Swapping air, trading places: Carbon exchange, climate change policy, and naturalizing markets

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 107, 2010, Pages 25-44

  Stewart, Mart A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77953399882     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2009-033     Document Type: Article

References (95)

1. Cameralism was formally a movement to enhance the science of government and to develop and refine the fiscal administration of the state in Prussia in the early eighteenth century, but the term has been used informally to refer to any state-linked initiative to mobilize populations and resources in the interest of increasing the prosperity and stability of the state.
2. This, of course, does not mean that global warming and climate change are not one of the most important contemporary challenges to human society. That ultimately we depend on climate, rather than the other way around, has always added potency to arguments that deploy perceptions of climate to naturalize social and political ideas.
3. Robert Collier, "State Bypasses Kyoto, Fights Global Warming," San Francisco Chronicle, February 17, 2005.
4. Hugh S. Gorman and Garry D. Solomon, "The Origin and Practice of Emissions Trading," Journal of Policy History 14 (2002): 300.
5. For an overview of emissions trading programs that served as precedents to discussions at Kyoto, see Michael Grubb, Axel Michaelowa, Byron Swift, Tom Tietenberg, and Zhong Xiang Xhang, "International Rules for Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading," UNCTAD/GDS/GFSB/Misc. 6 report, 1999: 31-42.
6. Just what kind of economics and economic theory informed the development of emissions trading is a subject in need of exploration. Gorman and Solomon point to an article by Ronald Coase in 1960 on welfare economics and the "social cost" of pollution that laid the groundwork for emissions trading, but they also remark that in the 1970s emissions trading "moved from the realm of neoclassical economic theory to real-world applications" (294, 296-97).
7. Neoclassical theory has informed both sides of the global warming policy fence: see Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway, and Matthew Shindell, "From Chicken Little to Dr. Pangloss: William Nierenberg, Global Warming, and the Social Deconstruction of Scientific Knowledge," Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38 (2008): 109 - 52
8. Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
9. Gorman and Solomon, "Origin and Practice of Emissions Trading," 301-2.
10. Gorman and Solomon, "Origin and Practice of Emissions Trading," 303 - 14.
11. Gorman and Solomon, "Origin and Practice of Emissions Trading," 307
12. Richard Elliot Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)
13. Marvin S. Soroos, The Endangered Atmosphere: Preserving a Global Commons (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 147 - 75.
14. Gary Bryner, "Carbon Markets: Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions through Emissions Trading," Tulane Environmental Law Journal 17 (2004): 267 - 99.
15. Ramin Rosencranz, "U.S. Climate Change Policy," in Climate Change Policy: A Survey, ed. Stephen H. Schneider, Armin Rosencranz, and John O. Niles (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 221-34.
16. Bryner, "Carbon Markets," 277
17. Barry G. Rabe, Statehouse and Greenhouse: The Emerging Politics of American Climate Change Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), 90-93
18. Western Climate Initiative, "U.S. States, Canadian Provinces Announce Regional Cap-and-Trade Program to Reduce Greenhouse Gases," press release, westernclimateinitiative.org (accessed September 23, 2008).
19. Cait Murphy, "Hog Wild for Pollution Trading: Why Environmental Markets Are Becoming a Very Big Deal," Fortune, September 2, 2002, 137 - 39
20. Bryner, "Carbon Markets," 280.
21. Bryner, "Carbon Markets," 281-86
22. Richard L. Sandor and Michael J. Walsh, "Kyoto or Not: Opportunities in Carbon Trading Are Here," Environmental Quality Management 10 (2001): 53-58
23. Ben and Jerry's, "Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream-Environmental-Activism- Global Warming," www.benjerry.com/activism/environmental/global-warming/ (accessed March 4, 2010)
24. Native Energy, "Ben & Jerry's and Native Energy Partner to Fight Global Warming," press release, August 1, 2002, www.nativeenergy.com/pages/aug_1_2002/90.php (accessed March 4, 2010)
25. Elizabeth Harris, The Voluntary Carbon Offsets Market: An Analysis of Market Characteristics and Opportunities for Sustainable Development (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, 2007).
26. Both voluntary projects-what some critics call "field of dreams projects"-and those requiring compliance to specific emission reduction goals set by political processes have not always worked very well: see, for example, Rabe, Statehouse and Greenhouse, 100-104
27. David Gow, "Smoke Alarm: EU Shows Carbon Trading Is Not Cutting Emissions," Guardian, April 3, 2007.
28. The annual reports of the International Emissions Trading Association and the World Bank provide data on trends in emerging carbon markets: see, for example, K. Capoor and P. Ambrosi, State and Trends of the Carbon Market 2007 (Washington, DC: International Emissions Trading Association and World Bank, 2007).
29. Dan Bilefsky, "World Bank Launches Carbon Trading System," Financial Times, January 19, 2000
30. Matthew Saltmarsh, "Market for Emissions Picks Up Steam as Kyoto Protocol Takes Hold," International Herald Tribune, July 6, 2005.
31. The post-Bush U.S. government is moving toward a climate policy that will perhaps take the first step to legislate at a national level a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions in the United States: The Climate Debate Heats Up, New York Times, May 8, 2009
32. John M. Broder, "With Something for Everyone, Climate Bill Passed," New York Times, July 1, 2009.
33. Johann Wackerbauer, "Emissions Trading with Greenhouse Gases in the European Union," CESifoForum 4 (2003): 28 - 32
34. Sonja Butzengeiger, Axel Michaelowa, and Sven Bode, "Europe-A Pioneer in Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading: History of Rule Development and Major Design Elements," Intereconomics 38 (2003): 220
35. Jørgen Wettestad, "The Making of the 2003 EU Emissions Trading Directive: An Ultra-quick Process Due to Entrepreneurial Proficiency?" Global Environmental Politics 5 (2005): 1 -23.
36. Andreas Arvanitakis and Gala Colover, "Carbon Trading: The EU Shapes Europe's Carbon Market," Energy Economist 262 (2003): 19-22.
37. Butzengeiger, Michaelowa, and Bode, "Europe," 220.
38. Arvanitakis and Colover, "Carbon Trading," 20
39. Harris, Voluntary Carbon Offsets Market, 20-22
40. Michelle Chan, Subprime Carbon? Rethinking the World's Largest New Derivatives Market (Washington, DC: Friends of the Earth, 2009).
41. Michael Toman, "Establishing and Operating the Clean Development Mechanism," in Climate Change Economics and Policy, ed. Toman (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 2001), 216 - 26
42. Matthew Mendis and Keith Openshaw, "The Clean Development Mechanism: Making It Operational," Environment, Development, and Sustainability 6 (2004): 183-211.
43. For current statistics on the number, location, and type of CDM projects that are up and running or are in the "CDM/JI pipeline," see the UNEP Risoe Centre Web page, www.cdmpipeline.org (accessed November 11, 2009).
44. Agus P. Sari and Stephen Meyers, "Clean Development Mechanism: Perspectives from Developing Countries," June 1, 1999, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Paper LBNL-43418, www.repositories.cdlib.org/lbnl/LBNL-43418.
45. 2 Flow Speeds Up: Poor Countries Now Lead," New York Times, September 26, 2008.
46. Marina Cazorla and Michael A. Toman, "International Equity and Climate Change Policy," in Toman, Climate Change Economics and Policy, 235-47.
47. The issue of atmospheric justice has been analyzed by political theorists, some of whom have advocated an understanding of the atmosphere as commonly owned and therefore demanding of management in the common interest (with justice for all): see, for example, Steve Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)
48. Peter Barnes, Who Owns the Sky? Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001).
49. Mendis and Openshaw, "Clean Development Mechanism," 183.
50. Mendis and Openshaw, "Clean Development Mechanism," 208 - 9.
51. Cazorla and Toman, "International Equity and Climate Change Policy," 244-45
52. Mendis and Openshaw, "Clean Development Mechanism," 209
53. Brent Sohngen and Sandra Brown, "Measuring Leakage from Carbon Projects in Open Economies: A Stop Timber Harvesting Project in Bolivia as a Case Study," Canadian Journal of Forest Research 34 (2004): 829 - 40.
54. Heidi Bachram, "Climate Fraud and Carbon Colonialism: The New Trade in Greenhouse Gases," Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 15 (2004): 7.
55. See also A. Agarwal and S. Narain, (Un)Clean Development Mechanism (New Delhi: Center for Science and Environment, 1998)
56. J. Lefevere, "The EU Green Gas Emission Allowance Grading Scheme," in Climate Change and Carbon Markets: A Handbook of Emission Reduction Mechanisms, ed. F. Yamin (London: Earthscan, 2005), 75 - 149
57. Carbon Trade Watch, Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: The G8, Climate Change, and Free-Market Environmentalism (Amsterdam: Carbon Trade Watch, 2005).
58. Bachram, "Climate Fraud and Carbon Colonialism," 16.
59. Anne Petermann and Orin Langelle, "Activists Criticize Carbon Trading as 'Privatization of the Atmosphere,'" Z Magazine, February 2005.
60. Matthew Paterson, Global Warming and Global Politics (New York: Routledge, 1996)
61. J. McCarthy and S. Proudham, "Neoliberal Nature and the Nature of Neoliberalism," Geoforum 35 (2004): 275 - 83
62. Jonathan Baert Wiener, "Policy Design for International Greenhouse Gas Control," in Toman, Climate Change Economics and Policy, 205-15.
63. Robin Hanbury-Tenison and Ross Gelbspan, "A Permit to Pollute or a Step in the Right Direction?" Ecologist 32 (2002): 35.
64. Gelbspan's skewering of the climate skeptics, his analysis of their connection to coal and oil lobbies, and the delays they caused, he claims, in the public acceptance of scientific consensus about global warming can be found in his The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, the Cover-Up, the Prescription (New York: Basic Books, 1998).
65. The conflict he describes between global warming proponents and climate skeptics may have itself in part been a debate created by journalists (including Gelbspan). Most climate scientists have not seen themselves as hawks or doves on the issue of global warming, but "as just a bunch of people with various degrees of uncertainty, groping about in a fog": Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 105.
66. Richard Quest, "Travel with Environment in Mind," September 13, 2005, CNN.com, edition.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/09/12/environment.travel
67. Ian Sample, "Kyoto Issue: There's Profit in Saving the Earth," Guardian, February 3, 2005. The European Union will begin to include global aviation in its emissions trading scheme in 2012.
68. Angela Jameson, "Carbon Trading Will Fail to Limit CO2 Emissions," London Times, February 16, 2005.
69. Vanessa Houlder, "Carbon Trading Plans May Be Hampered by the Politics of Pollution," London Financial Times, August 14, 2001.
70. Johannah Ladd, "Private Investors Say World Bank Is Dominating Carbon Trading," Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2005.
71. Greg Muttitt and James Marriott, Cynics or Saviours? Ecologist 31 (2001): 50-51.
72. Fiona Harvey, "Trade in Carbon Markets Takes Off," London Financial Times, October 21, 2004.
73. Arvanitakis and Colover, "Carbon Trading," 20
74. David F. Victor and Joshua C. House, "A New Currency: Climate Change and Carbon Credits," Harvard International Review 26 (2004): 56-60.
75. The most glaring problem in all the carbon markets so far is that they have failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The total volume of voluntary markets is only a hundredth of compliance markets, and many transactions in this market are in any case not transparent enough to count. But even the most rigorously structured compliance market, the EU market, has failed to curb the rise in CO2 emissions in Europe: James Kanter, "Europe's Carbon Market Holds Lessons for the U.S.," International Herald Tribune, June 18, 2008.
76. How the global change research developed an agenda for governing the earth is perhaps a more fundamental story to a study of the development of carbon markets: see Frank Biermann, " 'Earth System Governance' as a Crosscutting Theme of Global Change Research," Global Environmental Change 17 (2007): 326-37
77. Timothy W. Luke, "Environmentalism as Globalization from Above and Below: Can World Watchers Truly Represent the Earth?" in Confronting Globalization: Humanity, Justice, and the Renewal of Politics ed. Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 154-71.
78. Ulrich Beck points out that green globalization often works at odds with itself- it seeks to confront the global dimension of the ecological crisis with global understandings and international institutions, but it depends on the protectionist politics and bureaucratic political leverage of the national state; thereby it "put a spoke in their own wheel": Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000): 126-27.
79. For an excellent explanation of the heterogeneous construction of climate science that also problematizes social constructionist strategies and at the same time argues for a more reflexive understanding of climate science, see David Demeritt, "The Construction of Global Warming and the Politics of Science," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91 (2001): 307-37.
80. One of the most promising avenues of analysis of evolving global warming science and policy that might also be applied to the development of carbon markets focuses not on the development of particular institutions within a larger political economy but on practices and perspectives - not on governments and market institutions, but on governmentalities. The concept of governmentality both as an analytical mode and as a historically specific form of power has its origin, of course, in Michel Foucault's work and especially in an essay he published late in his career, "Governmentality." Here Foucault explains that governmentality is "the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security [modern institutions for the improvement and administration of life]." What is useful about this concept is that it encourages a concentration on forms of discourse, bureaucracies, and extrapolitical activities that have political meaning and that coalesce into systems of regulation. Since these systems of regulation are designed to apply both to populations and to territory, and all types of social power networks imply some organization of space, governmentality manifests itself as and through a set of material and human networks in space, in territory.
81. See Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 102-3.
82. For a discussion of the full range of phenomena that can be considered a part of governmentality, see Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, "Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government", British Journal of Sociology 43 (1992): 173-205.
83. For the most important introductions to the notion of green governmentality, see Eric Darier, "Foucault and the Environment: An Introduction," in Discourses of the Environment, ed. Darier (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 1-34
84. Timothy W. Luke, "Environmentality as Green Governmentality," in Darier, Discourses of the Environment, 121-51
85. Stephanie Rutherford, "Green Governmentality: Insights and Opportunities in the Study of Nature's Role," Progress in Human Geography 31 (2007): 291-307.
86. Bert Metz and Mike Hulme, "Climate Policy Options Post-2012: European Strategy, Technology, and Adaptation after Kyoto," Climate Policy 5 (2005): 244-391.
87. For example, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period," American Historical Review 87 (1982): 1262-89
88. David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture, and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)
89. Mart Stewart, " 'Let Us Begin with the Weather?': Climate, Race, and Cultural Distinctiveness in the American South," Nature and Society in Historical Context, ed. Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 240-56
90. Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment, and British Imperialism in India, 1600 -1850 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999)
91. Warwick Anderson, "The Trespass Speaks: White Masculinity and Colonial Breakdown," American Historical Review 102 (1997):1343-70
92. Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
93. For examples of subaltern responses that have taken imperial arguments about climate - about tropicality and racial or cultural distinctiveness in particular-and used them to create hybrid expressions of local pride, see David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)
94. Julyan Peard, Race, Place, and Medicine: The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Medicine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999)
95. Nancy Leys Stepan, "Tropical Modernism: Designing the Tropical Landscape," Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21 (2000): 76-91.