Carbon Chains: An Elemental Ethnography
Climate change is commonly understood to be an intractable political problem. It is also widely assumed that the solution to the problem is a rather straightforward reconfiguration of humanity's interactions with "carbon." If global warming is so clearly fixable, and so much work has long been underway to accomplish this fix (carbon offsets, international negotiations, localized climate initiatives, etc.), then why does the quagmire continue? This dissertation explores the stagnant "progress" of climate politics by using "carbon" as the locus of its mixed-methodological approach. The dissertation creates a new nomenclature, presented as a glossary at the beginning of the text, to represent the diverging meanings and underlying assumptions conveyed by different "carbon" invocations. This terminology facilitates the dissertation's material-semiotic analysis of climate politics, which combines discourse analysis, multi-sited ethnography, and object tracking of "carbon." The analysis finds that the dominant, carbon-based discourse of climate politics reinforces modernist assumptions that inspire a perpetual faith in the ability of humans to solve the climate problem through carbon management, regardless of evidence to the contrary. This discourse, ironically, enables a widespread estrangement of carbon the signifier from carbon the signified in global climate governance. This lack of fidelity between material "carbon" and representations thereof is also encouraged by the ubiquity and invisibility of elemental carbon; when apprehended largely with a reductive emphasis on quantifiability, and put in combination with market incentives, "carbon" is a fungible and easily co-opted entity. Therefore, despite "carbon's" appeal as a policy mechanism (thanks again to its perceived quantifiability), it is a misguided foundation for climate policy. The likelihood of failure according to the carbonized terms by which the problem has been defined is the "elephant in the room" of climate activism. The liberal capitalist global order that has summoned anthropogenic climate change may find itself challenged by the monster it has created. The dominant, carbon-centric discourse through which the problem is (not) addressed, amounts to an attempt of that order to control its monster without significantly changing itself.