Keywords

Introduction

Part of the work in this chapter overlaps with the work in the author’s doctoral dissertation, to be submitted in late 2022 at the IT University of Copenhagen.

The pressed flowers look like grey silhouettes against the cloudy sky outside. I am looking at the pressed flowers because I am participating in a guided tour of an exhibition about climate stressors in a small exhibition space in Copenhagen. Part of the exhibition is a selection of dried roses pressed between two see-through plates. They are displayed in a big window that makes up one side of the minimalist exhibition space. The guide, who works with strategic design at the exhibition space, is explaining that the roses were bought at a local flower market, but have been produced in Kenya, Ecuador, Germany and the Netherlands respectively. The original tags that are displayed with the roses testify to this. The guide is explaining that the rose exhibition is supposed to draw attention to the climate impact of everyday life stuff. She is telling me and the others listening that a rose has a carbon footprint of around one kg of CO2, which gives roses one of the highest carbon footprints among flowers. Someone is saying ‘wow’ at the seeming enormity of the number and the guide looks affirmingly at us and says ‘right!?’ She then moves her head from side to side and says in an assertive voice: ‘I’ve said to my husband: never buy me a bouquet of roses, it’s like buying me twelve kg of CO2!’

My visit to the exhibition took place almost a year after I finished the main part of my PhD fieldwork among young climate activists and their local community in the Norwegian oil-capital Stavanger. These young people were in their early to late teens and organized in different local political and activist groups. At the exhibition, I found someone who said the sort of things I had initially been looking for when embarking on fieldwork, namely someone who thought in terms of carbon and who used carbon as a measure to re-evaluate their actions and the objects in their surroundings. In the example, the romantic gesture of receiving a bouquet of roses from a lover, changes into a gift of climatic pollution as the receiver relates to the roses as an expression of the carbon emitted through their production rather than an expression of love and affection. The climate impact of a rose is concretized through the number one kg of CO2. A number most people would find difficult to evaluate in terms of whether it is a lot or a little, but to the guide it was clearly enough to stop wanting bouquets of roses. The guide’s statement about not wanting roses from her husband might have a performative element to it, given the exhibition context. Yet, I do find that the example is reflective of an almost common-sense assumption that information is concrete and will lead to changes in behaviour, which the guide exemplifies as she dismisses future bouquets of roses based on information about the carbon footprint of a rose. The digital sociologist and human–computer interaction scholar Yolande Strengers (2014) has synthesized such a reductive relationship between behaviour changes and often digitized information in the straw man figure of the rational ‘resource man’ in the context of energy use in the home. Strengers argues that energy consumption in the home is much messier and more dynamic than a straightforward relationship between digitized information and behaviour change, where information will lead to smarter and better behaviour in terms of saving energy (Strengers 2014, p. 26). Drawing inspiration from Strengers, in this chapter, I too set out to nuance such ideal-type visions of the relationship between often digitized information and behaviour change, albeit in the context of climate activism and fossil energy production rather than everyday energy use. I engage with the pushes and pulls of energy transitions towards a low-carbon future as it is experienced by young, local climate activists in Stavanger. In Stavanger, I expected to find ‘resource man’ types of relationships between carbon emissions and everyday objects among climate engaged young people. This way of thinking was not very prominent though, and more importantly something else seemed to be going on among the young people I got to know. They did not handle carbon as something concrete as in the example with the roses, rather they grappled with a sense of abstraction that the representation of climate through carbon signified to them. This grappling resulted in a variety of attempts to overcome the abstraction of carbon in order to make the climate crisis feel concrete. By, for example, evoking examples that come from the Global North and provide visceral, embodied effects, the young people foregrounded aspects of the climate crisis that are local and contemporary, rather than distant and in the future.

A central component of the young activists’ efforts to overcome abstraction centred on energy systems and on attempts to push for phasing out the local as well as national oil and gas production, although in Stavanger, the mission to decarbonize through transitioning energy away from fossil fuels is a contested subject. Stavanger inhabitants are acutely aware of the destructive consequences of the oil and gas industry for the global climate, but oil and gas make up the foundation of the local labour market and the finances of the national welfare state. Furthermore, in the relatively small city of Stavanger, activists are not many, and activists and industry people often share social ties of friendship or family. Stavanger thus affords a local and situated perspective on the socio-cultural dimensions of transitioning away from fossil fuels from the vantage point of a place that greatly benefits from their production. Martin Andersen’s artistic engagement with the end of the fossil fuel era through the medium of the mobile, depicted throughout in this book, beautifully portrays the sense of unrest that both the status quo of fossil fuels and the pending transition away from them affords in Stavanger (see also Sareen in this book).

Through ethnographic examples centring on different modes of visualization, I will show that energy systems as they matter to the young climate activists in Stavanger are the transnational energy networks and markets that Norway’s oil and gas production are implicated in. I argue that the young activists engage in concretizing and abstracting practices which create certain affectual states that render concreteness as something desirable and abstraction as something undesirable—or something to be overcome. Underscoring the importance of attending to the socio-cultural context and situatedness of energy transitions that the introduction to this volume points out, I end by discussing how there is also a limit to the perceived desirability of concreteness since in an oil-city, concretization and localization can also create too much resistance as responsibility is placed and accountability required.

I find it necessary to note that the conceptual space of abstraction and concreteness is complex and slippery, because this vocabulary is both used in analytical language and in the language that people in the field use, and as such they are both emic and etic concepts, a point echoed by Emile St. Pierre’s discussion of the abstractions of energy (St.-Pierre in this book). My approach to navigating this conceptual slipperiness is to make it my main task as an analyst to draw forward how people in the field apply these terms and to what ends.

The Realness of ‘Here’ and ‘Now’

A general pattern in my ethnographic material is that the young climate activists perceive climate change as abstract because they ‘cannot feel the climate crisis on their skin’.Footnote 1 The most violent consequences of climate change currently manifest in other geographical parts of the world than Norway and despite warmer winters, heavier flooding and more powerful landslides, tangible experiences of climate change in Norway are perceived as something that will take place in the future. This sense of abstraction is also present when it comes to the way climate change is represented in numbers about carbon emissions. ‘…I feel like I cannot understand the importance of saving the climate based on numbers about CO2 emission, and then I need more concrete things’,Footnote 2 the 16-year-old climate activist Nora told me during an interview, prior to which I had asked her to calculate her personal carbon footprint. Nora went on to identify concrete things, as for example natural disasters. She emphasized that it’s not because emissions are not important, they are just difficult to understand because they are so abstract as opposed to natural disasters which are both concrete and visible.

I present the above as brief examples that are reflective of a shared understanding among the young activists that abstract refers to something unembodied without direct impact on their physical being or something that does not have a visible manifestation. At the same time, they also experience the climate crisis as extremely concrete because of the urgency of countering the violent consequences of a changing climate. During an interview, the 19-year-old climate activist Sander told me about his motivation for being active in a variety of local climate organizations: ‘The climate crisis is not an abstract concept, it’s not like no, this will not happen until a hundred years. That is in a way what makes me so motivated in the battle to solve climate change, that it happens exactly now and there is very little time’.Footnote 3 Sander specified this sense of urgency by referring to the UN’s climate panel’s prediction that after 2030, climate change is likely to become irreversible and added: ‘It motivates me because it is actually about my life’.Footnote 4 Sander’s reflections about motivation is a good example of how the young climate activists also experience the climate crisis as concrete because of its temporal urgency and a sense that the future violent manifestations of climate change in the part of the world where they live, is not in some distant, disembodied future, but in a future that is part of their lives—or simply their future. Placing the most serious and violent manifestations of climate change locally in the future, can be read as if the youth understand climate change as abstract in the present. However, the youth have quite vivid visions of the future and these visions are not abstract, but very concrete to them. During the interview with Sander, he elaborated on the meaning of his statement that ‘it is actually about my life’. He explained that he lives close to the shoreline and half-jokingly, half-seriously said that he will have to travel by canoe to get around in his neighbourhood when he reaches retirement age. This sense that sea-levels-rise have concrete impact locally in the coastal city of Stavanger and its nearby areas has been a recurring theme among the young climate activists I encountered in Stavanger. Several of them have referred to a workshop they participated in, where they redrew the future sea-level through the city and realized how much of the city would be under water if this scenario came true.

I will argue that there is something essential at stake in these dynamics between abstraction and concreteness in the activists’ perception of climate change and in their experience that it is easier to relate to climate change through embodied and visual encounters than through for instance numbers about CO2 emissions, as Nora put it. What is abstract and what is concrete is not necessarily given but is enacted through practices and perceptions. I will, too, dwell a bit on numbers and data about climate change because literature about climate change as an object of knowledge through digital data can help unfold the connection between numbers and abstraction that the activists put forward.

The only way to experience climate change in a geographical position where its tangible consequences are not felt in a way that warrants immediate concern is either through data-driven predictions of the future or through learning about the violent consequences that take place in (other) specific geographical locations. The global phenomenon of climate change is available as an object of knowledge through the accumulation of data about weather patterns and carbon levels and the work of climate models that can turn this data into predictions about future climates (Edwards 2010), and as such the knowledge practices related to climate change are largely technologically mediated (Hoeyer and Winthereik 2022). Numbers and data about carbon emissions are the main way that climate change as a global phenomenon is known and governed (Beuret 2017; Knox 2015; Knox-Hayes 2010; Lövbrand and Stripple 2011; Paterson and Stripple 2010; Whitington 2016). While, as also outlined in the introduction to this book, the generation and circulation of digital data about carbon emissions are vital for understanding and managing the urgent need to reduce global carbon emissions, carbon metrics as a way of knowing and governing climate change has distinct consequences for how climate solutions are framed and responsibility placed. For example, the STS scholar Donald MacKenzie (2009) argues that carbon is ‘making things the same’ in the sense that it is a measure that makes comparison possible between seemingly incomparable activities and entities due to the carbon they emit or absorb (MacKenzie 2009). This ability to make things the same, the anthropologist Steffen Dalsgaard (2013) describes as the commensurability of carbon, while further arguing that commensurability enables assigning moral value based on carbon emitted or saved (Dalsgaard 2013, p. 83). Carbon is also the metric used to digitize most things climate related, as for example a recent multitude of carbon accounting apps testify to. ‘Digital governance’ literature has emphasized how digitalization has gone hand in hand with the audit and accounting mentality of neoliberalism—digitizing assets have made them easier to account for and to distribute upon individuals. The political scientists Matthew Patterson and Johannes Stripple (Paterson and Stripple 2010) argue that climate change governance largely takes place through carbon metrics, which act to cultivate a certain subjectivity of the individual as a carbon emitter. This subjectivity emerges as individuals internalize a state carbon governmentality based on carbon metrics. Paterson and Stripple talk about this as the ‘conduct of carbon conduct’, which they explain as ‘a government of people’s carbon dioxide emissions that does not work through the authority of the state or the state system, but through people’s governing of their own emissions’ (ibid., p. 347).

Together, this literature highlights the measures through which climate change is rendered knowable and governable through carbon metrics that are largely digital, which serves to individualize the responsibility to lower carbon emissions. This chapter’s opening gambit about roses is a good example of how this type of thinking can play out in practice. For the guide at the exhibition, the carbon footprint of a rose seems to be a concrete piece of information—at least concrete enough to induce change in her relationship to receiving roses. Yet, my ethnographic material from Stavanger tells a different story. For the climate engaged young people carbon emissions are not meaningless, but as Nora exemplifies, neither are they concrete enough to motivate actions towards saving the climate. I find looking at the way climate change takes place in data and numbers helpful for opening up this abstraction. In her contribution to a recent special issue about the anthropology of data, Hannah Knox (2021) writes about climate change as it is portrayed in climate models and the professionals who work with climate mitigation based on these models:

Climate change’s life in data means that definitionally it takes place in no individual location and that its relevance is located more in the future than in the present. People who engage with the question of how to mitigate climate change thus engage not with phenomenologically present environmental processes, but with complex data models that recast everyday practices into a climatological register. (Knox 2021, pp. 3–4).

Knox speaks here to the qualities of climate change that the activist youth see as abstract—that when represented through digital data, it takes place in no individual location. It is disembodied and it takes place primarily in the future. Knox connects these characteristics to what she calls climate change’s life in data, which I understand to refer to climate change as it is enacted in digital data models. Knox crucially points out that data models do not only trace and represent things in the world, they also have world-building capacities (Knox 2021, p. 2). Data models are instrumental in enacting a dominant understanding of climate change as something that takes place in the future and is removed from specific location. What the young activists in Stavanger do can be seen as filling up the global abstraction of climate change with local experiences, but I suggest that there is more at stake. Knox helps me make this point: she goes on to argue that though ‘climate change, as it is described in climate models, is never here, and not now, crucially this does not mean it is not real’ (Knox 2021, p. 4, original emphasis). I suggest that it is this realness that the young climate activists are trying to enact—not through numbers and data about carbon emissions and predictions about temperature increases, but by mobilizing a concrete here and now that can be seen and felt, if not physically as what Knox in the quote terms ‘phenomenologically present environmental processes’, then affectively. In developing my argument about how affective responses are central to experiences of what is real, I follow the anthropologist Kim Fortun’s (2021) argument that cultural analyses in and of the Anthropocene ‘need to get at the cross-scale, cross-system dynamics that is our context and responsibility’ (Fortun 2021, p. 29). Fortun points out that: ‘Part of what late industrialism affords or points to is the way the everyday real is produced through the interaction of many scales and types of systems, sedimented with history, laced with commercial interests’ (Fortun 2021, p. 25). I do not intend to cover all scalar and systemic cross-points in this chapter, but I concur with Fortun that scale in the current predicament of the Anthropocene is not so much a question of scaling between the global, the local or even the glocal, but rather about the way scales interact and create experiences of what is real.

In the following section, I will provide two ethnographic examples of how the here and now, which is lost in climate change’s life in data models, is enacted by the youth through different modes of visualization and bodily reactions.

Concreteness and Abstraction as Affectual States

Rain is cascading onto the windows of the first-floor room, where I sit alongside 15 local youths taking part in a meeting for new members of the local branch of a youth political organization. We sit in a few rows, a metre between each, facing a canvas onto which a slideshow is being projected. Kaja, the local leader of the youth political organization, is talking about the dangers of the climate crisis. To illustrate these, she is showing us a slide with various pictures of news articles about the consequences of climate change. One of the articles points out that the Greenlandic ice shelf has recently melted beyond the point of no return. This particular piece of information comes as a surprise to several of the people present and a quiet sense of exasperation grasps the room that fills with muffled exclamations of disbelief and surprise. Upon request, Kaja is laying out some of the climatic tipping points the melting will set in motion and concludes that it is ‘seriously bad’Footnote 5 and that there is no time to wait until we, meaning the youth in the room as well as youth more generally, become adults to do something about this. The comment about becoming adults could be read as if Kaja is scolding her peers and asking them to grow up and take responsibility. But based on recurring conversation among the young activists, I read the comment to be a conversation with a commonly held understanding among the activists that it is supposed to be adults who take political responsibility and ensure the required measures to counter global climate change. Since this is unfortunately not the case and there is very little time to do something, their conclusion is that young people must take measures into their own hands and insist that the climate crisis is important and needs to be addressed politically and systemically.

Kaja is pausing and letting us sit a bit with the information about the climatic tipping points and then rhetorically asks what the dangers of the climate crisis means for Norway. Adding that youth care so much about the climate because it is their future which is at stake, she argues that an important part of taking care of that future is to phase out oil in Norway. The next slide portrays a headline from MIT Technology Review stating ‘We need to halve emissions by 2030. They rose again in 2019’ next to a bar chart showing a very small bar labelled ‘Emissions within Norway’ with a much larger bar labelled ‘Exported emissions from oil and gas’. Emissions desperately need to go down, but they are actually going up, Kaja is telling us, and states that Norway is the world’s seventh largest exporter of carbon emissions. What Kaja here refers to is that under the current carbon accounting regime, the Norwegian state is only responsible for the emissions from production of its oil and gas, while the much larger burden of the emissions from combustion is the responsibility of the state where the combustion takes place. While pointing to the bar chart, Kaja says that it is obvious something must be done about the emissions that Norway exports. On the next slide, a bar chart is comparing the carbon emissions that will be caused by burning the available reserves of coal, oil and gas to the carbon budget that will need to be held to reach the Paris Agreement, respectively. It is quite clear from the chart that not all the available fossil fuel reserves can be used, and Kaja concludes that it makes no sense to look for more oil. I want to dwell a bit on this data visualization. What happens at this point in the presentation can be described as what Knox (2020) has called ‘a move from climate to carbon’ in the sense that we move from ‘climate as a singular hyperobject to atmospheric carbon as a whole that can be divided into parts’ (Knox 2020, p. 46). This shift entails that the global climate with its dangerous future manifestations rather seamlessly transforms into a question of the climate as accumulated carbon and from here, a question of proportion and responsibility. The use of emission data as visualized in the bar chart helps Kaja frame Norway’s role in a transnational energy system as a producer of oil and gas as the right place to intervene to take care of the future. And Stavanger with its close relationship with oil and gas production stands out as an important place to advocate for phasing out fossil fuels.

Part of what I find noteworthy about the example is that it portrays a general pattern in my ethnographic material about how numbers and visual representations about carbon emissions are mobilized to tell stories about the relationship between the climate crisis, fossil fuels, proportion and responsibility. In these stories, Norway becomes a central character for creating low-carbon futures considering its role in transnational energy systems. Because Norway exports climate pollution in the form of carbon emissions from the combustion of Norwegian oil and gas, the global climate catastrophe is constructed as something that can be acted on locally by reshaping energy systems. Carbon here seems to have a generative function as a sort of seamless connector between a global and local scale by enabling the establishment of a global whole with local parts (c.f. Knox 2020)—the most important of which is exported emissions from oil and gas extracted in Norway. In the presentation, the bar charts are brought forward as concrete data in the style of the formula from the opening example of this text: one rose equals one kg of CO2. But as the example shows, the bar charts do not stand on their own. The charts do not enter the storyline of the presentation until after the presenter has mobilized the melting of the Greenlandic ice shelf. I go on to describe what happened after the presentation to give a sense of the relationship between the bar charts and emotional and bodily responses.

After the meeting, most of the meeting participants are going out for a cup of hot chocolate at a nearby cafe in Stavanger’s Fargegata, which translates to Colour Street, named for the brightly painted facades of the wooden houses that make up the street. We split into two groups to be able to keep a COVID-19 safety distance of one metre—one group huddle themselves up in two ragged couches, I follow the other group and we sit down around a cluster of small coffee tables. I ask one of the participants from the meeting, if she knew about the Greenlandic ice shelf melting beyond no return. She moves her shoulders as if to shake off an icky feeling and answers that she knew it was close, but that she had not been aware it had now actually happened. She tells me that when Kaja mentioned it at the meeting, it gave her ‘a nasty feeling in the body’.Footnote 6

I am drawing forward this last bit of ethnography, because to me it shows that though my interlocutors cannot feel the climate crisis on their skin, information about its consequences can be felt in their bodies as a sensed and lived experience of the importance of phasing out oil and gas. I see this nasty feeling as an abstraction in its transition to becoming concrete through the bodily feelings of individuals. And though the bar chart poses as concrete information, it turns out to fail as a motivator for action. What is effective in mobilizing the concreteness that the youth associate with motivation for action is the affect they are left with, which is exemplified by the nasty feeling in the body that information about the melting of the Greenlandic ice shelf catalyses.

The social psychologist Margaret Wetherell argues that emotion and affect are inseparable and defines affect as ‘embodied meaning-making’ (Wetherell 2012, p. 4). Similarly, the historian Monique Scheer argues for a Bourdieu inspired understanding of emotions as practices and argues that emotions are not simply something people have, but also something they do as they perform and enact emotions through practice (Scheer 2012, p. 194). Thinking with the concept of emotional practices alongside embodied meaning-making helps me frame what the youth do as concretizing and abstracting practices that create certain affectual states. In addition, I take inspiration from the cultural analyst Sara Ahmed, who writes about affect: ‘Whether I perceive something as beneficial or harmful clearly depends upon how I am affected by something. This dependence opens up a gap in the determination of feeling: whether something is beneficial or harmful involves thought and evaluation, at the same time that it is “felt” by the body’ (Ahmed 2014, p. 6). I find it useful to connect this double movement of affect as bodily experience and as cognitive evaluation to how the youth relate to concreteness and abstraction. They are affected by information like the melting of ice which creates bodily sensations, like a nasty feeling, but also perform an evaluation of what the information about the ice shelf and the nasty feeling means together in terms of what it asks of them given the current incapability of politicians to act. Combined, the bodily experience and cognitive evaluation creates a sense of the melting of the ice shelf as either harmful or beneficial, desirable or undesirable. Synthesizing from the ethnographic examples, the affectual state associated with concreteness is exemplified by the nasty feeling in the body and a general sense of importance and motivation to, as Nora puts it, ‘save the climate’, and is perceived as beneficial and desirable. The affectual state associated with abstraction on the other hand is one of disconnection and distancing, a numbing and an overwhelm that to the youth seem counterproductive to change and are perceived as harmful and undesirable, something to be overcome through a translation to concreteness. Seeing affectual and embodied responses as central to meaning-making opens up for reading the youth’s engagement with a piece of information like the melting of ice as a way of making concrete through a certain affectual and bodily reaction. In contrast to the calculative logic of equating, one rose to the cost of one kg of CO2, the youth work from an embodied logic giving them a sense of urgency and motivation to keep pushing for change.

Still, these forms of movement between concretizing and abstracting practices have to be negotiated locally in Stavanger, and the perceived benefits of concretization are not limitless, as I will show in the following section.

Limits to the Perceived Benefits of Concreteness

I want to share another story, where abstraction and concreteness are navigated while some of the young climate activists work on a street art piece. The art piece is a response to the opening of Arctic areas for oil exploration and a subsequent lawsuit, where Greenpeace and a Norwegian youth environmental NGO took the Norwegian state to court arguing that the opening is unconstitutional. The piece is commissioned by a local branch of the youth climate and environment NGO and made in collaboration between its members and a local artist. I take part in the meetings, where the activists discuss the lawsuit, the street art piece and its content.

A set of white tables are placed in the middle of the room in the style of a long conference table. The smell of hand sanitizer lingers in the air. There are no windows in the room, so for the duration of the meeting, the rapidly changing weather of Stavanger is not a concern to me and the young activists whose meeting I am participating in. One of the topics for the meeting is the recent verdict in the lawsuit from the Norwegian Court of Appeals and the pending appeal to the Norwegian Supreme Court. One of the newer people present is raising her hand a bit hesitantly and asks what happens when you win a lawsuit. If you, for example, win money? She is laughing a bit apprehensively and adds that she only knows about lawsuits from films. Frida, an older and more experienced member of the local organization, answers that they won four out of five claims. With obvious frustration, she details that they lost the claim which focused on making it illegal to drill after oil in the Barents Sea, both because of the vulnerability of the specific area and because of the vast contribution from oil and gas to global carbon emissions. The claim was based on §112 in the Norwegian Constitution which states that everyone has the right to a liveable environment, also future generations, Frida is telling us. She elaborates that §112 was tested in court as a right’s statute, but the state argued that §112 is to be understood as a symbolic statute, which cannot be used as a concrete right. Frida’s assertiveness and proficiency in legal jargon impresses me. She goes on to clarify what they wanted to obtain with the lawsuit: ‘we want the court to recognize that the state has the full responsibility for the CO2 that is emitted when Norwegian oil is burned’.Footnote 7 Given the way things work now, she states, the Norwegian state is only responsible for the CO2 that is emitted from oil extraction, whereas emissions from subsequent combustion are the responsibility of the country where the combustion takes place. Roughly speaking, she adds, ten per cent of total emissions from oil is due to extraction whereas 90% is due to combustion. Frida looks as if she is getting an idea, then makes an eager gesture with her hands towards the person who asked the question about the lawsuit. She says that it is like what they talked about during a workshop at an activist summer camp they recently participated in and explains that ‘If I sell you a weapon, I am not responsible for what you do with it’,Footnote 8 the other person interrupts Frida and says, ‘No that was not it, it was that it is the same as if I sell you drugs, then I am not responsible if you die from an overdose, I just sold it to you, I did not use it’.Footnote 9 Frida is nodding enthusiastically at the correction, then looks across the room as if to round off the discussion, but ends up making a dispirited gesture while exclaiming a frustrated guttural sound and then says that the fact that they did not win the fifth claim says a lot about the power of oil companies, which seems to be bigger than the constitution.

At the meeting, the activists touch base about the status of the lawsuit and what they see as its most important feature: the hazards of oil production in terms of both carbon emissions from production and combustion of oil as well as the potential environmental damage to the Arctic ecosystem. What takes centre stage is their demand that politicians begin to acknowledge Norway’s responsibility for exported emissions from Norwegian oil and gas and their discussions centre around the dangers these emissions pose to future generations through their contribution to global climate change. When the activists at a later meeting present the issue to the artist, with whom they collaborate to make the street art piece, the key message shifts: The activists want the piece to only depict potential local damage to the species and ecosystems and do not mention the global hazard of carbon emissions. They explain to the artist that ‘oil is a sensitive discussion in this city’ and that it is important for them that the piece does not come off as if it is against the whole industry. They see keeping a specific focus on oil extraction in the Arctic, rather than the responsibility for global hazards of emissions, as the way to achieve this. This sensitivity that accompanies discussions about oil remains unspecified at the meeting but based on conversations with the youth, I take it to allude to what they experience as a rather harsh debate environment, where industry supportive narratives dominate what counts as knowledge and consequently what claims are seen as worthy of being taken seriously. The climate engaged youth often experience that people think they are uptight, or that their aim of phasing out the oil and gas industry hurts people who work in the industry or have family that do. All activists have classmates whose parents work in the oil sector. In discussions, these classmates will often say ‘but mom works in oil’Footnote 10 followed by a ‘do you want my mom to lose her job?’ Age also matters for the way this resistance plays out, as activists experience that adults appreciate their engagement, but do not really listen to them and in the end dismiss them as naïve youngsters, who do not know how the world really works. Not knowing how the world really works generally refers to appreciating the importance of oil and gas both for Stavanger and Norway as well as for making the world go round by meeting global energy demands, fuelling heavy transport and the wide array of petrochemical products.

At the meeting with the artist, the activists explain that they are afraid people working in the industry will perceive the piece as if it exposes the oil industry in a bad way on a public place in the city. This, the activists expect, will create resistance rather than support for their cause, emphasizing that negative attention is not what they are after. They agree that the piece should depict an oil platform, but that it should be rather small and that the focus should be on arctic animals and nature. Some of the images evoked are a polar bear on an ice flake, a white polar bear in contrast to black oil and an oil platform from where the oil is coming.

The activists struggle, throughout the meeting with the artist, to strike a balance where their message is clear but try to exclude problem framings and imagery that they expect will create resistance from the local community, because of the sensitivities about oil in Stavanger. I find it noteworthy how the responsibility for carbon emissions becomes absent in the conversation with the artist and hence in the actual work of art. Though the message is still clearly against oil in the Arctic, it becomes a question of local rather than global hazards visualized through Arctic animals, ice and an oil platform. It is important to keep in mind that the Arctic is closer to Norwegian concerns and geography than for example Pacific islands that are losing land to rising seas, Indian areas experiencing severe flooding or Australian wildfires—some of the places where these global hazards are currently manifesting themselves in the present. Though polar bears and ice flakes are not local to Stavanger, the complex and fragile sea environment of the Arctic is local to Norway.

Through the examples above it becomes clear that the activists see reducing the carbon emissions from the Norwegian oil industry as important for countering the climate crisis. But when it comes to a concrete visualization through a piece of street art in the city, carbon emissions are on the one hand too abstract and too far away for Stavanger to feel significant and on the other hand run the risk of placing too much responsibility on the many people in Stavanger whose livelihoods depend on the industry. The abstraction of carbon emissions as related to no individual location and as largely taking place in the future makes it on the one hand easy to dismiss local responsibility for contributing to the climate crisis, while benefitting economically from this contribution. On the other hand, carbon emissions are so all-encompassing that they become unspecific and emphasizing them can also lead to locals feeling that they are unrightfully blamed for the whole enormity of the climate crisis. The young activists navigate these pitfalls of abstraction by focusing on something concrete and relatively close to home, though not too close: the fragility of the arctic ecosystem and the animals that inhabit it. What I take this to mean is that there is also a limit to the perception of concreteness as desirable and beneficial. Concreteness is generally desirable for the young activists, but in the concrete context of the oil-city Stavanger, concretization and localization can also create too much resistance as responsibility is placed and accountability required, running counter to the objective of inducing change.

Conclusion

This conclusion faces me with the task of addressing both dried roses, melting Arctic ice, digital data in bar charts about carbon emissions and street art depicting Arctic animals and an oil platform. I have approached these different modes of visualization through the lens of how the young activists attempt to make visualizations work for them based on their perception of what is concrete and what is abstract. The work that the bar chart about carbon emissions put forward at the youth political meeting does for the activists, is to frame the problem by identifying a concrete, local contribution to climate change in the form of the oil and gas industry. The bar chart visualizes the rather intangible consequences of a warming climate as a relationship between fossil fuels and temperature rise scenarios, highlighting how the predictions necessary to grasp climate change globally are deeply dependent on technologies handling digital data. Yet, I suggest, these visualizations fail to mobilize the concrete bodily and affectual responses that are of such importance to the young climate activists, and that the information about the melting of the Greenlandic ice shelf beyond the point of no return activates. In the case of the Arctic animals that ended up being depicted in the street art piece, they do the work of evoking a manifestation of the climate crisis that is local, contemporary and situated enough to feel concrete without placing specific responsibility on the many inhabitants in Stavanger whose livelihood depends on the oil and gas industry. This suggests, I argue, that the perceived benefits of concretization are not limitless. Across the examples carbon plays the role of a seamless connector which is emphasized or downplayed depending on the circumstances. Emphasizing and downplaying carbon alters the ways in which energy systems come to matter: Are fossil fuel components of energy systems dangerous because of the global hazards of carbon emissions or due to the potential local damage to ecosystems and the beings that inhabit them?

I began by evoking the figure of the rational ‘resource man’ (Strengers 2014) as an example of a dominant idea about the relationship between often digitally based information and behavioural change, exemplified in the opening example, where the carbon footprint of a rose was enacted as a concrete fact through its transformation into an implicit demand for behavioural change in individual consumption. I set out to push back against such understandings of change, which my ethnography shows to be reductionist and individualizing. Just as much as focusing on individual energy consumption and ways of measuring, calculating, understanding and possibly adjusting these consumption practices, the young climate activists in Stavanger concern themselves with the big picture of Norwegian oil and gas production and how to reduce global carbon emissions by reducing and eventually phasing out this production. In a city dominated by the oil and gas industry, the young activists attempt to push back against local lived experience of the oil industry as beneficial and a perception of climate change as far away in time and space—a perception I locate in how climate change is depicted through digital data models (Knox 2021). I argue that these attempts to push back largely takes place through efforts to overcome abstraction and make climate change concrete by focusing on the local and contemporary through evoking examples that come from the Global North and provide visceral, embodied effects, but that there are also limits to what concretizing practices can achieve.

I find that the lived experience of abstraction as something to be overcome together with the limit to the desirability of concretizing practices says something essential about the knowledge practices that young people mobilize in their efforts to induce change with the aim of preserving a liveable planet. Though mediated through digital technologies that render climate change knowable as a coherent object, the youth also mediate their knowledge practices through embodied and affectual responses to climate change’s concrete manifestations, not in data and data models, but in concrete physical processes and objects which together seem to constitute their experience of what is real and what this reality asks of them. Exhibition Fig. 5 follows this chapter.

Exhibition Fig. 5
A photograph of a large display board with 3 paragraphs, 3 sets of handwritten listicles, paintings, and paintings of logos.

(Source David Odell [used with permission])

Margrethe Brekke assembles the research basis for her textile exhibition

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