Financialization, commodification and carbon: the contradictions of neoliberal climate policy
Financialization, commodification and carbon: the contradictions of neoliberal climate policy
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发表时间：
2012
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通讯作者：
L. Lohmann
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作者：
L. Lohmann
如今，在联合国、欧盟以及各种国家和非国家行为者的支持下运作的碳市场反映、延伸和深化了新自由主义。建立价值数千亿美元的流动性全球碳市场的项目仍然是应对气候危机的默认国际方法。这些市场一直快速增长，直到 2008 年，根据世界银行的数据，其规模达到了 1,350 亿美元，尽管自金融危机、2010 年美国国会未能通过拟议的碳交易立法、联合国气候条约未来的不确定性以及最近发生的一系列犯罪和其他丑闻之后，这些市场一直在下滑。与新的衍生品一样，碳商品也经历了一个彻底的脱嵌过程——在这种情况下，将气候问题从历史问题中脱嵌出来，即如何组织结构性、长期的变革，从而能够将剩余的化石燃料保留在地下。与其他生态系统服务市场一样，碳市场的目标是“为资本主义活动创造和稳定新领域”，但更根本的是，确保那些最依赖化石燃料、最受减排呼声威胁的积累背景条件。然而，不祥的是，影响气候商品的估值悖论比影响复杂金融衍生品的估值悖论更加棘手，更不用说普通期货或食品、能源和耐用消费品等更熟悉的商品了。为了理解其中的原因，有必要详细探索气候商品创造过程中的特殊代数。
The carbon markets operating today under the aegis of the UN, the EU, and a variety of state and non-state actors reflect, extend and deepen neoliberalism. The project of building liquid global carbon markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars remains the default international approach to the climate crisis. These markets grew rapidly until 2008, when, according to the World Bank, they amounted to US$135 billion, although they have stumbled since, following the financial crash, the 2010 failure of the US Congress to pass proposed carbon trading legislation, uncertainty about the future of UN climate treaties, and a recent spate of criminal and other scandals. Like the new derivatives, carbon commodities work through a process of radical disembedding – in this case, disembedding the climate issue from the historical question of how to organize for structural, long-term change capable of keeping remaining fossil fuels in the ground. Like other ecosystem services markets, carbon markets aim at ‘creating and stabilizing new areas for capitalist activity’, but also, more fundamentally, at securing those background conditions for accumulation that are most dependent on fossil fuels and most threatened by calls for emission cuts. Ominously, however, the valuation paradoxes that afflict climate commodities are even more intractable than those that affect complex financial derivatives, to say nothing of more familiar commodities like ordinary futures or food, energy, and consumer durables. To understand why, it is necessary to explore in some detail the peculiar algebra through which the climate commodity is created.