The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics

Three men are enjoying a sunny afternoon at the poolside of their luxurious retirement home when Bob asks his two friends what kind of work they did in the past that landed them in such a salubrious setting at this late stage of their lives. Joe explains that he had a corner store selling cold cuts; he did reasonably well until one day he turned up at work, and the place had been completely burned to the ground. “The insurance policy paid me a nice sum of money and set me up for retirement,” he says. Then Jon chimes in: “I had a packing warehouse down by the river. Business was steady but nothing remarkable. One day, the place simply flooded. Insurance, you gotta love it.” At which point, Bob shares his story: “I had a tailoring business in the middle of town—that is, until a hurricane swept through the area. Luckily I was insured!” The other two men stare incredulously at Bob and exclaim: “How do you make a hurricane happen!”

Regardless of how ostensibly amusing this joke is; it has a serious side to it, for in many respects it attests to the current situation we find ourselves in. Joe and Jon made a decision to destroy their business by calculating the costs and benefits of their actions. The risks of bankruptcy were offset with the certainty that the insurance company would compensate them for the destruction wreaked by fire and flood. Bob, however, was struck by a natural disaster and luckily had an insurance policy to help compensate for his losses. The first two adopted a cost–benefit strategy that sought to optimize the costs associated with risky—not to mention fraudulent—behavior. Bob’s decision to take out an insurance policy was to strengthen his ability to absorb shocks and bolster resiliency in response to such shocks. He assessed possible situations that might occur in the future and took out an insurance policy as a way to safeguard himself and his assets; his assessment paid off.

The voluntary carbon-offset market is not that different to the situation posed by this oft cited Jewish joke. Both the offset market and the three retirees’ insurance policies are voluntary investments against future risks, and they offer a significant challenge to the “act now, think later” premise that, as the global economic crisis at the beginning of the twenty-first century proved, pervades contemporary business decision-making processes. As mitigation strategies set out to lower the costs of climate change, the carbon-reduction market operates like an insurance policy against the uncertainties of climate change and its future effects. The questions that arise, though, are: How do we assess the mitigation strategies implemented? Are they evaluated purely in economic terms in the way that Joe and Jon’s cost–benefit approach does?¹ Or do we need also to factor into the equation a community’s adaptive capacity to absorb the shocks inflicted by climate change? Neither of these questions, however, addresses the underlying structures that lead to greater vulnerability in the context of climatic change—inequities, power relations, and poverty dynamics—the selfsame structures that produce an uneven geography through which the flows of capital continue to move largely uninterrupted. This problem is one that largely slips below the radar of the carbon-offset market and the criteria used to assess the usefulness of the carbon offset. Indeed, I argue here that the voluntary carbon-offset market merely facilitates and maintains asymmetric relations of power throughout the global economy, bolstering the economic and political influence of the powerful at the expense of the less than equal.

The safe limit for atmospheric CO₂ is 350 ppm, and it has not stayed within that amount since 1988, with figures since then consistently exceeding it. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that average annual concentration of atmospheric CO₂ in 2010 reached 389.78 ppm.² For the global average temperature increase to remain below 2°C compared to preindustrial levels, and in an effort to make the situation of climate change and the problem of GHG emissions producing it more tractable, climate change policies and strategies have been introduced the world over. Out of this action has emerged a new carbon economy that sets out to facilitate the growth of a low-carbon economy that results in the least possible output of GHGs into the atmosphere, if not eventually a carbon neutral one.

In the carbon economy, GHGs are bought and sold with a view to reducing the total amount of carbon emitted.³ The carbon economy operates on the neoliberal presumption that the market will sufficiently discipline polluters, all the while boosting the profit margins of those whose business practices engage environmental issues. Simply put, this market employs economic policy to abate emissions. The primary justification used for the effectiveness of the global carbon market to lower GHG emissions is the equivalence principle. Adopting a stringent environmental perspective, the equivalence principle operates on the premise that geography is irrelevant for emissions-reduction projects because GHGs uniformly mix in the atmosphere. The central idea is that the bad effects of carbon emitted in one part of the world can be neutralized by projects that sequester, reduce, or prevent carbon from entering the atmosphere in other parts of the world.

The precedent for the current carbon market lies with the United States, which developed a pollution-trading market in the 1980s to prevent acid rain. This economic initiative successfully reduced sulfur dioxide emissions that cause acid rain. It was later modified and fine-tuned to become the carbon-trading system developed as part of the Kyoto Protocol. Prior to the protocol, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was signed at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, had established a series of nonbinding agreements to stabilize GHG emissions, assist developing countries in lowering their emissions through technological transfer, and protect the world’s carbon sinks. The voluntary nature of the agreement proved insufficient, though, which prompted a compulsory agreement to be developed at the next meeting of world leaders held in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan: the Kyoto Protocol.⁴ The protocol established binding GHG emissions targets (a 5.2 percent reduction in emissions by 2000 as compared with 1990 levels) for each of its member countries.

In order for the protocol to take effect fully, member countries must ratify the agreement (the United States and Australia have not ratified yet). Countries that have ratified are called “Annex 1 countries.” The protocol’s first task was to assist Annex 1 countries in realizing the emissions reductions it set, so Flexible Mechanisms were instituted—Emissions Trading; Joint Implementation (JI); and a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)—to establish a framework through which the trading of GHG emissions could occur.

The Kyoto Protocol’s Emissions Trading scheme is outlined in Article 17.⁵ It allows countries that have not used all their assigned amounts of emissions for the 2008–2012 commitment period to trade or sell those unused emissions to countries that have exceeded their emissions targets. In addition, emissions units such as a removal unit (i.e., reforestation activities), an emission-reduction unit (ERU), or a certified ERU (such as a clean-development mechanism) can also be traded and sold under the emissions-trading scheme established by the protocol.

The voluntary carbon-offset market has in large part emerged out of the two project-based mechanisms for reducing emissions offered by the protocol: the JI and the CDM. The JI permits developed countries (Annex 1 countries) to collaboratively invest in and develop emissions-reduction projects as a way to meet their emissions targets.⁶ The carbon credits generated by JI are the ERUs. The benefit of the JI is that it is an economical and flexible way for a country to reduce its emissions.

The CDM is a sustainable development scheme that allows developed countries (Annex 1 countries) to invest in emissions-reducing projects in developing countries (Annex 2 countries). In addition to being project based, the CDM is a market-based approach to solving the problem of GHG emissions. It has three primary goals:⁷ first, to reduce GHG emissions; second, to build developing nations’ low-carbon technology capacity through a system of technology transfer; and third, to foster sustainable development. For example, instead of using high-polluting technologies or energy systems, developing countries such as Brazil, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, and Nicaragua are paid to use low-polluting ones.⁸ The certified emissions reductions arising out of the emission-reduction project produce credits that can be bought or traded. One credit equals one ton of CO₂ equivalent gas. Selling the credits helps offset the higher outlay costs for low-polluting energy solutions.

The CDM approach is not only preemptive, but also a more cost effective way to lower global GHG emissions because the cost of transforming existing energy infrastructure in the developed world is more than the cost of installing a low-carbon energy infrastructure.⁹ The idea behind the CDM is to provide a financial incentive for developing countries to become involved in lowering their GHG emissions. Further, wealthy countries can generate credits by subsidizing projects in developing countries that save or reduce emissions. A saving of more than 2.9 billion tons of CO₂ was projected for the first implementation period (2008–2012).¹⁰

All Kyoto carbon emissions–reducing projects have to meet the “additionality” requirement: the emissions savings have to be in addition to what would have otherwise occurred. For instance, project developers have to demonstrate that the emissions reductions or savings would not have happened without the project in question. The Designated Operational Entity is an authorized third party who certifies that the additionality requirement has been met and that the stated emissions reductions have in fact been achieved.

In addition to the Flexible Mechanisms offered by the Kyoto Protocol, another important institutionalized market for offsets was established in Chicago in 2003, when Chicago instituted a voluntary GHG and carbon-offset trading program, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX).¹¹ Since its inception, the CCX has reduced approximately 700 million metric tons of carbon, which equates with 140 million cars being taken off the road.¹² Companies voluntarily enter into a legally binding agreement to reduce their emissions. The CCX operates on the premise that companies have begun to factor climate change into their corporate governance agenda and as part of their corporate environmental responsibility portfolios. In order to meet their targets, companies can either purchase pollution offsets from other entities whose projects lower GHG emissions, or they can purchase emissions from other organizations that fall short of their emissions cap. As such, the CCX uses a version of the cap-and-trade system. It can paradoxically best be described as being “voluntarily mandatory.”¹³

Not long after the CCX, the EU instituted its own program in 2005 to assist union countries to meet EU climate policy—the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The EU has strong climate change legislation, and the driving force behind making these goals a reality is the ETS.¹⁴ The EU ETS system is mandatory, and it boasts of being “the first and biggest international scheme for the trading of greenhouse gas emission allowances.”¹⁵ The scheme involves approximately eleven thousand power stations and industrial plants over thirty countries (the twenty-seven EU member states plus Iceland, Lichtenstein, and Norway). The EU ETS operates on a strict system of cap and trade: a limit is set on the amount of GHG emissions that industry (power plants, iron and steel works, oil refineries, combustion plants, manufacturing plants) can emit. An allowance of emissions is allocated, and depending on how many emissions are used, a shortfall can in turn be sold, or if more emissions are needed, they can be bought from another entity that has not depleted its emissions quota. In order for the allowances to retain their value, the EU ETS sets a limit on the number of allowances it distributes. Over time, the EU cuts the number of allowances that are issued so that overall emissions fall. The EU accordingly estimates that by 2020 emissions from the EU will be 21 percent lower than those in 2005.

Critics point to the overallocation of allowances by member states to parts of the energy sector that they have a vested interest in protecting. This overallocation has resulted in windfall profits for these organizations because they are able to sell their unused allowances.¹⁶ During the first trading period (2005–2007), the price of carbon allowances fell to zero because the EU misjudged the number of allowances it would issue and even allocated allowances free of charge. In an effort to make the system more equitable and rigorous, the EU intends to start auctioning off allowances. In other words, the EU recognizes that government can use the market to help achieve its emissions targets, but the market cannot be left to its own devices; it also needs regulation.

In addition to the larger institutional carbon-market frameworks mentioned, a host of smaller independent entities participates in the carbon-offset market. Projects that reduce, sequester, or prevent CO₂ emissions generate what is called a “carbon credit” that a consumer can purchase to offset a single or long-term activity that generates GHG emissions. A common one-off activity that consumers can purchase a carbon offset for is air travel. A more long-term activity might be offsetting annual car mileage. Offsets are sold to individuals, groups, or business entities to cancel or mitigate the GHG emissions they produce. One ton of carbon typically costs anywhere between $5 and $25. Included in this price are the cost to offset the carbon in a given program and other administrative costs such as salaries and transaction expenses.

There are two kinds of offset markets: voluntary and compliance. The voluntary market consists of consumers who are not obligated to lower their GHG emissions but choose to do so of their own accord. The compliance market consists of entities that are legally obligated not to exceed a certain number of GHG emissions; in this market, though, an entity can buy offsets in order to ensure that it does not surpass this limit. The carbon-offset market is made up of retailers who promote, advertise, and sell an offset; project developers who are involved with establishing an offset project or program; middlepersons who bundle offsets together and sell them; the brokers and the actual exchange trading in offsets (such as the CCX); and third-party quality-assurance officers or organizations that ensure the legitimacy of an offset—for instance, the World Wildlife Fund with its Gold Standard.

Offsets are typically purchased from a retailer or broker, but some people purchase their offsets directly by investing in a project. Common projects include investment in renewable power (wind, solar, or tidal energy schemes) or forest offset projects (afforestation, reforestation, and forest-management activities). A person can now even pay for professional services with carbon credits. For example, Cueto Law Group (Florida) allows clients to pay up to 20 percent of their legal fees with carbon credits. Many retailers now focus on the sale of offsets, and the number continues to grow despite the global economic downturn.¹⁷

Although quality-assurance standards do exist, it is not mandatory that offsets comply with them, which leads to the question of how a project’s carbon offsets can be objectively and consistently measured and verified. Added to this problem are the limited amount of information that a consumer receives concerning the credibility of the offset purchased and the subsequent dilemma over the best way to measure the impact of offsets. All this brings us to the question of value, for there is no single regulatory body that oversees the assessment and validation of carbon-offset value, thereby making the offset commodity more vulnerable to the whims of a speculative market because it exists solely on the market as an empty signifier into which all the energies of good ecological feeling that come from the identity of being a carbon-neutral individual are seamlessly invested.

Yet even if the value of the offset can be reliably measured, it still would not make the offset commodity an inherent “good.” The production and circulation of this kind of commodity, despite what the equivalence principle might encourage us to believe, do not take place in a vacuum. Some projects openly disregard political struggles already taking place in areas where carbon-offset programs are introduced. In these situations, the programs have the disastrous effect of putting climate change politics to work to make capitalist modes of production coherent at the expense of subordinate groups, whose own political struggles are in turn rendered invisible and inaudible. For these reasons, as we move forward to decarbonize societies the world over, we need to address not only questions concerning the integrity and effectiveness of voluntary carbon-offset projects, but also the more Marxist problem of the social relations of production that the offset commodity sustains and at times amplifies.

It can be argued that because the United States was able to lower its sulfur dioxide emissions successfully through the right-to-pollute market that came into effect at the end of the twentieth century, we have a solid precedent in favor of a carbon market. Why wouldn’t this system work for carbon emissions? One serious hiccup in this argument, however, is the issue of scale and the coordination of a consistent set of standards and methodologies across the world. To deal with acid rain, the United States had to monitor only a few thousand smokestacks in one region (the Midwest), whereas the global market in carbon involves many more power plants and companies dispersed throughout different parts of the world in different sovereign territories.¹⁸ Further, in order to be effective, carbon offsets and amelioration efforts require the coordinated effort of various governments, entrepreneurs, communities, and NGOs, each of which have different capacities to monitor, regulate, and enforce emissions standards, not to mention different capabilities to absorb the costs of enforcement. Aside from the absence of a consistent set of criteria that can be used to assess, verify, and certify carbon-emissions projects, there is a very real concern over the integrity of the carbon market.

Michael Wara has pointed out that the global carbon market established by the CDM is a market for all six of the Kyoto Protocol gases (CO₂, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, sulfur hexafluoride), not just CO₂, despite the fact that the reduction of CO₂ is of most concern because it remains in the atmosphere one hundred years and is emitted in massive amounts at an accelerated rate. He indicates that the largest volume of credits from CDM projects arise from capturing and destroying trifluoromethane (HFC-23), a “greenhouse gas that is a by-product of the manufacture of refrigerant gas.” These gases amount to 30 percent of CDM credits, accounting for ₠4.7 billion in credits for the first compliance period. Wara remarks, “In fact, HFC-23 emitters can earn almost twice as much from CDM credits as they can from selling refrigerant gases—by any measure a major distortion of the market.” The reason for the distortion is cost. HFC-23 is a cheap non-CO₂ credit. It is cheap to cut HFC-23 emissions—so much so that in the industrialized world manufacturers voluntarily reduce their emissions this way. Yet, as Wara mentions, it would be cheaper to pay for the installation of technology that captures and destroys HFC-23 than paying CDM credits for HFC-23. He calculates that this option would save ₠4.6 billion in CDM credits.¹⁹

Although Wara recognizes that the CDM’s goal is not just to lower emissions, but to do so in a cost-effective way, he does not problematize the CDM’s free-market-based approach. He does not go on to discuss how the principles of the free market give rise to the very problem he is identifying. The CDM subsidizes the developing world to reduce their emissions; however, by combining market mechanisms with development and carbon-emissions reduction, it is the most lucrative, not necessarily the most cost-effective, way of generating credits that is being pursued. And why not? This is exactly what a free-market-based approach strives to do: accumulate capital. It is this neoliberal premise—that the free market will adequately solve climate change—at the core of the carbon-offset market that I interrogate further on, but first let us return to the question of assessment criteria.

Serious concerns persist over whether offset projects fully comply with the additionality requirement or are involved in double-counting (selling the same offset more than once). In large part, the reason for these concerns is that the value of carbon credits is difficult to validate. Offsets can be sold for projects that simply do not exist. For example, Vatican City encountered this situation when it was given a generous donation to the value of ₠100,000 in 2007 from the startup carbon-offset company Planktos/ KlimaFa. The gift came in the form of carbon offsets to be generated from planting trees over fifteen hectares of land on an island by the Tisza River in Hungary. The offsets would have made Vatican City the first carbon-neutral state. In a highly publicized event, Russ George, president and CEO of Planktos/KlimaFa, launched the “Vatican forest” by presenting Cardinal Paul Poupard with a carbon-offset certificate in July 2007, thereby piggy-backing the donation to rouse publicity for Planktos/KlimaFa. Even by 2011, however, the trees still did not exist. The Vatican went on to take legal action to protect its reputation.

The Vatican carbon-neutral debacle leads us to the issue of integrity. Planktos was forced to shut down in December 2007 after selling offsets for a geoengineering scheme that went terribly wrong. The project was to use iron fertilization for carbon sequestration by dispersing iron dust over 2.4 million acres of the South Pacific. The idea was simple: grow phytoplankton algae that would absorb CO₂ and then sink to the seabed. Russ George sold the offsets at $5 a ton. The scientific community raised doubts over the project, claiming that distributing large amounts of iron filings into the ocean might cause more damage than good.²⁰ Plankton blooms might actually result in an increase in GHGs because they can lead to the release of methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.²¹ As a consequence, the project came to screaming halt.²²

Connected to the subject of integrity is the topic of temporality. There is an urgent need to develop a reliable method of quantification that engages with the temporal dimensions of carbon storage.²³ How long does a carbon-sequestration project need to be in effect before it reaches an equivalence with prevented emissions? The answer requires formulating an equivalence factor between sequestration and CO₂ emissions. In other words, how successful is a project at achieving its stated targets over time?

Measurement aside, there is a whole gamut of sociopolitical ramifications to carbon-offset projects because the logic of the free market underpinning the carbon-offset market obscures the material effects of the dynamic of production and consumption. Let us consider the example of the two hundred adivasi (tribal people) from the Dhule District of India who had worked the same piece of land for generations. The farmers were offered $4,000 in 2007 if they would allow windmills to be built on their land. The project was part of a renewable-energy carbon-offset scheme. The farmers refused, but the 550 windmills of the Suzlon Energy Ltd. wind project were installed regardless.²⁴ The situation constitutes nothing less than a massive land grab. It left the farmers without a livelihood, broke up the community (farmers had to leave the area to find work in other parts of the country), and put an end to the promise given to the farmers of legally owning the land in the future.²⁵

In a report published by the World Rainforest Movement in December 2006, Chris Lang and Timothy Byakola describe the human costs of one offset project in Mount Elgon, Uganda.²⁶ The nonprofit organization Forests Absorbing Carbon Dioxide Emissions (FACE) teamed up with the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) to plant twenty-five thousand hectares of trees in Mount Elgon National Park to absorb CO₂. The idea was to sell the offsets to the for-profit Dutch offset companies GreenSeat and Climate Neutral Group. The project began in 1994, but the land it was slated to take place on was wrought with a history of violence against the forest-dependent indigenous population, the Benet people.²⁷

The FACE–UWA forest carbon-offset project on Mount Elgon was the outcome of an alliance between international aid agencies and the Ugandan government to “conserve and use sustainably the delicate mountain ecosystem.” The project began regardless of the ongoing land disputes between the UWA and the Benet people, who had been residing in the forest since 1956. A research team from the Centre for Development Studies of the University of Wales warned that there was “a clear bias towards conservation rather than considering the needs, hopes and desires of the people who will be affected.” The Protected Area Management and Sustainable Use Program, funded by the World Bank, provided financial support to the surveying of the Mount Elgon National Park boundaries—the selfsame boundaries at the heart of disputes between the UWA and the Benet people. The World Bank had been involved with capacity-building projects in Uganda since the 1980s and had funded a $38 million European Commission Natural Forest Management and Conservation Project there from 1990 to 1993 that had also resulted in the eviction of the forest dwellers (approximately 130,000) from their lands without compensation.

The evicted were left landless and homeless and were robbed of their livelihoods. Yet despite all the violations waged against the Benet and the violence surrounding their land-claim disputes, at the Rio+10 Earth Summit in August 2002 Alex Muhweezi, the Uganda International Union for Conservation of Nature representative, commended Uganda’s forest-conservation program, reporting to journalists that “Mount Elgon had been degraded but had been re-planted with forests to absorb CO₂ emissions.” Lang and Byakola, however, state that “in April 2004, SGS [Société Générale de Surveillance] carried out a surveillance visit to Mount Elgon, to assess whether the UWA–FACE tree planting project continued to meet FSC [Forest Stewardship Council] guidelines. SGS’s public summary of the surveillance visit makes no mention of the conflicts surrounding the Mount Elgon National Park and makes no mention of the fact that the Benet were suing the government.”

In 2008, the voluntary carbon market was estimated at $728.1 million, but in 2009 it was at $387.4 million, marking a drop in values of about 47 percent.²⁸ In order to shed light on the reasons behind the drop, it might be helpful to examine the conditions of the global economy over this two-year period. As the World Bank reported, global GDP experienced a “sharp growth deceleration” in 2008 and subsequently contracted in 2009.²⁹

If a dip in the global economy prompts fewer people to offset their carbon footprint, doesn’t this trend highlight the limits of a neoliberal approach to lowering GHG emissions? The choices of the individual energy consumer are not rationally motivated by environmental concerns; they are driven first and foremost by an investment of the energies and affects arising out of feeling like a good responsible citizen with a green carbon-neutral identity, but that feeling in turn finds expression through consumption and can, I should add, quickly change direction, such as when hard economic times shift it to anxiety over financial matters. The irony is that consumers buy offsets to neutralize the carbon footprint of their excessive consumption so that they can continue consuming. Put simply, consumption trumps environmental concerns. What the priority exposes is the political problem of consumer politics.

If political subjectivity is predetermined by identity politics, it does not go on to be liberating. It fails to be transformative. If political subjectivity is solely an expression of the commodity form and determined by the carbon-neutral identity that the offset commodity supposedly represents, then politics never amounts to anything more than a displacement activity. It might be helpful to revisit an earlier point regarding the value of carbon commodities using Marx’s discussion of money to scrutinize the logic of consumer politics driving the carbon-offset market and the depoliticizing effect that such a consumer-based construction of “political” subjectivity engenders.

In many respects, the carbon commodity can be described as the commodity par excellence. In volume 1 of Capital, Marx explains that the value of a commodity is invisible; it is made perceptible only by the phenomenal form of money, whereby the value of the commodity is “expressed by an imaginary quantity” through the ideal form of money (price). The circulation process of commodities and money also presupposes the logic of property (the commodity owner who sells the commodity in return for money), wherein money is the “expression of the circulation of commodities.”³¹ Whereas commodities can fall out of circulation, as when they are consumed, money does not. As the medium of circulation, money necessarily remains in circulation. As an invisible entity, carbon is the pure form of Marx’s concept of “value.”

It would seem that, on the one hand, the carbon offset represents the perfect commodity insofar as its use-value will never become redundant in the context of climate change. It is also the ideal commodity on the global market because carbon emissions impact every person and all life forms both today and in the future. People therefore have a vested interest in ensuring that emissions are lowered so that the economy become carbon neutral. Such deep-vested interests are themselves a productive energy, which when placed in the service of market forces drive the value of the carbon-offset commodity. On the other hand, as a “market,” the trade in carbon needs to grow—all with the aim of slowing down the supply chain feeding that growth. The paradox is peculiar and runs contrary to the logic of growth driving capital. However, one way to make sense of this situation is by using Marx’s observations on commodity fetishism.

Marx writes: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”³² This statement can be compared to Michael Jenkins and Ricardo Bayon’s argument that the mystical powers of the market be put to work so that people internalize the economic value of the environment,³³ proving Marx’s point that the workers have internalized capitalist ideologies, making it hard for them to break free of the very system that incarcerates them. The subtlety Marx refers to is commodity fetishism. That is, commodities represent both material and metaphysical processes. The fetish prevents a person from appreciating the true environmental and social costs of a given commodity because the commodity is understood in terms of its money equivalent, which gains its power from the investments people make in it (carbon offsets make people feel green regardless of how much they consume and despite the material conditions of exploitation that go into the production of some carbon offset commodities).

For Marx, the fetish is fundamentally an inaccurate representation of the process of production. False consciousness produces the commodity fetish, thereby making the fetish an effect of false consciousness.³⁴ Put differently, the law of the market produces a fiction (the price of an invisible commodity—carbon). We identify with the plight of life on earth through the free market, which mediates our relationship to each other and to the environment in which we live. The free market is therefore simultaneously a mechanism of repression (replacing the investment of political energies in liberating change with an investment in free-market forces), a displacement activity (the benign image of political activity), and a repressive system that we unreflexively obey.

David Harvey has pointed out the political limitations of Marx’s theory in this regard, remarking that Marx was not able to “create a space in his own thought in which the subjective lived experience of the working class could play out its proper role,” and for this reason “he could not … solve the problem of political consciousness.” Politics as consumption threatens neither the “adaptive powers of capital” nor the “processes of competition in particular,” and, worse still, it facilitates the “mutual disciplining effect of the law of value in exchange and within production,” which, Harvey points out, so many of Marx’s critics ignore.³⁵

Above all, from the logic of economistic struggle that Harvey provides, the fetishisms enveloping the carbon-offset market (offset commodities, the price fluctuations, consumers’ carbon-neutral identity, and so on) “prevent any automatic translation of the experience [of political struggle] … into more general states of political consciousness.”³⁶ As Larry Lohmann of the U.K. research group Corner House has commented, “Most governments, whether north or south, know by now that every year the world burns up 400 years worth of accumulated biological matter in the form of oil, coal, and gas. They are aware that the biosphere can’t reabsorb all this carbon. They realize that an equitable way must be found of leaving most remaining fossil fuels in the ground.”³⁷

The voluntary carbon-offset market thus displaces the more pressing and pertinent question of how to end the current dependence on fossil fuels and, I should add to Lohmann’s point, the problem of unsound land-use patterns (converting land with abundant ecosystems into agricultural or built environments and in the process damaging biodiversity and releasing ancient carbon from the earth’s carbon sinks). Stressing the importance of finding a way to keep fossil fuels in the ground, Lohmann also demands that whatever solutions we come up with need to be equitable also.

Not only are the material realities of the unequal all too often rendered invisible by the logic of carbon commodity production, but their plight is often depoliticized as it is re-represented as part of a larger, “more important” environmental movement that in a well-meaning way aspires to save future generations and life on earth as we currently know it. This process of re-representation dehistoricizes and depoliticizes both the struggles of subordinate groups and climate change politics as well.