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

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.