Peluso and Vandergeest, 2001: 762). Practices of scientific forest management were key to modernist practices of “seeing like a state” (Scott, 1998). However, such practices of scientific forest management also played a key role in enabling the consolidation of a specific temporal orientation. Forestry became, as Julia Nordblad writes, a “model for the administration of other things” and the calculated forest helped “materialize a conception of time as the realization of progress and reason” (Nordblad, 2017: 172). In the 18th century, German scientific forestry formulated the concept of “Nachhaltigkeitsprinzip” (sustainability principle), which utilized quantitative methods to estimate growing stock and to ensure the extraction of the maximum “sustained yield.” Forests were also one of the “first non-financial assets to which the principles of discounting future costs and revenues were applied” (Doganova, 2018: 280–281). The economic calculations by mid-19th-century German foresters are now “regarded as one of the earliest formulations of [discounted cash flows]” analysis (Doganova, 2018: 280–281).

What is now called “the great acceleration,” marking the “drastic change in magnitude and rate of the human imprint” (Steffen et al., 2015) on the natural world, started shortly after the end of World War II. This period also saw the birth of “modern” international law and the establishment of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions. Despite its purported universality, modern international law enabled the maintenance of an imperial hierarchy and global power structure, partially due to the positioning of development and economic growth as its “transcendental grounds” (Pahuja, 2011: 37). The discourses and practices of development are structured by a specific way of understanding, invoking and imagining time and temporality. Development, as Uma Kothari writes, “is embodied in notions of modernity and progress, the idea that particular linear changes take place in linear time is reproduced” (Kothari, 2011). It was also in the post-World War II period that the contemporary notion of the “environment” emerged (Warde et al., 2018). This new understanding of the environment “made the planet visible in a wholly new way” by creating it as an “object of imagination and measurement” (Warde et al., 2018: 1–2) as well as an object of governance by law (Natarajan and Dehm, 2022; Natarajan and Khoday, 2014). The concept of the environment was also inherently intertwined with new forms of interdisciplinary knowledge-making and expertise, with the creation of new technologies of measurement and monitoring, as well as the production of new narratives about and orientations to the future (Warde et al., 2018). It was also in this period that the future came to be seen as something that “could be rendered visible and hence inherently governable” (Andersson, 2018). This gave rise to new fields of study of futurology, futurism, and future studies and associated forms of future expertise, methods, and technologies (Andersson, 2018). Finally, it was also in this period that the idea of the “economy” emerged (Mitchell, 2014). This novel conception of the economy was “not just a new object of government policy,” but as Timothy Mitchell argues, was also “a new prognostic structure in which a future was mobilized as a mode of adjudicating and managing claims in the present” (Mitchell, 2014: 484). Thus, this period marked a profound transformation in the understanding of the economy, the future, the environment, and the modes of international ordering, and these roughly simultaneous transformations mutually reinforced each other and produced together a specific temporal–legal–ecological order.

This post-WWII temporal–legal–ecological order was disrupted by the intersecting oil, economic, ecological, and geopolitical crisis of the 1970s. Suddenly, the problem of ecological limits to growth loomed large (Meadows et al., 1972). A number of strategies were adopted to try to respond. In the international legal domain, the discourse of “sustainable development” was gradually introduced and popularized with the 1987 Brundtland Commission's Our Common Future report (Bruntland Commission Report, 1987). “Although sustainable development emerged in a moment characterized by increasing anxiety about future ecological possibilities,” Eliana Cusato writes, “it operated as a re-legitimation of narratives of progress in and through law” (Cusato, 2025: 880). More consequential, arguably, were several key shifts in the organization of production that sought to promote growth unconstrained by physical ecological limits. These included the expansion of immaterial production, the growth of the service sector, and increased financialization. Concurrently, the organization of production was spatially disaggregated, with production increasingly coordinated through global value chains (The IGLP Law and Global Production Working Group, 2016). With the globalization of production, there was a greater mobilization of heterogeneity (Tsing, 2009), but time also became an increasingly important factor in production circuits: “just-in-time” circulation of commodities required the increased securitization of logistical infrastructure (Cowen, 2014). The rise of financialization, which “installs speculation at the very core of production” (Cooper, 2008) has important temporal effects. Global financial capital has a “rival temporality” to that of the nation-state (Johns, 2016), which is premised on anticipation. The anti-foundationalist speculative value of finance (Cooper and Konings, 2015) is thus accompanied by what Lisa Adkins calls “speculative time,” where “past, presents, and futures do not stand in pre-set relation to each other, but are open to constant revision” (Adkins, 2017: 449). Alongside speculation, contingency became increasingly central to modes of governing. This is evident in the rise of future technologies, such as scenario planning, that are not premised on prediction or prognosis, but rather posit in narrative form a plurality of possible futures (Cooper, 2010: 173).

Although not confirmed as a geological epoch, this era has come to be recognized as the “Anthropocene” (International Union of Geological Sciences, 2024; Damianos, 2024). We are faced with the risk of sudden, non-linear changes that trigger feedback loops between complex interlocking systems, destabilizing the climatic systems that have supported life for thousands of years (Lenton, 2013). As well as climate collapse, we are confronted with multiple, overlapping crises, or “poly-crisis,” and the necessity to navigate disparate, but interacting shocks (Tooze, 2022; United Nations Environment Programme and International Science Council, 2024). The concept of the “Anthropocene” is, as Anna Grear reminds us, “intrinsically a spatio-temporal-material phenomenon” (Grear, 2019: 300). The efforts to designate our current geological epoch as the “Anthropocene” have thus engendered various debates about time, temporality and periodization. These include debates over how to date the origins of the Anthropocene (Davis and Todd, 2017) and whether tracing such a moment of origin is possible (Subramanian, 2019). There have also been debates over the appropriate timescales through which to understand the Anthropocene, including those of geological time or “deep history” (Bjornerud, 2018; Chakrabarty, 2018). The contested nomenclature of the “Anthropocene” itself has been the subject of temporalizing debates. Instead of the Anthropocene, which posits humanity as a whole as the responsible subject (Grear, 2015), almost 100 other “-cenes” have been proposed—most prominently, the Capitalocene (Moore, 2016, 2017), Chthulucene (Haraway, 2015, 2016), and Plantationcene (Davis et al., 2019). However, Andrew Curley and Sara Smith worry even in their most progressive iterations, all such “-cenes” are “fundamentally universal, linear, and crisis-oriented” (Curley and Smith, 2023). Against such a universal and linear approach to time, they foreground Indigenous and black theorizing of temporality as relational (Curley and Smith, 2023).

The “Anthropocene” is the bearer of “strange and chaotic temporalities” (Pinkus, 2013: 3). The contemporary moment is characterized by “the encounter between conflicting, yet intersecting, strata of tempo-materialities” (Folkers, 2021: 227). Dominant modernist modes of temporal ordering are increasingly undermined by the chaotic temporalities generated by what was considered a mere “externality” or “residual” to “business-as-usual” (Folkers, 2021). Long-repressed questions about ecological debts and reparations for ecological harms reemerge (Riley Case, 2023; Táíwò, 2022) and demand a reckoning with the “sedimentation of colonial power” (Povinelli, 2021: 20). Scholars have identified how the Anthropocene confronts us with a “mangl[ing] [of] conventional temporalities” to produce “interwoven geological and artificial temporalities” and thus a “warping of time” and a “messy mix-up of time scales” (Edelstein et al., 2020: 187). Simultaneously, there is, as Anna Grear suggests, an ever greater sense of how “temporalities collide, inter-penetrate” due to an “overall sense of velocity, intensification, of temporalities folding in on each” (Grear, 2019: 308). This moment of ecological crisis could thus present an opportunity for a radical rethinking of international law's temporal ordering. Concurrently, the Anthropocene unsettles the modernist conception of the environment as an inert backdrop to human drama: rather, it makes visible the entanglements between humans and other living entities. Like Anthropocene temporalities, “Anthropocene environments” are also not standardized, but rather, in Anna Tsing's term, “patchy” (Tsing et al., 2019). Thus, Tsing and her collaborators call for greater attention to the “structural synchronicities between ecology, capital, and the human and more-than-human histories through which uneven landscapes are made and remade” (Tsing et al., 2019: 186). While each of these brief snapshots showed a deep co-imbrication and complex interplay between temporality, technology, narrative, materiality, and law, it is arguably in the Anthropocene where these co-constitutive relations are most pronounced.

Law, transmission, and obligations across time

In addition to analyzing how law actively produces and constructs time, including by standardizing and synchronizing time, there is a need to be attentive to law's unique role in engendering transtemporal relations. While there is something unique about the intensity of temporal pluralism in the “Anthropocene,” we have always lived in an “‘inherently multi-temporal’ world” (Jordheim and Wigen, 2018: 426). Scholars of temporality have highlighted that “plurality, multiplicity, and heterogeneity of socially and historically conditioned temporalities” is actually a fundamental feature of social life (Jordheim, 2014: 505). The scholarship has shown that there is “extraordinary plurality, cohabitation, and incommensurability of experiences and conceptions of time” (Edelstein et al., 2020: 3). Edelstein, Geroulanos, and Wheatley coin the term “chronocenosis” as a way of “theorizing not simply the multiplicity but also the conflict of temporal regimes operating in any given movement.” They highlight how “power and time interface amid intensely competitive temporal formations, and not simply parallel or layered ones” (Edelstein et al., 2020: 4). This scholarship, therefore, points to the need to reject assumptions about a “singular unfolding of time” and instead be attentive to the existence of plural temporalities (Rifkin, 2017). Mark Rifkin shows how such attentiveness to plural temporalities is a crucial dimension of decolonization, and calls for engagement with “varied temporal formations that have their own rhythm … that emerge immanently out of the multifaceted and shifting sets of relationships that constitute these formations and out of the interactions among those formations” (Rifkin, 2017: 2).

Yet, temporal diversity is frequently treated as an “explicit challenge for law—something law is forced to confront and conceptualize, something it tries to quash, tame, arrange, or regulate” (Wheatley, 2020: 72). The fact that we have come to think of time in terms of “unity, uniformity, and homogeneity” is a product of the “work of synchronization” (Jordheim, 2014, 2017; Jordheim and Wigen, 2018). The modernist project has been one of making the multiple temporalities of the world appear to be synchronized, uniform, and universal (Jordheim, 2014, 2017; Jordheim and Wigen, 2018). This ideational project is closely aligned with other efforts to standardize to foster capitalist discipline and control, given how standardizing time has been central to imposing the discipline of socially necessary labor time (Tomba, 2012). Various techniques have been developed to manage the persistent coexistence of different temporal orders, especially by understanding them as “graded in temporal terms” (Wheatley, 2020: 72). Alongside standardization, the temporal order of modernity has also been premised on the construction of a temporal hierarchy between the West and those it colonized. This temporal hierarchy operates on a number of different registers: whole societies and cultures were deemed “backward,” banished to the “waiting room of history” (Chakrabarty, 2008), and their temporal coevalness (Fabian, 2014) and indeed history (Wolf, 1982) denied. Simultaneously, the production of a single temporal frame has been an integral element of settler colonial violence and control (Rifkin, 2017: 1). As Mark Rifkin has shown, in a settler colonial context, the frame for thinking the synchronicity of non-native and Indigenous peoples and their temporalities is usually “provided by settler discourses, structures and perspectives” (Rifkin, 2017: 1). However, despite such temporal standardization, temporal plurality persists, especially in spaces that have been deemed “frontier zones”: the frontier “exceeds a sole chronopolitics” (Aung, 2022). The frontier is a site that “combine[s] modernist promises with non-linear time” (Aung, 2022: 378), and thus remains a site of violence as other temporalities are brought within the authority of state law and the state's temporal frame.

The role of law in standardizing and synchronizing time is an aspect of its “ambivalent, yet constitutive, role in temporal governance” (Cusato, 2025: 868) and its ongoing work to produce specific forms of temporal ordering. However, this co-constructive relationship that produces ideas of time is not the only relationship international law has with time. Law also plays a unique role in engendering transtemporal relations. Anne Orford's work has highlighted how law is a key medium for the “movement of meaning” and the “transmission of concepts, language, and norms across time and space” (Orford, 2013: 175). She writes that the “operation of modern law is not governed solely by a chronological sense of time in which events and texts are confined to their proper place in a historical and linear progression from then to now” (Orford, 2013: 175). Thus, law as a discipline is necessarily anachronistic, given how the past is never gone, but “is constantly being retrieved as a source or rationalization of present obligation” (Orford, 2013: 175). Law also plays a unique role in enacting transtemporal relations and obligations between the past, present, and future. The etymology of obligations in the Latin ligare foregrounds, as Daniel Matthews reminds us, that obligations are “ultimately concerned with binding beings” (Matthews, 2023: 238). Scott Veitch shows that “this binding or tying also operates on a temporal dimension: obligations work through time and with time” (Veitch, 2017: 416). He writes, “They provide a way, for example, of instituting memory and of seeing that memories are themselves sometimes sources of obligation. And obligations are crucial in supplying ties not just to what has passed, but with respect to what is yet to come” (Veitch, 2017: 416–417).

Law's transtemporal potentialities have arguably been less actualized than its constructive capacities to universalize, synchronize, and standardize time. However, I suggest, that in the context of the Anthropocene, the law's transtemporal potentialities deserve greater attention. Legal techniques that seek to standardize and synchronize the plural temporalities of the Anthropocene and maintain a sense of linear, progressive time and the promise of progress in and through law are becoming more strained and producing ever more discordant effects. Thus, a different vision of law as a way of authorizing and enlivening inter-temporal relations needs to be foregrounded in order to juggle multiple temporalities and navigate changing climatic conditions (Mai, 2022). ¹ While this article is primarily concerned with critiquing the role international continues to play in constructing a sense of linear, progressive time and the discordant effects this is having in the context of the Anthropocene, it also tells a more submerged, minor story about possibilities for fostering more just inter-temporal relations.

Climate law, progress, optimism, overshoot, and carbon dioxide removal

Climate change represents a dire challenge to the modernist promise of progress and thus also to the associated ideas of universal justice and freedom that have underpinned international law. This section explores the challenge of maintaining the promise of progress in and through law within the international climate regime in the face of the dire implications of the lack of sufficiently ambitious climate action by the international community. It then examines how the adoption of one technology of deferral, namely the idea of temporarily, “overshooting” international climate targets and subsequently meeting them through carbon dioxide removal, operates to both legitimate delay whilst also maintaining a promise of progress. This notion of overshooting has been heavily criticized both because of the potentially catastrophic implications of overshooting temperature targets and because it relies on currently unproven and unviable at scale technologies of carbon dioxide removal. Thus, overshoot ideology has been described by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm as “the ideology of anti-revolution in a warming world” that “posits that an extended time above a given temperature limit is now unavoidable because fossil fuels cannot be phased out at the required speed” (Carton and Malm, 2024: 95). In this section, I argue that the idea of overshooting operates temporally like the idea of an “overdraft”—a withdrawal in excess of a specified limit or budget—that then establishes a credit relation and the obligation to pay back the excess sum in the future. The idea that “negative emissions technologies” could be rolled out in the future is offered as a form of guarantee that this credit could be repaid in the future. Yet, such promises of future carbon drawdown through negative emissions technologies are inherently flimsy, given that carbon removal technologies remain speculative and untested. Nonetheless, even if these promises of future carbon drawdown are never actually realized, these projectionsdo crucial and dangerous work in the present. They enable a “political economy of delay” and thereby legitimate the perpetuation of a “regime of capital accumulation centered around the continued use of fossil fuels” (Carton, 2019: 759). This section shows how discourses and technologies premised on the speculative, anticipatory temporality of finance, namely credit, are being deployed to ideologically protect the unsustainable status quo and maintain faith in narratives of progress in and through law, even though the material effect of these discourses and technologies is to produce a catastrophic future and an unlivable world.

Even though climate change has been arguably the most high-profile international environmental challenge for over three decades, political and legal efforts—including the adoption of landmark treaties, institutional proliferation, and annual conferences producing voluminous decisions—have not yet managed to bend the global emissions curve (Stoddard et al., 2021). Arguably, the fact that emissions continue to rise, despite decades of law-making and judicial decisions, should challenge the overarching narrative of progress through law (Dehm, 2018). As Naomi Oreskes writes, climate change is “intimately bound to the promise of progress, both economic and technological” and especially to the “anxiety that progress—at least as it has been understood in Euro-American thought—may not continue” (Oreskes, 2024: 7). Climate change—in the most extreme scenarios—threatens to “turn back the clock” and reverse “millennia of social, economic, and technological progress” (Oreskes, 2024: 11). The historian of the idea of progress, JB Bury, wrote over a hundred years ago, “If there were good cause for believing that the earth would be uninhabitable in AD 2000 or 2100 the doctrine of Progress would lose its meaning and would automatically disappear” (Bury, 1921). However, rather than using the climate crisis as the catalyst for a deeper interrogation of the relationship between law, progress, and temporality (Dehm, 2018: 71), the dominant response has been a call for further “legal interventions, which reinforce (rather than undermine) the progressive promise of international law to contribute to more sustainable futures” (Cusato, 2025: 876). These attempts to maintain the myth of progress in and through the law, I suggest, are becoming more and more ideologically discordant, while materially locking in increasingly dangerous futures.

The temporal orientation of the international climate regime is premised on reiterative cycles of incremental improvement and enhanced ambition (Duvic-Paoli, 2023; Rajamani and Guérin, 2017). The Paris Agreement's hybrid architecture is organized around three global objectives—most famously its objective to limit warming to “well below 2°C” and to “pursue efforts” to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (Paris Agreement, Article 2.1(a)). The Agreement does not mandate any specific emission reductions from its parties but requires all countries to put forward their own “bottom-up” nationally determined contributions towards that objective, that they “intend to achieve” (Paris Agreement, Article 4.2). There continues to be an alarming “emission gap” between the pledges made by countries and what would be necessary to meet the Agreement's objectives (United Nations Environnent Programme, 2023). Instead, the regime promises incremental improvement and increased ambition over time through a periodic process of “global stocktaking” (Paris Agreement, Article 12) and an institutional accountability process that regularly reviews each country's actions. Every five years, parties are required to submit an updated nationally determined contribution that “represent[s] a progression beyond” their existing pledges and “reflect[s] its highest possible ambition” (Paris Agreement, Articles 4.3 and 4.9). This evolving process's regular review—like the Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review—engages both elements of cyclicality and linearity (McNeilly, 2024). These reiterative cycles of ever-increasing ambition secure a temporal logic that posits progressive change in and through the law as a quasi-teleological inevitability (Dehm, 2018; Skouteris, 2010) and sustains a perpetual refrain that we are moving in the right direction, although the pace may be too slow, or much more needs to be done (Beer, 2023; ). Indeed, “optimism” has been described by Christina Figueres, former executive secretary of the UNFCCC, as the “primary input” to the Paris Agreement, and called on the public to maintain a “stubborn optimism” (Figueres, 2020). Climate politics has increasingly been characterized as a form of “incantatory governance” (Aykut et al., 2021) with the annual Conference of the Parties becoming “occasions for the incantation of optimism” (Carton and Malm, 2024: 89). Such optimistic narratives of progressive improvement over time do crucial work in the world, by deflecting from the persistent failure of the regime to achieve its stated objectives, namely “prevent[ing] dangerous anthropocentric interference with the climate system” (UNFCCC, Article 2). The discourse of ambition that underpins the regime, as Leslie-Anne Duvic-Paoli has shown, “articulates motivations, structures action and adopts a future-oriented vision” and thus “contributes to explaining the optimistic, quasi-utopian, objectives which continue to guide the field despite being constantly in a state of apparent crisis” (Duvic-Paoli, 2023: 235). This tension is epitomized in the outcome of the first Global Stocktake, which found that “despite overall progress on mitigation, adaptation and means of implementation and support, Parties are not yet collectively on track towards achieving the purpose of the Paris Agreement and its long-term goals” (UNFCCC, 2023, para 2). The language of “not yet” alongside the promise of future progress work to maintain faith in the existing international legal arrangements, and thus discourage more critical discussions of the shortcomings of the climate regime or more structural interrogations of how international law is implicated in the production of ecological harms (Natarajan and Dehm, 2022). Yet, as more and more evidence accumulates about the accelerating risks of climate catastrophe, these narratives and faith in progress in and through the law become increasingly precarious.

In narratives of the climate crisis, there is an increasing gulf between some actors who take the position that “it's not too late” and others who argue bluntly, “we are fucked” (Venzke, 2023). Ingo Venzke has argued that the tension between these positions can be understood as a problem not only of ideology, but also of temporality (Venzke, 2023). Building on his thoughtful reflections, I suggest that the more optimistic account of “it's not too late” increasingly relies not just on a certain ideological investment, but also on speculative future promises of—as yet untested and unviable—carbon drawdown through negative emissions technologies. As Win Carton and Andreas Malm write, “Overshoot was the only way the optimism could be sustained while the carbon budget neared depletion” (Carton and Malm, 2024: 91).

Underpinning legal debates on targets and pathways is the modeling produced by climate scientists and periodically collated into an authoritative assessment report by the IPCC. The first integrated assessment models (IAMs) for the climate were developed in the 1980s, drawing on the tools and methodologies of the relatively new discipline of energy policy modeling that arose in the aftermath of the 1973 oil shocks. There are two types of IAMs: relatively simple cost–benefit models that seek to identify “optimal” climate policies, but also more complex and sophisticated detailed process-based IAMs, which link various “modules” representing the global economy, energy, land, and climate systems in order to understand the trends in energy technology and use, land use, and social trends to analyze different “transformation pathways” (Evans and Hausfather, 2018). The IAMs are based on “scenario planning,” a future technology and forecasting technique that departs from “classical” forecasting, which draws on deterministic and quantitative methods to predict (often by extrapolating from past trends) a future imagined as singular and certain (Dehm, 2022). Instead, scenario planning posits in narrative form a plurality of contingent, possible futures that could be actively and creatively brought about within dynamic, evolving social structures and relationships (Cooper, 2010; Godet, 1982: 298; Williams, 2016: 473). Although these scenarios purport to imagine a range of possible futures, they are actually heavily constrained by their underlying assumptions. In particular, critics have highlighted how these models contain very conservative assumptions about the cost of renewables, that models are constrained by the need to identify cost-effective mitigation pathways, that models assume the inevitability of economic growth, and that they fail to include North/South equitable considerations (Braunreiter et al., 2021; Carton, 2019).

In part due to the assumptions about continued economic growth and the need for cost-effective mitigation pathways, there was almost no modeling prior to 2007 consistent with limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius (Rogelj et al., 2018). For example, the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report contained 177 stabilization scenarios, but only six of these fell within the range of 2.0–2.4 degrees Celsius and none below 2 degrees Celsius (Cointe and Guillemot, 2023: 6). By the time the 2014 IPCC Fifth Assessment Report was released, there were 114 scenarios that were consistent with limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius (Carton and Malm, 2024). However, there was a devil in the details:

In AR5, all scenarios that achieved warming below 2C by 2100 relied on a temporary overshoot of atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, followed by the removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere in the second half of the 21st century through CDR (also referred to as negative emission technologies, or NETs)—the form most used in the models being bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) (Cointe and Guillemot, 2023: 4).

Similarly, prior to the 2015 Paris Agreement, there was almost no modeling consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Prior to the Paris Agreement, the IPCC was asked to model pathways for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius for the 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees (IPCC, 2018). Even though many in the modeling community had “lingering doubts about the feasibility of the target,” there was a rapid growth in modeled 1.5 degrees pathways (Van Beek et al., 2022: 195). Like with the 2-degree target previously, this modeling relied on overshoot and subsequent emission drawdown. “Essentially, UNFCCC's knowledge demand to understand if and how the new target could be achieved was answered by IAM research with ‘yes—using NETs’” (Van Beek et al., 2022: 195). In doing so, some climate scientists now worry they “basically opened a Pandora's box” (Wolfgang Knorr cited in Thorbecke, 2021). Now, the overwhelming majority of scientific scenarios that limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius rely on “overshooting” and the large-scale use of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) to come back to “net zero” in the second half of the century. BECCS involves two technologies: the growth of biomass (tree plantation), which operates as a carbon sink, and second, the combustion of this biomass to produce bioenergy alongside the use of carbon capture and storage technology to catch CO₂ released and store it geologically or in concrete. The inclusion of negative emission technologies in the IAMs has been strongly criticized, given that both bioenergy production and carbon capture and storage face “perhaps insurmountable obstacles” (Anderson and Peters, 2016). While the models assume that the large-scale deployment of negative emissions technology is technically, economically, and socially feasible critics have described these technologies as a “speculative technology” or “technological imaginary” (Workman et al., 2020) or even “climate unicorns” (Carton, 2020) as they exist predominately in the minds of modelers and are unlikely to be feasible at the scale envisioned.

Nonetheless, the inclusion of negative emissions technologies in the IAMs does crucial ideational work. Scholars of science and technology studies have shown how these models are not simply descriptive of contingent future possibilities, but increasingly prescriptive (Workman et al., 2020: 81), and that they operate as a means of “making futures present … based on acts of creative fabulation” (Anderson, 2010: 784). Scenarios have therefore been described as “exercising a ‘world-making’ power in bringing futures into being” (Braunreiter et al., 2021: 3) and as “tools for the actual shaping of future worlds” (Orpana, 2017: 80) given how “images of the future shape and structure actions in the present” (Braunreiter et al., 2021: 2; Workman et al., 2020: 81). The ideational work of models is especially pronounced in the climate context, where the inclusion of negative emissions technologies in the IAMs justifies “existing limited and gradualist policy choices” (McLaren and Markusson, 2020) and “licenses the ongoing combustion of fossil fuels” (Anderson and Peters, 2016). Wim Carton argues that such negative emission technologies provide a “spatial-temporal fix” that could “provide a rationale to delay expensive, drastic emission cuts in the present,” thereby enabling an “economy of delay” that helps protect a “regime of capital accumulation centered around the continued use of fossil fuels” by preventing the devaluation of fossil fuel assets that might otherwise become “stranded” (Carton, 2019: 759).

I suggest the inclusion of negative emissions technologies in IAMs operates temporally like the idea of an “overdraft.” It makes possible the maintenance of optimism and enables proliferating spending in the present, and then establishes a credit relation and an obligation to repay that must be borne unequally by future generations. The temporal flexibility enabled by these still speculative negative emissions technologies also comes at a clear spatial cost: it rests on the appropriation of land elsewhere (Dooley et al., 2022). As the Land Gap report shows, there is an alarming “gap between governments’ over-reliance on land for carbon mitigation purposes and the more limited role that land can play to meet competing needs, including [carbon dioxide removal]” (Dooley et al., 2022). The debt imposed on the future provides a certain elasticity to the carbon budget in the present day, on the assumption that emission reductions can be deferred. Political theorist, John Holloway, has argued that credit “creates a fictional world” that “rests on a very fragile basis” (Holloway, 2003). He argues that “with the expansion of credit and debt, all our categories of thought become more fictitious, more make-believe.” He continues, “[c]redit then becomes much more elastic, the world of make-believe more fantastic” (Holloway, 2003). However, at a certain point, the dissonance between the world imagined by fantastical, modeled projections and the reality of accumulated greenhouse gas emissions will become untenable. As Naomi Oreskes writes, “betting the planet on technologies that do not yet exist is the very definition of magical thinking” (Oreskes, 2024: 10). If assumed technologies never materialize at scale, such models that assume overshooting and subsequent drawdown have condemned future generations to a catastrophic future. For now, the myth of progress in and through law has been maintained, but at an astonishingly high future price that will ultimately be borne by future generations. Ultimately, a course of action deemed unrealistic by the climate modeling—stranding fossil fuel resources and confronting fossil fuel lock-in and the international legal regime that enabled it—is the only pathway to a viable future.

Investment law, fossil fuel extraction, stranded assets, calculation of value, and the reproduction of progress

The previous section showed how a sense of optimism within the international climate regime and the promise of progress in and through law is being maintained by a technology of deferral, namely projected future negative emissions technologies that operate temporally as a form of overdraft, that grant credit to the present while imposing a debt on future generations. In conclusion, it highlighted how stranding fossil fuel resources and confronting fossil fuel lock-in and the international legal regime that enables it, is the only viable future pathway. This section explores the challenge of stranding fossil fuel resources. It draws attention to how the international investment law regime is being used to protect the future expected profits of fossil fuel companies and protect the value of these fossil fuel assets, by allowing corporations to sue national governments in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) processes if government policies to transition away from fossil fuels impact their expected investment returns. I show how international legal frameworks are again deploying a novel technology of deferral that mobilizes ideas of the future to lock in “business-as-usual.” Here, the projected future does not entail promised negative emissions technologies, but rather the legal protection of expectations of future economic returns and future appreciation embedded in asset valuation. Underlying these practices of asset valuation are background assumptions of continuous economic growth that rest upon an assumed progressive, linear temporality. In the previous case study, the myth of progress in and through law was only maintained through speculative technologies that created a dangerous dissonance between climate models and reality. In this case study, the myth of progress in and through law again produces a dangerous dissonance between scientific warnings to leave fossil fuels in the ground and the profit-maximization of the fossil fuel industry; it is protecting investor expectations that things will stay the same, precisely at a moment when urgent transformation is needed.

After three decades of negotiations, the international climate regime has finally acknowledged the need to “accelerate efforts towards the phase down” of “unabated coal” (UNFCCC, 2021) and to “transitio[n] away from fossil fuels in energy systems” (UNFCCC, 2023). The International Energy Agency's 2021 NetZero Pathway was clear that no new oil or gas fields, or coal mines, or mine extensions can be approved if the international community is to meet the Paris Agreement objectives (Bouckaert et al., 2021). There is growing recognition that the transition to a low-carbon economy will require transformative changes across a number of economic sectors and that the resulting changes in market dynamic could affect the valuation of organization's assets, and in some cases could trigger write-offs, early retirement or the re-pricing of assets resulting in sudden losses of asset value (Leaton, 2011). In particular, there is growing awareness of the risk that fossil fuel reserves and other fossil fuel infrastructure could become “stranded assets,” given that meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement will require the vast majority of fossil fuel reserves to remain underground (Green et al., 2024). “Stranded assets” are defined as assets in which investments have been made that will no longer earn an economic return, prior to their anticipated economic end of life (Caldecott, 2017). A recent study shows that the “present value of future lost profits in the upstream oil and gas sector exceed US$1 trillion under plausible changes in expectations about the effects of climate policy” (Semieniuk et al., 2022). Although many fossil fuels are “still technically in the soil,” they are, as Bill McKibbon reminds us, “already economically aboveground” insofar as their value is “figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony” (Bridge and Billon, 2013; McKibben, 2012). Despite the climate regime's belated statements about the need to transition away from fossil fuels, such statements have not yet adequately shifted investment decisions on the ground. The United Nations Environmental Programme's Production Gap report shows that countries still plan to produce more fossil fuels than is consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (SEI, Climate Analytics, E3G, International Institute for Sustainable Development, United Nations Environment Programme, 2023). Other reports suggest that fossil fuel companies are planning to spend almost a trillion dollars developing new gas and oil fields in the next decade (Global Witness, 2022). In the aftermath of COVID and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, fossil fuel profits skyrocketed (Carrington, 2022b), and numerous fossil fuel companies have distanced themselves from their previous (limited) climate commitments and pursued yet more exploration and expansion (Carton and Malm, 2024).

In this context, there is growing concern that international investment law might operate to delay and present further barriers to a rapid and equitable transition to a low-carbon society and impose the costs of that transition on states and their populations rather than on the companies that have profited from causing the climate crisis (Tienhaara, 2018; Tienhaara et al., 2022, 2023). There have been over 150 international investment law cases brought by companies involved in extracting, transporting, refining, selling, or burning fossil fuels for electricity. However, most of these cases did not directly engage questions of climate policy (Tienhaara et al., 2020). One of the first investment law arbitrations that implicates climate policy was Rockhopper v Italy, brought under the Energy Charter Treaty ( Rockhopper v Italy ). ² The UK company Rockhopper Exploration was awarded €184 million against Italy because the Italian government imposed a ban on all oil and gas projects within 12 nautical miles of the Italian coast, thereby impacting its 2014 license to drill for oil off Italy's Adriatic coast (Moulds, 2021). All the arbitrators affirmed that a state has the sovereign right to regulate the fossil fuel industry and to amend legislation due to environmental concerns. However, they found that where there was an unlawful expropriation, an oil company has the right to obtain compensation for the negative consequences it might suffer as a result ( Rockhopper v Italy ). The Tribunal found that there was an expropriation, even though the interest that Rockhopper held under Italian law did not amount to a property right; the right it held was not actually a concession right, but rather a mere right to a concession, that is, a preliminary right to a contract (Arcuri, 2023). However, it was in determining the quantification of damages that the underlying temporal assumptions of the Tribunal were most evident. While ISDS processes generally treat value as “a purely factual matter, and valuation as a purely technical endeavor,” Toni Marzal's work has exposed the politics of such valuation practices (Marzal, 2020, 2021, 2023a). His scholarship has foregrounded the options the Tribunal had in quantifying damages: a “sunk cost approach” (the costs incurred by the investor after the acquisition, namely €2 million); a “market-based approach” (the amount paid by Rockhopper for the investment in 2014, namely €36million); or a discounted cash flow (DCF) approach (based on the future cash flows the investment is expected to generate, “discounted” to account for future risks) (Marzal, 2023b). Rockhopper argued that DCF was the “dominant methodology” of valuation in the oil and gas sector and the primary method used to calculate the value of resource projects in investment arbitration ( Rockhopper v Italy , para 221), while Italy argued that because production had not commenced and no profits had yet been generated, any DCF valuation would be “inherently speculative” ( Rockhopper v Italy , para 235–237). Although the Tribunal recognized the inherent limitations of a DCF approach, they nonetheless applied this methodology (although they used a different calculation than Rockhopper proposed), thereby quantifying damages at €184 million. As Toni Marzel argues, this approach is premised “on the assumption that…the claimant has a right to the future profits that happened to be projected at the valuation date, and therefore to compensation for their loss” (Marzal, 2023b). He suggests that “[s]uch a right is dubious in any sector of the economy.” However, he argues that such a “right to future profits of the fossil fuel industry is […] even more questionable in the context of the climate emergency, given the pressing need to adopt regulations to transition to cleaner sources of energy” (Marzal, 2023b).

The decision in Rockhopper v Italy makes viable the crucial role that law plays in protecting assets and especially securing investor expectations of future returns. An asset is defined by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) as “a resource controlled by the entity as a result of past events and from which future economic benefits are expected to flow to the entity” (cited in Birch and Muniesa, 2020). Thus, Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa describe assets as both an “objective resource” and a “subjective value (or effect of valuation practices)” (Birch and Muniesa, 2020: 4). Accordingly, the asset has a temporality that is distinctive from that of the commodity and “brings to the fore a different economic tense,” given it is “property title that affords a claim on value, linked to a collateralized, contracted and de-risked future that is governed to make the claim on value hold true” (Tellmann et al., 2024). As such, its temporality is “stretched between an ongoing presence of title and a controlled and continuously evaluated future of return” (Tellmann et al., 2024). Similarly, Lisa Atkins, Melinda Cooper, and Martin Konings demonstrate how “asset logics” foregrounds a temporal dimension that “allow[s] us to understand uncertainty and speculation as constitutive aspects of economic life” that is eluded by a focus on commodities (Adkins et al., 2020: 13; Cooper and Konings, 2015). Crucially, their analysis is also attentive to how the construction of an “asset economy” is the product of political, legal, and policy choices and fiscal, monetary, and other regulatory changes to create the “legal structuring” that produces an inequality creating dynamic where rents from profits consistently exceed economic growth (Grewal, 2014, 2017; Piketty, 2014). Law has historically played, and continues to play, a key role in stabilizing expectations (Dehm, 2023) through various different techniques, including the award of contractual damages to protect expectations (Horwitz, 1977); “regulatory taking” jurisprudence that requires governments to pay compensation, based on expected market returns if regulatory actions result in the expropriation of private property (Epstein, 1985); and, the international forms of investment protection that protect the “legitimate expectations” of investors (Rasulov, 2017).

Discounting, as Liliana Doganova has shown, needs to be understood as a “political technology” that has the future as its “political domain.” As such, legal regimes that seek to secure the future returns of assets have fostered a relationship to the future that is “stuck in the mechanics of capitalization” (Doganova, 2024b). The underlying “principle of capitalization,” as Liliana Doganova argues, “entails a rupture with any temporality other than the future” (Doganova, 2024a: 25). The future that is assumed is premised on continued profit-making and continued extraction—a linear, ever-increasing extrapolation of ongoing economic growth. In securing the future expectations of asset holders, international law fosters increased dissidence between the temporality of assets and expectations of continued extraction and the urgent imperatives of a just transition away from fossil fuels. As such, “[t]he time of the unbroken asset…is often in urgent disjuncture with the time of transition” given how, paradoxically, the “time of the unbroken asset entrenches—locks in—the value and continued use of fossil fuels even as that value undermines (ecologically) the very future it derives from” (Aitken, 2025: 18). By protecting the future expectations of investors, premised on ongoing extraction and presumed economic growth, international investment law is continually reproducing narratives of linear, progressive time, even though, in the face of the climate crisis, such assumed futures would produce a catastrophic world. Scholars have argued that “the decision in Rockhopper is an active intervention that secures and locks in the long-term lives of hydrocarbon assets that have yet to gestate against a climate future rendered vulnerable by those very objects” (Aitken, 2025: 18).

Intergenerational equity, future generations, sterility, and reproductive futurism

The previous two case studies have shown how novel technologies of deferral that mobilize specific ideas of the future, based on the financial logic of credit and the asset, have been deployed to continue to shore up a sense of linear, progressive time. In both case studies, these technologies of deferral have enabled delay and legitimized the continued extraction of fossil fuel, thereby producing a catastrophic future. As such, the continued co-constitution of linear, progressive time and the myth of progress in and through law is producing both temporal dissonance and extreme inter-temporal injustice, condemning future generations to a catastrophic future. Questions of inter-temporal obligations loomed large in both the previous case studies, given how future-oriented practices in the present were producing unlivable futures. This section explores more specifically the growing international legal discussions about inter-generational equity and the rights of future generations in the climate crisis. I suggest that the tension between two different ways of legally engaging time, first, actively producing and constructing ideas of time and second, enabling trans-temporal transmissions and obligations, is evident at the heart of legal debates about the rights of future generations. Building on the previous discussion of “stranded assets,” I explore the evocative (and disturbing) connotations of the industry terminology of “resource sterilization.” I then propose that visions of ecological futures continue to be caught uneasily between an imaginary of sterilization and that of reproductive futurism, that is, between the violent ending of a lineage and the continuity of the same. The exploration tentatively suggests that by thinking of generations not as sequential but as co-existing, and by thinking of inheritance not as linear temporal transmission but as active processes that rework the relationship between past, present, and future, more radical possibilities for inter-temporal justice might emerge.

The language of “stranded assets” has recently been popularized in climate discourses, but this nomenclature is rarely interrogated. The language of “stranded assets” draws on the image of the “beached ship, which might be towed back into deep water to serve its purpose and become profitable again” (Kraemer, 2017). The language of “stranding,” which the Oxford Dictionary defines as “left without the means to move from somewhere” (Oxford Language), conveys a temporary incapacitation or a certain “stuckness,” but also implies an underlying hope “that the ‘assets’ can be put afloat again” (Kraemer, 2017). While the terminology of “stranded assets” is prevalent in climate discourses, the terminology that has traditionally been used by the resource industry to describe resources that cannot be extracted from the ground is “sterilization.” Resource sterilization refers to “lack or loss of the possibility of their exploitation” (Sermet and Nieć, 2021), particularly where “the development of the resource is precluded by another existing land use” (Rajaram et al., 2005: 255) or where “the value of the site for development … is greater than the value of the mineral in the ground” (Pendock, 1984: 23). Outside the resource context, sterilization has other meanings, either the process of making something free of bacteria or that of surgical intervention to prevent reproduction. The language of sterilization invokes evocative imagery, which is closely associated with “[e]xhaustion, sterility, extinction, entropy, desiccation.” It functions as a “watchword[] for life vitiated by its own waning vigor” (Sheldon, 2016). Sterilization also has particularly violent overtones: the destruction of the potential natality, often forcefully without consent and underpinned by ideas of racist and ableist eugenics. Given this, is the use of the language of sterilization by the resource industry symptomatic of its ideological investments and temporal assumptions? What does it say about the conceptual transformation of nature into “resources” that human appropriation and extraction are not just seen as desirable and necessary, but that the failure to extract is envisioned as a violent destruction of future potentiality? The resource industry's use of the language of “sterilization,” I suggest, reveals how an ideology of “reproductive futurism” underpins the extractivist economy and fossil fuel dependency.

Queer scholars of temporality have powerfully critiqued the logic of “reproductive futurism.” Reproductive futurism rests on an ideological appeal to the figure of the child and “organizes political discourse and the social imaginary as the projected fantasy of continuance” (Davis, 2022: 91). Lee Edelman has powerfully shown how the fantasy of “reproductive futurism” restricts the field of the political, and reflects an innately conservative logic that “works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the forms of its inner Child” (Edelman, 2004: 3). This “figure of the child”—imagined as white, cis, and able-bodied—is mobilized as a “resource” and is put to figurative and literal uses within broader social discourses, where it stands for broader “expectations and anxieties about the future” (Sheldon, 2016: 3). In particular, the figure of the child enables a staging for intersecting anxieties about reproduction and the social reproduction of norms (Sheldon, 2016: 4). It thus frequently becomes a proxy or stand-in for a certain mode and expression of inheritance that often serves to uphold or buttress current social and power formations (Davis, 2022: 91). In this way, such discourses operate to protect the “maintenance of a particular way of life” (Davis, 2022: 91). One might recall the famous words of George H.W. Bush at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, resisting the imposition of international environmental law: “The American way of life is not up for negotiations, period” (Hudson, 2018).

Contemporary environmental discourses have become saturated with an implicit logic of reproductive futurism in which the image of the child is “the vision of hope for the (environmental) future” (Davis, 2022: 90). Moreover, some of the most powerful climate activism in recent years has come from young people. Youth activists—in various guises as victims, litigants, activists, and messiahs—have brought a powerful voice and marshalling of righteous anger to climate activism (Rogers, 2020). Hundreds of thousands of young people have called for fossil fuel companies to stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites (Carrington and Gayle, 2023). In international law, the principle of inter-generational equity, a central component of the principle of sustainable development, speaks to the demand for justice between generations (Weiss, 1990). In the context of climate change, a somewhat amorphous right of future generations has gained renewed prominence. Many scholars have called for recognition of the rights of future generations and welcomed their “emancipatory potential” (Wewerinke-Singh et al., 2023). More critically, Stephen Humphreys argued that although the invocation of “future generations” is “immensely appealing” on an “intuitive level,” such an “evocative call to solidarity risks papering over deep and substantive differences of interest and perspective, both today and in the future” (Humphreys, 2022: 1063). He worries that “the appeal to future generations … stands to elide numerous existing loci of responsibility in climate matters that are more concrete, more coherent, more demanding, more easily understood and more effectively articulated in law” (Humphreys, 2022: 1092). Humphreys thus suggests that this “register performs a reverse double move, abjuring responsibility in the same gesture that nominally assumes it” and that it “deflects the urgency and scale of action required to meet the suffering of concrete persons alive now and seems likely to carry forward today's structural inequities into the future” (Humphreys, 2022: 1063).

Visions of ecological futures are thus currently caught uneasily between the imaginary of sterilization and that of reproductive futurism—the ending of a lineage and continuity of the same. At the heart of the challenge is that the possibility of inter-temporal justice requires precisely a break with, and rupture from, the present because perpetuating a fantasy of continuance will create a catastrophic future. One way of putting it is that futurity and inter-temporal justice might require thinking sterility, alongside, or possibly even against, reproduction. Another way of getting to the same problem is to problematize questions of transmission and inheritance. Inheritance is often imagined as a “thing” that moves smoothly across time. For example, fossil fuel and mineral resources are often conceptualized as part of the “national patrimony,” a right passed down from previous generations, that provides “a finite shared inheritance asset that future generations have an equal right to inherit” (Basu and Pegg, 2020: 1369). However, inheritance might better be thought of as a task that requires critical decisions about what is reproduced and what is discontinued. Adil Hasan Khan's writing on the “task of inheritance” foregrounds both the “critical labors” this entails and the responsibility that heirs have to and for their inheritance (Hasan Khan, 2017). He highlights how all heirs are “faced with the critical decision to transform their inheritance in the present” and that “heirs can be responsible for and toward inheritance only if they critically act to transform it” (Hasan Khan, 2017). In this conceptualization, inheritance is no longer envisioned as a linear temporal transmission but rather as an active process that reworks the relationship between past, present, and future.

Like inheritance, the concept of “generations” is often structured by an implicit temporalization and a notion of linear, progressive time, rather than being understood as a trans-temporal concept. But like with inheritance, there are rival approaches to how generations are conceived as a “framework of temporality, [and] as an institution of temporalization” (Scott, 2014: 162). David Scott draws attention to how the problem of generations can be differently scripted in terms of a “mechanistic, externalized conception of time” understood and unilinear and progressive, and thus focused on the fact of succession, or rather a more interiorized, experiential temporality of lived time that brings into view the coexistence of generations (Scott, 2014: 163). In her work on intergenerational justice, Christine Winter highlights how within Indigenous epistemologies, “past, present, and future may be understood as contemporaneous” (Winter, 2020: 282). Such a conception radically upends thinking about intergenerational environmental justice, by positing “generations as co-existing,” given that “the past is always in the present, and the future is always in the past” (Winter, 2020: 282–283). Building on her work, legal scholars have proposed a more “relational conception of intergenerational environmental justice” that avoids thinking about the interests of different generations as “competing” or “rival” (Eisen et al., 2018; Scott and Malivel, 2021). Their account challenges the orthodox notion of “identifiable, separate, and undifferentiated ‘generations’” that have discrete interests, even as they continue to “recognize the responsibilities that flow across these boundaries” (Scott and Malivel, 2021: 173). Simultaneously, their approach recognizes the impossibility of treating problems of intra- and inter-generational equity in “separate silos” (citing Eisen et al., 2018: 22; Scott and Malivel, 2021: 170–171). Unavoidably, inequalities in the present create an “uneven distribution of futurity” (Cusato, 2025: 866).

Indigenous epistemologies and Indigenous environmental justice emphasize the reciprocity of the relationship between the web of living beings and between ancestors and descendants (Deborah McGregor cited in Scott and Malivel, 2021: 173). Métis scholar Zoe Todd shows how, within “Métis frameworks of kinship, obligation, and responsibility to human and more-than-human beings,” it becomes possible to articulate a very different relationship with below-ground fossil fuels than the obligation to extract that underpins dominant discourses. Todd “asks the reader to consider the possibilities that are opened when we contemplate that the materials being extracted in Alberta's oil and gas industries are not inert chemical substances, non-renewable resources, or, in turn, waste, but in fact kin, ancestors, and relations that tie us to long ago more-than-human societies, existences, and obligations” (Todd, 2022: 3). Her work teaches us about ways of thinking about obligations to ancestors and descendants simultaneously, and how, in the present moment, these converge on the necessity to keep fossil fuels in the ground, not as an act of “sterilization” of future potentiality but as an enactment of trans-temporal relational obligations.

Conclusion: temporality transgressive obligations

This essay has sought to highlight crucial choices about the temporal work that law does in the “Anthropocene.” International law has continued to play a fundamental role in the “shaping of time” and the production of specific forms of temporal ordering in the climate crisis. Historically, international law and its promise of universal justice have been underpinned by linear time and a temporal narrative premised upon ideas of progress. This article has explored how, in the context of the climate crisis, such narratives of linear and progressive time are increasingly untenable. It has explored through two case studies the adoption of technologies of deferral, which mobilize specific ideas of the future, both premised on the speculative, anticipatory temporality of finance, namely credit and the asset. The analysis has shown how these technologies of deferral have worked ideologically to shore up the current temporal order and ideologically maintain a linear, progressive, and temporality, while simultaneously, materially enabling an economy of delay and locking in current relations of fossil fuel dependency, thereby producing catastrophic futures. The final section explored tensions at the heart of legal debates on the rights of future generations by thinking with the concepts of “resource sterilization” and “reproductive futurity.” At stake are dynamics of continuity and change and the tension between maintenance and disruption. It suggested how concepts such as “inheritance” and “generations” can be thought of both within a linear, progressive temporality or more transgressively as trans-temporal.

This article has shown that by continuing to seek to shape temporality in linear, progressive terms, the operations of international law are producing a dangerous temporal dissonance. Thus, in the face of the urgent challenges climate change presents, international law has demonstrated itself to be “temporally unfit” (Johns, 2016: 41). It is producing temporal dissonance, rather than enacting the “temporal justice” necessary for creating ecologically just futures (Huebener, 2020). However, throughout this article, there has also been a “minor” story of different temporal work done by law, that is not focused on constructing, standardizing, or synchronizing time, but rather on engaging with temporal plurality and holding different temporalities in relation. The Anthropocene calls for greater engagement with the inter-temporal nature of legal obligations, given that “there is neither strict continuity between past and present nor a clear break between the two temporal dimensions,” rather, there is an “ongoing, uneven, and destabilizing intrusion of irrevocable pasts into an unredeemed present” (Rothberg, 2019: 9). One of the key challenges of the “Anthropocene” is how to live well with temporal plurality and how law can give effect to temporally transgressive obligations.