Punctum Books

Chapter Title: Business

Chapter Author(s): Gökçe Günel

Book Title: Anthropocene Unseen

Book Subtitle: A Lexicon
Book Editor(s): Cymene Howe, Anand Pandian
Published by: Punctum Books. (2020)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11hptbw.10

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 anthropocene unseen

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 7

Business
Gökçe Günel

Businesses, especially green businesses, promote a peculiar opti-

mism in the face of climate and energy crises. They supply envi-
ronmentally friendly products that aim to supplant the demand
for non-green products, expanding their product portfolios to
service environmentally conscious humans. Green businesses
vary in form and shape. In the United States, we might think
of organic grocery stores as an example. We look at technology
companies, which promise smart homes as well as systems for
monitoring and managing our consumption patterns. Some fos-
sil fuel companies seek to reimagine themselves as green. Their
marketing and communications campaigns address planetary-
scale problems and highlight how protective, soothing tech-
nological innovations and design solutions will be available to
those who can afford them.
In the United Arab Emirates, where I have been conducting
research for the last ten years, green businesses promise a mark
of progress different from oil exports: they will resolve pressing
energy deficiency and climate-change-related problems, while
at the same time generating a new economic vision for the re-
gion and the globe. My book, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy,
Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (2019), de-
scribes and analyzes this process in detail.

doi: 10.21983/P3.0265.1.09 59

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 anthropocene unseen

One prominent example is the multifaceted renewable en-

ergy and clean technology company Masdar. In responding to
the dual problem of energy security and climate change, the
Abu Dhabi government founded Masdar (meaning “source” in
Arabic), investing $22 billion to start the project. The company
is widely known for Masdar City, the futuristic ecocity master-
planned to rely entirely on renewable energies. While the ecoc-
ity was central to Masdar’s development, Masdar also invested
in green businesses through its other operations: Masdar Pow-
er, Masdar Carbon, and Masdar Capital. Masdar Institute, the
energy-focused research center set up and supervised by MIT’s
Technology and Development Program, operates on a growing
campus within the ecocity site.
The designers of Masdar City, the London-based architects
Foster + Partners, have suggested that they borrowed from old
Arab cities in thinking about the future, pointing to the Yemeni
city of Shibam as an inspiration for their designs. Like Shibam,
Masdar City would be dense and walled. Yet it would also be
smart, and its hidden brain would know when residents entered
their buildings so as to start cooling their apartments before
they opened the door. In public areas, flat screens would broad-
cast uplifting news on the environmental performance of the
complex, displaying how much energy is produced and saved.
Framed as a utopia or science-fiction project, Masdar relied
on the backdrop of a world struck by climate change and en-
ergy deficiency. The marketing and communications campaigns
put together by Masdar aimed at proving that the world needed
Masdar City in order to survive these catastrophes.
This preemptive optimism is certainly not unique to the
United Arab Emirates. Some businesses, such as General Elec-
tric and Siemens, propose that their inventions make the fu-
ture happen, using slogans such as “Tomorrow is Today” or
“Enabling the Future.” For them, climate change emerges as a
business opportunity, endowing professionals with the capacity
to sculpt a particular smart, networked future. Climate change
may trigger the breakdown of political and ecological systems,

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 business

but the implication is that businesses will hold their ground in

the face of these challenges.
When I asked a Siemens representative what the company
meant by its slogan “Tomorrow is Today,” he explained that at
Siemens they had access to all of the technological tools that
would be used “Tomorrow,” but unfortunately people were not
ready to embrace what they had to offer. “We test our products
at Masdar City,” he clarified, “which is also in the future.” The
company was involved in a project called the Office of the Fu-
ture, where they concentrated on optimizing office spaces. One
of these offices would be situated in Masdar City. On the other
hand, General Electric indicated that it would be “Enabling the
Future” with smart appliances, as well as other technological
gadgets that would become part of the energy mix. A GE repre-
sentative stated, for example: “In the future everything will be
smart and regulated, just as it is at Masdar City.” The future was
both a time and a place.
Green responses to future climate and energy crises have var-
ied in form and shape, but this sense of optimism is pervasive.
Take another well-known example, Tesla Motors, whose cars
feature a so-called bioweapon defense mode. The button acti-
vates what is described as “a medical-grade HEPA air filtration
system, which removes at least 99.97 percent of particulate ex-
haust pollution and effectively all allergens, bacteria, and other
contaminants from cabin air.” In describing the button in 2015,
the company’s founder Elon Musk said that Tesla is “trying to be
a leader in apocalyptic defense scenarios.” Tesla cars equipped
with these devices will be able to protect passengers from possi-
ble toxicity, while allowing them to observe their surroundings
through the car’s all-glass panoramic windshield. The bioweap-
on defense button thus sets up a presumed apocalyptic future in
which some passengers remain protected while others are left
exposed, breathing in toxic air. Rather than seeking to resolve
toxicity in a collective manner, the bioweapon defense button
eliminates toxic air for individuals with enough cash.
Green businesses seek to create alternative environments of
peace and rationality, standing in opposition to the destructive

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 anthropocene unseen

and irrational crises of Earth. Despite providing products and

services to a small number of people who are experiencing the
existing and future effects of climate change, these companies
lay claim to the planetary-scale questions of survival in the un-
known, the sustenance of the species beyond ecological disas-
ters, and the preservation of an existing civilization. In all of
these examples, businesses demarcate the boundaries between
the haves and the have-nots upon whom the formers’ lives are
predicated.
Yet the environmental changes brought on by a century of
human industrial activity, induced by industrialized humans,
are truly global; their effects cannot be contained inside a par-
ticular history or geography. By producing enclosed and enclos-
ing solutions in the name of green business and then promoting
these fragmentary spheres as the ultimate means for survival,
humans fail to understand and confront the predicament of the
Anthropocene. Given the unbounded complexity of the chal-
lenge, an adequate response may require a somewhat less happy
and optimistic, but ultimately more inclusive understanding of
our collective future.

References

Günel, Gökçe. 2019. Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate

Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi. Durham: Duke
University Press.

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