The Carbon Calculation

"Examines how climate science, the policy-world, and neoliberalism have mutually informed and co-constituted each other in order to define the problem of climate change as one of 'market failure' - a diagnosis that implicitly restricts the imaginable solutions and concomitant policy debates to ones about how to adjust, improve, or otherwise rationalize the market. This book traces the history through which politics and science have intertwined and informed each other in order to confine debates about how to tackle climate change in ways that pre-empt any possibilities other than market-based solutions. In tracing the emergence of a conceptual apparatus that has come to operationalize greenhouse gases in terms of a singular and simplified unit (carbon) that can be commodified, and a logic that enables transaction of this unit on a global scale, this study offers insights into evolving novel forms of transnational governance and rationale for markets as governing tools"--