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Inspired by the commercial desires of global brands and retailers to access the lucrative green consumer market, carbon is increasingly being counted and made knowable at the mundane sites of everyday production and consumption, from the carbon footprint of a plastic kitchen fork to that of an online bank account. Despite the challenges of counting and making commensurable the global warming impact of a myriad of biophysical and societal activities, this desire to communicate a product or service's carbon footprint has sparked complicated carbon calculative practices and enrolled actors at literally every node of multi-scaled and vastly complex global supply chains. Against this landscape, this paper critically analyses the counting practices that create the 'e' in 'CO2e'. It is shown that, central to these practices are a series of tools, models and databases which, in building upon previous work (Eden 2012; Star and Griesemer 1989) we conceptualize here as 'boundary objects'. By enrolling everyday actors from farmers to consumers, these objects abstract and stabilize greenhouse gas emissions from their messy material and social contexts into units of CO2e which can then be translated along a product's supply chain, thereby establishing a new currency of 'everyday supply chain carbon'. However, in making all greenhouse gas-related practices commensurable in enrolling and stabilizing the transfer of information between multiple actors these objects oversee a process of simplification reliant upon, and subject to, a multiplicity of approximations, assumptions, errors, discrepancies and/or omissions. Further the outcomes of these tools are subject to the politicized and commercial agendas of the worlds they attempt to link, with each boundary actor inscribing different meanings to a product’s carbon footprint in accordance with their specific subjectivities, commercial desires and epistemic framings. It is therefore shown that how a boundary object transforms greenhouse gas emissions into units of CO2e, the outcome is of distinct ideologies regarding ‘what’ a product's carbon footprint is and how it should be made legible. These politicized decisions, in turn inform specific reduction activities and ultimately advance distinct, specific and increasingly durable transition pathways to a low carbon society.
This article discusses how by voluntarily adopting new dimensions of corporate responsibility—for the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated by its products—global retailers not only position their organizations as responsible in the battle to win the hearts, minds, and wallets of their consumers, but also articulate a new solution for the mitigation of climate change aligned with their commercial interests. As part of this solution, retailers (and other brands) reimagined how GHG emissions should be allocated—shifting from a productionist-based to a consumptionist-based perspective—and redefined what they are responsible for and what their supply chains must care about. The article argues that the complexity involved in engaging tens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual organizations across numerous products’ supply chains means that requirements to measure and reduce a product's carbon footprint cannot, and are not, simply pushed down a supply chain. Rather through a confluence of the practices of translation, observation, and normalization retailers are creating, fostering, and articulating new regimes of responsibilization within which actors across successive tiers of a product's supply chains must measure, monitor, and reduce their own carbon footprints independently, conscientiously, and diligently, thereby enabling retailers to achieve carbon reductions at a distance. Seen through the Foucauldian-inspired lens of the technologies of the self and self-government under neoliberal governance regimes, this article suggests that, through the control of what is in a product's carbon footprint, how this should be measured, and how it should be reduced—what are called here carbon truths—global retailers are working to consolidate their socioeconomic powers as sustainability leaders that fundamentally direct society's response to, and mitigation of, climate change
How does a corporation know it emits carbon? Acquiring such knowledge starts with the classification of environmentally relevant consumption information. This paper visits the corporate location at which this underlying element for their knowledge is assembled to give rise to carbon emissions. Using an Actor- network theory (ANT) framework, the aim is to investigate the actors who bring together the elements needed to classify their carbon emission sources and unpack the heterogeneous relations drawn on. Based on an ethnographic study of corporate agents of ecological modernisation over a period of 13 months, this paper provides an exploration of three cases of enacting classification. Drawing on Actor-Network theory, we problematise the silencing of a range of possible modalities of consumption facts and point to the ontological ethics involved in such performances. In a context of global warming and corporations construing themselves as able and suitable to manage their emissions, and, additionally, given that the construction of carbon emissions has performative consequences, the underlying practices need to be declassified, i.e. opened for public scrutiny. Hence the paper concludes by arguing for a collective engagement with the ontological politics of carbon.
Attempting to tackle climate change with market solutions hinges on the existence of emissions. We know much about the politics of undoing emissions—via offsets (e.g., Böhm and Dabhi 2009). But where do emissions come from? How are they done? Carbon footprinting seems to be the simple answer. Is this merely a technical matter? In this chapter I explore how emissions come into being; carbon accounting emerges as techno-political practice, fraught with non-transparency. This chapter argues that successful corporate carbon accounting practices efficiently and skillfully ignore significant political implications of the company’s practical relation to climate change. ‘Successful’ in this case signifies what matters for the company to compete well in capitalist markets. By examining voluntary carbon accounting at a financial services corporation, I invite an engagement with how the technicality and politics of carbon interrelate in accounting. I ground my analysis in ethnographic fieldwork across 20 months in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) unit at one of the 50 largest global companies. Over this period, I supported the CSR unit’s management of their sustainability data, in exchange for overt and explicit research access to the CSR unit’s activities.
In this paper I provide a first-hand account of a trip designed to verify the existence of a carbon forestry offset in Costa Rica. In so doing, I reflect on how various actors become the stabilized calculative agents of scientists, state bureaucrats, indigenous leaders, GPS devices, trees, signs, and field reports that such trips require. In addition, I show how various articulations of these actors, and their emergent agencies, simultaneously maintains both the carbon offset as a commodity object as well as a field of action and communication that allows for such an object to be exchanged. In short, I consider the verification of an offset as a performance. Doing so, I examine the agency of some actors in this process, and account for the uneven power relations inherent in such a process. Specifically, I advance three arguments. First, the agency of actors is constituted, in part, by various calculative devices, which themselves simultaneously occupy an unstable position of being both a material object and an abstraction. Second, the normative power of the performance I witnessed derives from its relation to the abject: spaces and ways of being that are unintelligible to the logics of offsetting that nonetheless serve to further reiterate the need for an offset’s calculative frame. Third, performing an offset is a self-reflexive process, and it is through the self-reflexivity of actors involved that the qualities of “the forest” emerge in ways that confound the stability of an offset commodity. In this way, the biophysical qualities of the forest are not necessarily barriers to its commodification. Instead, it are the reflexive practices inherent in performing “the economic” that can serve to confound the emergence of the commodified forest.
Science As Culture
Marketing and Making Carbon Dumps: Commodification, Calculation and Counterfactuals in Climate Change Mitigation2005 •
The Paris Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol and kindred carbon trading measures have usually been presented as a small but indispensable step forward to mitigate climate change. Are they? Or, as this article for the journal Science as Culture asks, do they amount to a stumble backwards and a block to the emergence of more constructive approaches?
Global Warming - Impacts and Future Perspectives
A New Perspective for Labeling the Carbon Footprint Against Climate Change2012 •
2015 •
How does a corporation know it emits carbon? Acquiring such knowledge starts with the classification of environmentally relevant consumption information. This paper visits the corporate location at which this underlying element for their knowledge is assembled to give rise to carbon emissions. Using an Actor-network theory (ANT) framework, the aim is to investigate the actors who bring together the elements needed to classify their carbon emission sources and unpack the heterogeneous relations drawn on. Based on an ethnographic study of corporate agents of ecological modernisation over a period of 13 months, this paper provides an exploration of three cases of enacting classification. Drawing on Actor-Network theory, we problematise the silencing of a range of possible modalities of consumption facts and point to the ontological ethics involved in such performances. In a context of global warming and corporations construing themselves as able and suitable to manage their emissions, and, additionally, given that the construction of carbon emissions has performative con-sequences, the underlying practices need to be declassified, i.e. opened for public scrutiny. Hence the paper concludes by arguing for a collective engagement with the ontological politics of carbon.
This paper analyzes the global commodity chains of carbon markets, which offer profit, marketing and legitimacy-providing opportunities for both Northern and Southern corporations. Specifically, we contrast EDF Energy’s green CSR and marketing discourse with the social, economic and environmental realities on the ground near the factory of Gujarat Fluorochemicals Limited (GFL), which operates one of the biggest Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects in India. Our analysis makes a direct link – enabled by global carbon markets – between the green claims made by EDF Energy, one of the biggest energy companies in the UK, and the dirty reality of GFL’s operations in India. We analyze publicly available UNFCCC documents, an EU-ETS dataset of EU companies that have traded carbon credits with GFL, as well as companies’ websites and their financial information. We have also collected detailed ethnographic and interview data from those communities that live in the immediate surroundings of the GFL factory. Our analysis puts into doubt the green CSR claims made by EDF Energy, questioning the discourse of sustainable development that surround global carbon markets and specifically the CDM. Our analysis of the global carbon commodity chain shows that carbon markets are often driven more by sustainable profit motives than real improvements in the sustainability of companies’ production and supply chain processes.
This paper contributes to the development of device-centred perspectives on public participation through an analysis of everyday technologies of carbon accounting. Such instruments are put forward, in the UK and elsewhere, as a way of locating environmental engagement in everyday practices, such as cooking and heating. The paper considers whether and how these technologies can be said to ‘materialise’ public participation. It argues that the materialisation of engagement entails a particular codification of it: as participation is located in everyday material practice, it comes to be defined in terms of its doability and the investment of effort. Material participation, then, does not just refer to its mediation by things: it involves the deployment of specific legitimatory tropes associated with liberal theories of citizenship and the domestication of technology, in particular the notion that the engagement of everyday subjects requires things to be ‘made easy’ (Pateman, 1989; Schwartz Cowan, 1983). To make sense of this confluence of political and technological ideals, the paper takes up the notion of ‘co-articulation’ (Callon, 2009). A distinctive feature of the everyday devices of accounting under consideration here, I argue, is their ability to ‘co-articulate’ participation with other registers: those of innovation and economy. In this respect, spaces of participation organised with the aid of these technologies can be qualified as spaces of ‘multi-valent’ action. Different carbon accounting devices do this, however, in different ways, and this has consequences for how we understand the wider normative implications of the ‘materialisation’ of environmental participation. In some cases, materialisation entails the minimisation of social, material and political changes, while in others it enables the exploration and amplification of precisely these modes of change.
Ingenieria Naval nº 665 y 666
La búsqueda del paso del Noroeste y el relato de Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado1990 •
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art
Review of Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus2023 •
Korean Journal of Yoga Studies
Al-Bīrūnī’s Indian Philosophy: The Kitāb Sānk and the Kitāb Pātanǧal (Korean)2023 •
Historia del libro y cultura escrita en México: perspectivas regionales: volumen Oriente
Mujer e imprenta en Puebla: dos casos novohispanos2022 •
PWN, Warszawa 2019, ss. 160. ISBN: 978-83-01-20540-9
Rosyjska geopolityka a wojna informacyjna [fragment]2019 •
2006 •
Faculty of Humanities
The barzakh and the bardo: challenges to religious violence in Sufism and Vajrayana Buddhism2019 •
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences
Quadruple Thinking: Critical Thinking2011 •
Medicina: competências técnica, cientifica e ética na área da saúde 2 (Atena Editora)
Medicina: competências técnica, cientifica e ética na área da saúde 2 (Atena Editora)2023 •
Anthropology of Art (Oxford Brookes University)
How tattoo appears in the Media? The conceptions of mature people and their problems2008 •
Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases
EULAR recommendations for the management of primary small and medium vessel vasculitis2009 •
Journal of Geophysical Research
Modeling springtime shallow frontal clouds with cloud-resolving and single-column models2005 •
Nutricion Hospitalaria
Utilización del contaje de hidratos de carbono en el tratamiento dietético de la diabetes mellitus2010 •
MORTE, CULTURA E RELIGIOSIDADE
Da Europa Para O Vale Do Paraíba: O Trabalho Dos Marmoristas Na Arte Tumular2021 •
JISR management and social sciences & economics
Flexible Working Hours versus Quality of Life: A Case Study of IoBM2009 •
International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology
Comparison of cardiac function and valvular damage in children with and without adenotonsillar hypertrophy2005 •