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Appel, Hannah; Arthur Mason and Michael Watts (Eds.) (2015) Subterranean Estates:
Lifeworlds of Oil and Gas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Carbon, Convertibility and the Technopolitics of Oil
Hannah Knox
ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), University of
Manchester
This chapter focuses on the way in which attempts to mitigate climate change through
reductions in carbon emissions are introducing new ways of imagining and talking
about oil. Inspired in part by Mitchell’s (2011) analysis of the epistemological and
material mechanisms through which oil came to establish its contemporary political
power, this chapter attends to what happens when theories of anthropogenic climate
change reconfigure fossil fuels as the primary source of emissions of carbon into the
atmosphere. In what follows, I explore how the identification oil and other fossil fuels
as ‘carbon’ has had the effect of unsettling the relations that have come to organise
the use and circulation of oil. The analysis proceeds through a consideration of two
empirical cases. Firstly, following a brief history of how carbon measurement became
a matter of political concern, I explore the introduction of carbon as a fungible unit of
trade in carbon markets in order to unpack the implications of carbon trading for our
understanding of the contemporary politics of oil. Secondly I draw on ethnographic
fieldwork conducted in Manchester, England, to explore how local efforts to reduce
the carbon emissions of particular territories are also affecting the imagination of oil
as a political substance. Through a consideration of the calculations and translations
required to reconfigure oil as carbon, I describe how recasting oil as carbon has had
the effect of placing fossil fuels into a relationship of similitude with other carbon
producing or absorbing entities which can be aligned and rendered definitionally
equivalent to oil. Observing the effects of the reconfiguration of oil as carbon extends
a core interest of this volume in the performativity of oil and gas, by exploring the
way in which the performativity of oil interfaces with other institutional, political and
environmental concerns. In particular it draws attention to the way in which
calculative knowledge practices are capable of destabilising the coherence of a
substance like oil. This has implications for our consideration of just what it is that is
being referred to, when people engage in different kinds of ‘oil talk’.
Making Carbon Political
Global climate change is in its very definition inextricably tied to carbon, although the
history of the emergence of the current theory of anthropogenic climate change
illustrates the complex social, political and technological relationships that were
required to produce the conditions within which a link between the burning of fossil
fuels and the warming of the earth could become established (Weart, 2008). From the
mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, the science of global
warming was concerned not with intervening in energy politics, but with merely
establishing the facts about the functioning of the global atmosphere, the climate and
the weather and the conditions that might lead to global temperature changes. This is
not the place to recount precisely how a link was established between the burning of
fossil fuels and global climate change, a story that is well rehearsed elsewhere
(Edwards 2010, Weart 2008), but suffice it to say that by the mid 1980s this link had
become sufficiently well established by mainstream climate science that a shift
occurred from the pursuit of scientific knowledge about anthropogenic climate change
for its own sake, to discussions of what kinds of political actions might be necessary
to mitigate the effects that human activities were having on the global climate system
(Lövbrand and Stripple 2011). During the 1980s and 1990s, a policy infrastructure
began to be established which aimed to turn the science of climate change into a
political, economic and social issue. This was to bring the science of climate change
and carbon to bear for the first time on the technopolitics of oil.
It was the UN conference on Climate Change held in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 that is
generally held up as the moment at which climate change became the basis of forms
of social and political reorganisation with implications for technopolitical life of oil
with which this chapter is concerned (Gough and Shackley 2001, Weart 2008,
Edwards 2010). The Kyoto protocol was the first legally binding global agreement
that attempted to put in place measures that would begin to tackle global carbon
emissions (Böhringer, 2003). The solution that emerged was the outcome of complex
political negotiations which focused primarily on the question of who should be held
responsible for reducing carbon emissions and by what amount. After protracted
negotiations it was agreed that developing countries would be excluded from the
protocol. In turn, developed countries would be expected to reduce their carbon
emissions to achieve an average reduction of 5.2% from 1990 levels by 2012
(Bachram 2004).
In setting out a methodology for achieving these emissions reductions targets the
protocol did two things. Firstly it established a legally binding agreement for
developed countries to reduce their territorial carbon emissions by a set amount.
Secondly it put in place the basic infrastructure of a greenhouse gas emissions trading
scheme, called the Clean Development Mechanism, which would allow developed
countries to direct funds towards carbon reduction projects in the developing world in
order to claim the carbon reductions achieved in these projects as part of their own
carbon reduction targets (Bailey et al 2010, Boyd et al 2011). Both territorial
emissions reductions and carbon trading were to require a reconsideration of the role
that fossil fuels play in driving social and economic development by posing the
question of precisely what the substantive composition of these fossil fuels should be
understood to be. By reconceiving of oil as carbon, the technopolitical management of
fossil fuels was to enter a new and highly politicised terrain which as we will see,
threatened to unsettle conventional forms of oil talk.
Carbon Markets
The development of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) was a negotiated
response to the problem of how to develop a policy intervention to reduce carbon
emissions in a way that would be politically and economically palatable. In the face of
reticence from countries like the USA who were concerned about the implications of
signing up to a treaty that would commit them to reduce their use of fossil fuels, and
in the face of the political un-palatability of regulation as a tool for global governance
(Boyd et al 2011), emissions trading schemes emerged as a compromise that would
introduce flexibility into the way in which countries could achieve emissions
reductions targets.
The CDM was based in large part on a previous emissions trading scheme that had
been developed in the USA during the 1980s to tackle the problem of acid rain by
reducing industrial emissions of sulphur-dioxide (MacKenzie 2007; Prins and Rayner
2007). The use of emissions trading to tackle acid raid had been broadly understood to
have been successful, prompting factories to invest in clean technologies with the
effect of significantly reducing sulphur-dioxide emissions. Using a similar mechanism
to deal with greenhouse gas emissions was put forward by the USA as a solution that
would allow high emitting countries to offset emissions produced by the burning of
fossil fuels, with emissions saved in other places through different kinds of activities.
The CDM was just one of a range of markets mechanisms that were developed post-
Kyoto to enable emission trading. One of the major criticisms that has been leveled at
markets like the CDM is the complex geo-politics that the structure of these trading
arrangements has effected. Crudely put, the CDM enabled developed countries to
trade units of pollution, categorised as ‘tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent’, with
units of carbon dioxide saved in the developing world. Apart from establishing a
trading relationship whereby developed countries ended up financing developing
countries to reduce their emissions whilst they are given a license to pollute (Bachram
2004), studies which have looked at the details of specific carbon offsetting projects
that have been established in countries like India and Brazil have also highlighted a
powerful neo-colonialist logic to carbon markets where the unit of carbon dioxide
becomes a mechanism, for example, for valuing forests as resources to be preserved,
rather than sites where people live and livelihoods are supported (Agarwal and Narain
1991, Robbins, 2007, Bumpus and Liverman 2008, Liverman 2009). However, whilst
much of the critical literature has focused on the geo-politics of carbon trading
mechanisms like the CDM, the focus of this paper is, in the spirit of this volume, to
ask less what carbon trading does to social and political relations, than to what carbon
trading does to oil as a politically and technologically constituted substance.
As noted above, trading mechanisms like the CDM work on the basis of exchangeable
units of carbon known as ‘tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent’ (TCO2e).
Standardised measures are used to determine the TCO2e of different fuel stuffs and
these are set alongside the estimated savings of carbon that can be achieved by
projects that achieve reductions in emissions by stopping activities that would have
emitted more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the scenario that would have
occurred without the intervention of the CDM. The differential emissions generated
by the replacement of one activity by another which emits less carbon is commonly
termed ‘additionality’ (Boyd 2011). This is achieved through various intiatives,
including projects to prevent the felling of forests which are reconceived as carbon
‘sinks’ (stores of carbon dioxide), renewable energy projects which involve a transfer
of energy use from fossil fuels to renewables, and projects which result in reductions
in industrial emissions.
The first effect of the emissions trading schemes is that a focus on carbon renders oil
and other fossil fuels as definitionally equivalent to objects and projects which would
previously have been considered of an entirely different order. Oil, reconceived as
TCO2e, becomes categorically identical, for example, to a particular acreage of non-
felled forest. William Boyd sums this up well:
‘Simply put, a ton of avoided emissions from reduced deforestation is
conceptually identical to a ton of avoided emissions from reduced fossil fuel
use, with the same permanence issues applying (in theory) in both cases. In the
former case, live carbon is left in the forest reservoir and prevented from
leaking into the atmosphere. In the latter case, the dead carbon is left in the
geological reservoir and prevented from leaking into the atmosphere’ (Boyd
2010:896).
In practice, offset schemes have focused on the former of these two scenarios - the
avoidance of emissions from reduced deforestation - precisely in order to prevent the
need to reduce carbon emissions by leaving valuable fossil fuels in the geological
reservoir. Transforming forests into carbon sinks has required a re-conceptualisation
of particular forests as part of a global ecosystemic infrastructure of forests, capable
of exerting a transformative planetary force. Boyd points out, for example, that,
‘Understanding forests as a problem of global carbon management …
depends on a conceptual understanding of the earth’s forests as a single,
aggregated component of the global carbon budget, as well as new synoptic
infrastructures for coordinating the observation of forests on a planetary scale.
This new way of seeing constitutes an immensely powerful technology of
simplification and legibility “dedicated to specific forms of globalist
information” (creating new “facts on a planetary scale”) that are in turn
shaping the content of specific regulatory responses’ (Boyd, 2010: 901).
Oil, on the other hand, is itself already configured by similar devices of measurement
and inscription in the fulfilment of a different kind of global role (see Limbert, this
volume). Rather than being seen as part of a global ecosystem, oil has been conceived
more along the lines of what Heidegger (1977) referred to as a ‘standing reserve’, a
banked resource which has the potential to act as the foundation for the ongoing
development of a technological society. As other chapters in this book attest, oil has
for a long time been conceived as a resource awaiting extraction and exploitation,
with all the political wranglings that the existence of such a resource entails. Already
inscribed as a foundational component of modern life (Campbell, 2005), reconceiving
of fossil fuels not as a reserve to be used, but as part of an ecosystem whose key
function is one of preservation, is highly controversial.
Whilst on the face of it, carbon trading might therefore appear to make all carbon
identical, we might also argue that it is precisely the political importance of allowing
oil to retain its status as a ‘standing reserve’ that has driven the pursuit of
methodologies which can establish the equivalence of oil and other carbon producing
entities. The purpose of making oil and forests equivalent in terms of TCO2e is not to
render them the same, but precisely to avoid the scenario where fossil fuels might
have to be conceived as carbon sinks, with the associated risk that this might draw
forth regulatory mechanisms that would prevent or slow down the rate of extraction of
fossil fuels. Indeed, the very reason why trading schemes were developed in the first
place, was to allow carbon reduction initiatives to proceed without affecting the
extraction and use of fossil fuels. Whilst carbon trading thus appears to establish oil as
definitionally the same as forests and other carbon-defined entities, its primary effect
has been to diminish the political significance of oil and other fossil fuels as carbon
by finding other kinds of carbon that can act as substitutes for fossil fuels as
participants in an atmospheric politics. Whilst carbon trading posits an equivalence
between different entities in terms of their capacity to absorb or emit carbon dioxide,
the aim of this equivalence is to enable a substitutability between oil and other kinds
of activities that are nothing to do with the oil industry. The establishment of an
equivalence between oil and other entities in terms of their participation in the carbon
cycle, operates as a means by which oil can remain shielded from concerns about
environmental politics. Carbon offsetting allows for the legitimation of the continued
pursuit and use of oil and other kinds of fossil fuels by enrolling other entities to
participate in carbon markets as proxies for the polluting effects of burning fossil
fuels (Bumpus and Liverman 2008).
This is not, however, to claim that the introduction of proxies does not in the end have
effects on the conceptualisation and circulation of fossil fuels like oil itself. As Boyd
points out, once carbon becomes a numerical proxy, the problem for the oil industry is
that ‘it may take on a life of is own, tempting all concerned to evaluate alternative
programs solely in terms of the number, without asking more fundamental questions’
(Boyd, 2010:904). Certainly this seems to have been the case with carbon trading,
with implications that have had tangible effects for the fluctuating price of fossil fuels.
Writing about the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) which was
established in 2005, for example, Donald Mackenzie points out that carbon trading
often produces highly perverse effects which are directly related to decisions about
the use of different fuel-stuffs. In the case of the EU-ETS, certain key industries have
been categorised as high polluters thus making them eligible for incorporation in
carbon trading schemes. In order to protect those industries with high levels of
pollution from what were seen as unfair penalties for their polluting activities, a quota
scheme was introduced which would allow high carbon dioxide emitters to
legitimately produce a certain level of CO2 emissions. Firstly assessed as to the levels
of carbon dioxide that they were emitting, these industries were then allocated a quota
of carbon dioxide that they were allowed to emit annually. The trading scheme
operated on the basis that companies that emitted more than their allocation could
bring their emissions levels down by buying carbon offsets. Meanwhile industrial
producers that emitted less carbon-dioxide than their allocation were able to trade
these savings on the EU-ETS (Mackenzie 2007).
Mackenzie’s fascinating analysis of the effects of establishing equivalences between
different fuels via the EU-ETS, highlights a perverse incentive that emerged in the
course of the development of the scheme. Far from encouraging high polluting
industries to invest in low carbon or carbon capture technologies, the EU-ETS
initially had the effect of encouraging high polluters to pollute more in advance of
their incorporation into the EU-ETS. Ironically the transformation of fossil fuels into
carbon acted as an incentive for industries to use higher polluting fossil fuels during
the period of their assessment. This enabled them to become eligible for larger
allowances thus meaning would have to do less to reduce their emissions in the future.
Moreover, Mackenzie also shows that the method through which carbon allowances
were allocated was highly influenced by powerful lobbying by industries who
campaigned for high quota levels which are widely regarded to have led to a general
over-allocation of allowances meaning that industries began to receive allowances for
more than they polluted. With industrial producers and power generators receiving
more allowances to pollute than the levels of carbon that they were emitting, they
were able to begin to sell the difference between the amount of carbon they emitted
and the amount they were allowed to emit, with the effect of flooding the market with
excess units of carbon. As a result carbon prices began to fall and from a peak of 31
Euros per tonne of carbon, it now sits at less than one Euro per tonne.
Whilst carbon allowances have clearly reduced the capacity of carbon trading to
incentivise investment in low carbon and carbon capture technologies, they also
reveal how the complex interplay of carbon politics also interfaces with calculations
about the desirability of different fuels in often surprising ways. Whereas carbon
trading on the one hand shields oil from being directly tackled as a source of
pollution, the complexities of carbon trading revealed by Mackenzie’s analysis
demonstrates that carbon has now become an additional dimension to the means by
which the choice of fuel is decided. With unstable carbon markets, the practical
implications for industry is that the carbon price of particular fuels fluctuates over
time. The desirability of a particular fuel is not tied to just to the levels of emissions it
produces, but changes according to the idiosyncrasies of the carbon market itself.
Even if the fuel is just as polluting as it has always been, the relative importance of its
carbon status waxes and wanes in ways that make choices over which fuel stuff to use
highly complex. Carbon markets potentially produce an additional uncertainty into
how people address fossil fuels as commodities. Not only is their price affected by
demand, but their desirability is affected by the shifting implications of the price of
their polluting effects.
In sum, the reconfiguration of oil as carbon through carbon markets has been shown
to have particular relational effects which do not always result in the choice of using a
lower carbon-emitting fuel. Measuring the carbon status of a fuel establishes an
equivalence between fuels like oil and previously non-equivalent entities like forests.
At the same time, the purpose of the establishment of this equivalence has been less to
demonstrate similitude than to introduce the possibility of substitutability. The aim of
substitutability is not to incorporate fossil fuels into carbon markets as carbon sinks,
but rather to enable the continued extraction and use of fossil fuels by introducing
numerical proxies that allow other things to stand in for oil, thus allowing oil to
remain coherent as a tradable economic commodity. At the same time, I have shown
that the generation of proxies does not entirely insulate fuels like oil from the politics
of carbon reduction. Via mechanisms that work to put a price on carbon, the price of
oil risks being further destabilised by experimental carbon markets which have
experienced large price fluctuations in the process of their establishment. Ongoing
attempts to reinstate the carbon-life of oil as a political problematic, focus on what
kinds of interventions might be able to repair the failures of carbon markets which to
date have reduced the price of carbon to less than one euro per TCO2e.
Carbon Reductions beyond Trading
Whilst the Kyoto protocol’s aim of reducing carbon emissions by making states
responsible for their territorial carbon emissions has been analysed in the literature
largely in terms of carbon trading, emissions trading in fact only accounts for a certain
percentage of the territorial emissions reductions that were required under the Kyoto
Protocol. Fankhauser and Skia (2009) have suggested that at least a third of overall
emissions reductions targets in the UK, for example, are expected to come from direct
reductions in the use of fossil fuels in sectors which are not covered by the emissions
trading schemes. Beyond carbon trading schemes then, an extended range of
techniques and methods have been under development which aim to directly reduce
carbon emissions and I suggest that these have also had the effect of disrupting what
we are terming here ‘oil talk’.
In this section I will draw on ethnographic work that I have been conducting on
attempts to bring about territorial emissions reductions through interventions into this
non-tradable domain in order to explore what these activities have been doing to the
conceptualisation and discussion of oil. Since 2010 I have been following activities of
people in Manchester who have been involved in strategic attempts and specific
initiatives to try to bring about reductions in carbon emissions through direct
transformations in energy use. Like other cities and regions that have pursued direct
reductions in carbon emissions (cf. While et al 2004, Rutland and Aylett 2008, Jonas
et al 2011) the primary focus of work in Manchester has been on how to increase the
energy efficiency of buildings and transport, and how to reduce the consumption of
energy through attempts at cultural or behavioural change.
The development of solutions to reduce carbon emissions in Manchester has been
oriented by an initial analysis which calculated the potential carbon emissions
reductions achievable within the local economy. Arriving at this base-line information
required definitional work which was carried out by scientists working for the Tyndall
Centre for Climate Research in Manchester. The scientists who carried out the
analysis utilised a cost-benefit model called MARKAL which works out the most
economically efficient way of dealing with carbon reductions in order to determine
where policy interventions for carbon reduction would be most effective. The model,
which had previously been used by the Committee on Climate Change to work out
UK emissions reductions targets, was applied to Manchester to work out a ‘realistic’
distribution of carbon reductions at the city level. Using ‘marginal abatement cost
curves’, the model promised to demonstrate the relationship between the impact of
different carbon reduction measures and the cost of achieving those reductions.
According to one of the scientists at the Tyndall Centre, the model assumes that ‘if the
cost is right the change will happen’. Whilst recognising that ‘it is more complicated
than that’, the scientists argued that model nevertheless produced a viable basis upon
which to frame the kinds of energy reductions that should be aimed for within the key
areas of action that the report identified: buildings, transport and energy, and within
what timescale. The purpose of the calculations was to arrive at a set of figures that
would both be indicative of what needed to be done to avoid catastrophic global
warming, and which realistically apportioned sites of action according to where
current technologies and methods of intervention were deemed to be already
economically viable.
One effect of the model, then, was to establish a direct relationship between the
ambition of reducing carbon and the financial implications of these activities. The
model incorporated calculations of both the costs associated with implementing
carbon reduction measures, and the potential cost savings that could be made by
reductions in fuel use which would result from the installation of these measures. In
aligning carbon reduction and cost in this model, oil and other fuels were
conceptualised as convertible both into carbon and, simultaneously, into cost savings.
Reconfiguring energy usage in terms of carbon reductions and cost savings was also
central to the broader use of carbon footprints as a technique that was being used to
help reduce people’s personal consumption of fuel and reducing the consumption of
fuel by businesses. An environmental organisation working in Manchester at the time
of my fieldwork, which I will call Efficas, was working with businesses to help them
achieve what they called ‘resource efficiencies’. A key part of the work of Efficas was
to assist in the overall reductions of carbon emissions for Manchester by encouraging
businesses to invest in technologies and management techniques that would reduce
both their carbon emissions and their energy costs. Companies who signed up to the
programme were visited by an analyst who conducted an audit of their business
mapping the various resources that they used in their organisation, including different
fuels, and then entering them into a spreadsheet. The figures on the quantities of
resources used by the business were then channelled through a set of ‘conversion
factors’. These conversion factors are standardised calculations which are updated
each year by the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), and which
enable a particular quantity of any fuel to be translated both into TCO2e and into cost.
In this way it was possible for a direct relationship to be established between energy
saving, carbon saving and cost saving, each capable of being converted into the others
at the click of a button.
So, what have the effects of these conversions been on the status and
conceptualisation of oil? Firstly I suggest that the act of conversion has focused
attention on the primary issue facing surrounding the use of fuel to be a problem of
quantity. In contrast to what Urry (2010) has characterised as a contemporary ‘culture
of excess’, which is preoccupied primarily with capital and resource accumulation and
ever increasing consumption, conversions between energy, carbon and money have
had the effect of introducing a politics of efficiency into discussions about the proper
manner of consuming fuel stuffs like oil.
One perennial problem that is posed as a result of rendering of fossil-fuels and other
resource as substances that need to be saved rather than expended, is the question of
what then happens to the money that is saved through efficiency drives. An oft
repeated example is the imagined scenario where a householder saves several hundred
pounds on energy costs by insulating their home, but spends the money that they have
saved on an overseas flight. Not only then, does the convertibility of energy into
carbon and into money create the foundation for an approach to fuel that is framed by
the question of efficiency, but it simultaneously raises the spectre of a twin problem
of what I will call here ‘transference’. Because almost everything that people living in
Manchester do, is understood to be based on carbon producing activities the issue thus
shifts from a question of how to improve the efficiency of people’s use of fossil fuels
like oil, to the problem of how to incorporate an understanding of the latent energetic
qualities of all of the things that they could potentially spend money on.
In order to tackle this problem, organisations like Efficas have begun to attempt to
understand not just the carbon impact of the use of particular fuels but to analyse the
carbon impact of all ‘resource use’. Unlike the Markal model, which was used to
calculate carbon reduction targets for Manchester as a whole and which focused just
on carbon dioxide emissions from the direct burning of fossil fuels within the city
boundaries or the use of electricity by city businesses and residents, carbon
footprinting which is carried out both for businesses and for individuals increasingly
incorporates an analysis of the carbon impact of things other than fuel. Rather than
focusing just on gas and oil (‘scope 1’ emissions) and electricity (‘scope 2’
emissions), resource efficiency and ecological footprinting techniques also
incorporate what are known as ‘scope 3’ emissions – that is those emissions that are
generated in the course of producing or disposing of any good or service.
Keen to pursue the most effective and transparent approach to carbon reduction
measures, since 2011 members of the city council environment team have been
pursuing the possibility of extending the measurement of carbon emissions conducted
by the Tyndall Centre scientists to move away from a focus just on fuel use as the
basis for a territorial measure of carbon reductions. The aim of the new analysis is to
include not just the carbon effects of the fuel burnt and electricity used within the
territorial boundaries of the city, but to acknowledge the broader responsibility that
the city and its residents should have for consuming goods and services whose carbon
production and distribution is located outside the territorial boundaries of the city. To
this end, the city council has been involved in attempts to develop an alternative way
of measuring carbon to that used in the Kyoto agreements, which has come to be
called ‘Total Carbon Footprinting’.
In 2011 Manchester City Council commissioned a report from an independent
consultancy called Small World Consulting, the Managing Director of which is also
the author of a popular book on consumption based carbon footprinting entitled ‘How
Bad Are Bananas’ (Berners-Lee, 2009). The book, written in a playful and accessible
style, sets out to demonstrate the counterintuitive effects of consumption-based
carbon emissions measurement, and promotes an educational message to help people
make the right consumption choices to reduce their carbon-producing behaviour.
Building up an escalating picture of the carbon producing effects of different
activities, the author discovers that reusing plastic bags has a minor carbon effect
compared to stopping eating meat and that flying on an aeroplane is about the worst
single thing you can do as an individual to emit carbon. The central aim of the book is
to provide people with the tools through which they can deal with the problem of
transference which lies at the heart of attempts to be environmentally aware by
pursuing cost savings through energy efficiency. The book provides a map of
consumption choices that people can make if they want to simultaneously participate
in a consumer society, and save carbon.
Building on the methodology used in this book, in 2011 Small World Consulting
developed a total carbon footprint for the whole of Greater Manchester. This resulted
in a pie chart which demonstrated where most of the carbon was currently expended
in the consumption habits of Manchester residents (fig. 1). What was most striking
was the relatively significant impact of activities that were not covered by the original
Tyndall report on the city’s contribution to climate change. Transport and Buildings
as sites of energy reduction activities now appeared alongside a new set of areas of
potential intervention, with the largest new area of intervention appearing to be food.
Fig 1. The greenhouse gas footprint of Greater Manchester residents broken down by
consumption category (total 41.2 million tonnes CO2e). Source: The Total Carbon
Footprint of Greater Manchester, 2011, Small World Consulting.
One of the immediate effects of re-analysing the activities that were responsible for
the city’s contribution to climate change, was that the work that had been done to
achieve reductions in carbon emissions by reducing the use of fuel by local businesses
and residents was being replaced by figures that showed that the carbon footprint of
the city, far from gradually being reduced, was in fact increasing. A UK analysis
using a similar methodology demonstrated that far from having reduced its carbon
emissions by the celebrated figure of 15% between 1990 and 2005, the UK could be
shown to have actually significantly increased emissions since 1990 by 19% (Helm,
2012). Why then, was this the case and what were its implications for our present
discussion about oil?
On the 17th January 2012, both Mike Berners-Lee and a representative from
Manchester City Council debated this very question at a meeting of the UK Energy
and Climate Change Committee at the House of Commons, which had been convened
to gather expert advice on the possibilities and limits of total carbon footprinting.
According to the discussion in the Committee meeting, and the diagnosis of others in
Manchester with whom I discussed the possible advantages and disadvantages of total
carbon footprinting, the reason why total carbon footprinting appears to increase the
UK’s responsibility for carbon emissions is that it expands the definition of territorial
emissions to consider all of the carbon dioxide emitted in the supply chain activities
that go into producing goods and services that are consumed in a single country. In
terms of what this does to fuels like oil, a shift from the ‘direct emissions’ method of
reporting which was established in the Kyoto Protocol to total carbon footprinting has
the effect of redistributing the locations where oil can be conceptually located.
Moving away from thinking of oil as a tangible substance existing in a particular time
and place, total carbon footprinting instead reconfigures oil and other fossil fuels as a
kind of echo or ghostly presence, imperceptibly contained in the biographies of all
goods and services. Total carbon footprinting thus appears to shift attention away
from oil itself as an identifiable thing in its own domain. Instead it dissipates fossil
fuels into a component of everything, establishing a potential carbon equivalence not
just between different kinds of fuel, but between all things and activities.
The analysis provided by total carbon footprinting thus draws attention away from the
commodity status of objects in their own right, towards the question of any object’s
energetic biography. One effect of an increased awareness of the carbon life of all
objects has been to draw attention to the problem of definitional instability. One
example that was often given to illustrate this instability was strawberries. During an
interview with the head of environment and energy at a medium sized supermarket
chain, he reflected upon the way in which his organisation had dealt with the often
counter-intuitive findings of carbon footprinting by recounting what had happened
when they too had conducted a carbon footprint of the strawberries that the
supermarket stocked. A carbon-biography of different strawberries had revealed that
the strawberries that they sourced from Scotland were, suprisingly, responsible for a
far larger carbon footprint than those they imported from Spain. This turned on its
head a general conceit that imported goods are more carbon-intensive than non-
imported goods because of the fuel expended in transporting them. In this case, the
reason for the difference came down to production methods. The footprinting had
shown that Scottish strawberries had been grown using peat, an agricultural material
that had a much greater carbon impact than the fuel burned in the transportation of
Spanish strawberries to the UK.
If the immediate effect of total carbon footprinting was to reveal suprising figures on
the carbon life of different objects, the issue of how to act on this information soon
drew attention to the politics of intervention. One of the primary concerns about the
interventions that total carbon footprinting would require to achieve a reduction in the
carbon emissions of goods and services, was the geo-politics this these interventions
would set in play. Although the methodology is not yet widely used, during the
Energy and Climate Change Committee hearing there were several scenarios put
forward which imagined the geopolitical implications of introducing a method like
total carbon footprinting. With total carbon footprinting appearing to enjoin
developed countries like the UK to acknowledge a greater contribution to climate
change than that identified in the Kyoto Protocol, one issue that arose was the extent
to which the UK should be expected to directly intervene in the production methods
of companies that produced things that were consumed in Britain, but which were
themselves located under different legal and regulatory regimes. People were
concerned about the political and moral implications of interventions into the energy
decisions of other countries that were currently protected from having to pursue a
legally binding reduction in fossil fuel emissions. Others put forward more pragmatic
arguments, suggesting that carbon pricing, if it could be made to work, would likely
raise the cost of commodities produced overseas because few attempts had yet been
made to reduce direct carbon emissions in many countries from which manufactured
goods consumed in the UK derive. Pre-emptively intervening in the energy systems of
developing countries was in this instance conceived less a form of ideological
imperialism and more a matter of national security: protecting one’s own citizens
against rising commodity prices becomes recognised as a necessity once all objects,
all commodities and all processes are re-imagined as materialisations of a chain of
relations which is revealed by a shift in attention to the carbon composition of fossil
fuels like oil.
Conclusion
In a recent article on carbon markets, Anders Blok describes the circulation of
conceptualisation and reifications of both global climate change and units of carbon as
what he calls ‘overlapping and clashing cosmograms’ (Blok 2010:910). Yet for Blok,
like for many others who are working to understand the complexities of global
climate change and contemporary energy politics, the dynamics of overlap and clash
are mainly analyzed in terms of their existence in the field defined by the focus of
analysis. As Bridge has pointed out, research on climate change and research on
energy continue to be pursued along parallel trajectories with few attempting to
explore the manifold interferences that we find between these two domains (Bridge,
2011, Lovell et al 2009). Inspired in large part by the same theoretical debates and
conceptual repertoires as Blok, the purpose of this chapter has been to shift beyond an
analysis of the technopolitical dynamics which might explain the epistemological
emergence and cultural significance of either climate change (Szerszinsky and Urry
2010, Wynne 2010) or energy politics (Nye 1990, Coronil 1997, Winther 2008,
Mitchell 2010) and to observe how the domains of expertise being developed around
carbon in response to scientific evidence on climate change is affecting the coherence
and stability of what we might call, following Blok, the ‘cosmograms’ of oil.
The Kyoto protocol was put in place in 1997 but yet since then global carbon
emissions have continued their exponential rise. In spite of proven emissions
reductions in some developed countries, overall global emissions appear to have been
hardly affected by the measures that have been put in place. The analysis provided
here gives some clues as to why. Whilst the transformation of fossil fuels into carbon
aimed to incentivize industries to invest in low carbon alternatives, the establishment
of an equivalence between fossil fuels and other entities that could also be conceived
in terms of their carbon properties, also had the effect of protecting oil talk from its
re-conceptualization in terms of carbon through what I have called a technique of
substitutability. This is not to say that fossil fuels have not been unsettled by moves to
re-conceptualise them in terms of their carbon polluting qualities. However, the
destabilization of oil and other fossil fuels has been accompanied by considerable
analytical, institutional, political and technical repair work that has attempted to
reinstate the purification (Latour, 1993) of fossil fuels allowing them to remain
primarily conceived as a ‘standing reserve’ for future human use.
In activities which have been focused on reducing territorial emissions through the
promotion of energy efficiency, this work has proceeded through techniques which
have aimed to establish a convertibility between energy, carbon and cost. However, as
we have seen, this in turn has produced a problem of transference, where
efficiencies/carbon savings achieved in one sphere of activity risk being undone by
spending/carbon expenditure in another. In response to the problem of transference I
have considered the implications for fossil fuels of a new method of measurement
which has been proposed in the context of my fieldwork on climate change mitigation
in Manchester, the method of total carbon footprinting.
Although recommendations are beginning to be made to shift the measurement of
carbon from a direct emissions-based method of measurement to a total carbon
footprinting based method, it remains to be seen what the actual effects will be on oil
talk. We have seen some tentative speculations as to what these might be, in terms of
both a moral crusade to implore other countries to also invest in energy efficiency
measures, and a pragmatic sense of the need for preemptive action against future
commodity costs that might be affected by taxes on pollution. For those who hope
that total carbon footprinting techniques hold the key to developing new forms of
legislation that might prove more effective than the Kyoto protocol at reducing carbon
emissions, it would seem imperative however, not just to assume that metrics change
the choice of which substance to use, but to acknowledge that the substantive stability
of different fuel stuffs is a simultaneously social, cultural and technical achievement.
As we move forward, understanding the politics of oil in the context of transition will,
I suggest, benefit from an ongoing attention to the interplay between different
methods of calculation, enumeration and definition through which the objects and
subjects of climate change and energy will continue to form themselves anew.
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