May 2, 2025, by Brigitte Nerlich

Carbon bombs: On climate change and lexical change

Have you heard about car bombs? Surely, you have. Have you heard about ‘carbon bombs’. Probably not. I hadn’t, until my husband shoved The Guardian under my nose this morning and pointed to a headline saying: “UK banks put £75bn into firms building climate-wrecking ‘carbon bombs’, study finds”.

He did that because he knew that Nelya Koteyko and I once did an ESRC funded project on what we called ‘carbon compounds’ in around 2009. ‘Carbon bomb’ was a nice specimen we could have added to our linguistic fossil (fuel) collection.

What are ‘carbon compounds’ and what are ‘carbon bombs’?

Carbon compounds

Around 2008 Nelya and I became intrigued by some lexical developments around the word ‘carbon’ as the hub. We found talk of ‘carbon footprints’, of course, but also of ‘carbon criminals’, ‘carbon profligacy’, ‘carbon tax’, ‘carbon diet’, ‘carbon sinners’, ‘carbon indulgences’, etc. We called these combinations of at least two lexical roots ‘carbon compounds’. And just like ‘carbon compound’ itself, many of these compounds were metaphors.

A whole new language seemed to be evolving at that time that needed to be mapped. This could, we thought, provide insights into changing public and policy attitudes to climate change from about 1990 onwards. We collected as many compounds as we could and examined the arguments in which they were embedded, what entailments they had and what actions they called for.

At the time, we found five main clusters of compounds (but there are surely more). (I provide some indicative dates for their first uses found in the Oxford English Dictionary)

1. A group of compounds headed by scientific terms: ‘carbon dioxide’ (used since 1867), ‘carbon emission’ (used since 1921), ‘carbon sequestration’, ‘carbon capture’ and ‘carbon sink’, for example.
2. A group of compounds headed by the lexis of finance and accounting, such as ‘carbon trading’ (used since 1992), ‘carbon cost’, ‘carbon market’, ‘carbon tax’, ‘carbon economy’, etc.
3. A group of compounds referring to collective and individual efforts to reduce CO2 emissions such as, (low) ‘carbon diet’, ‘carbon footprint’ (used since 1999), ‘carbon conscious’, or ‘carbon journey’.
4. A group of compounds headed by broadly religious lexis (‘carbon indulgence’, ‘carbon morality’, ‘carbon sinners’).
5. A group of what one may call carbon critical compounds, such as ‘carbon colonialism’, ‘carbon slave’, ‘carbon gold rush’, ‘carbon delusion’, ‘carbon cowboys’ and many more.

Carbon bombs

‘Carbon bombs’ belong to the last cluster of compounds, it seems. They are used to refer to destructive fossil fuel mega-projects. As far as I can find out, this compound was invented around 2022 in an article published in Energy Policy and entitled “‘Carbon Bombs’ – Mapping key fossil fuel projects”. 

The use of the phrase ‘carbon bombs’ in the Guardian article seems to indicate that all the language used since at least the 1990s trying to persuade people to take climate change and climate change mitigation seriously has failed… but there is hope….

The Guardian says: “Banks in the City of London have poured more than $100bn (£75bn) into companies developing ‘carbon bombs’ – huge oil, gas and coal projects that would drive the climate past internationally agreed temperature limits with catastrophic global consequences – according to a study.”

However, the Energy Policy article from 2022 article says, these ‘carbon bombs’ can perhaps be ‘defused’. We can see here that this lexical compound, although seemingly so negative and devastating, opens up new opportunities for action that one might want to explore.

“Climate change mitigation efforts cannot ignore carbon bombs. Defusing them could become an important dimension of climate change mitigation policy and activism towards meeting the Paris targets. So far, few actors, mainly from civil society, are working on defusing carbon bombs, but they are focussing on a very limited number of them. We outline a priority agenda where the key strategies are avoiding the activation of new carbon bombs and putting existing ones into ‘harvest mode’.” They add that “This means naturally declining output of producing oil and gas fields, a scenario that is described by the International Energy Agency as a ‘no new investment’ scenario”.

Image: Pixabay

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