Neoliberalism and the Calculable World
The Rise of Carbon Trading

Carbon trading resembles other neoliberal movements of recent decades that have invented new possibilities of accumulation through the creation of fresh objects of calculation and intensified commodification. Such movements include the hugely expanded derivatives markets responsible for the financial crisis, global intellectual property rights regimes, and attempts to transform health, health care and even biological species into measurable, tradeable commodities. Generating both profits and crisis, the ambitious abstraction and commensuration that are vital to such schemes can never be completed, any more than politics or the evolution of a language can be completed.

This chapter in the book, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism, edited by Kean Birch and Vlad Mykhenkoto and published by Zed Books, outlines the contradictions inherent in the attempt to form a working climate commodity.

Related articles of interest:

• When Markets Are Poison Learning about Climate Policy from the Financial Crisis
• Upsetting the Offset The Political Economy of Offset Markets
• Carbon Trading How It Works and Why It Fails
• Uncertainty Markets and Carbon Markets Variations on Polanyian Themes
• Unregulatability in Financial and Carbon Markets
• Climate Markets Six Soundbites
• Carbon Trading, Climate Justice and the Production of Ignorance Ten Examples
• Toward a Different Debate in Environmental Accounting The Cases of Carbon and Cost-Benefit
• Carbon Trading A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power
• Making and Marketing Carbon Dumps Commodification, Calculation and Counterfactuals in Climate Change Mitigation
• The CO2 Alibi (video)