Carbon markets and the production of climate change: Appropriating, commodifying and capitalising nature

摘要

This thesis evaluates the efficacy of carbon markets by assessing the impacts of the EU ETS and its links with the Kyoto Protocol’s flexibility mechanisms, the CDM and JI, on the socio-ecological, economic and political dimensions of climate change. The analysis of the relationship between the causes of climate change and the pollution movements, financial practices and policy debates that constitute these markets is developed by progressively introducing Marxist conceptions of the appropriation, commodification and capitalisation of nature, which organises the thesis in to three parts. The first part develops a critical understanding of the social relations, institutions and actors that produce climate change by appropriating carbon in capitalist economies. Mapping the organisation of capital and carbon to create a database of companies in the EU ETS reveals a concentration and centralisation of emissions among a relatively small number of publicly and privately owned corporations and large-scale power and manufacturing plants. The second part considers the processes that equalise differentiated relationships between installations and emissions, and offset projects and emissions reductions, in commodity form. Case studies of carbon allowance and credit networks associated with energy utilities RWE and E.ON illustrate the potential for the largest polluters to exploit unevenness in the production of climate change by trading transformative for marginal climate actions. The final part examines dynamics of accumulation and contestation in carbon markets in terms of the extent to which the capitalisation of carbon can support the expanded reproduction of capitalism. The crisis of the carbon market accumulation strategy and consolidation of the EU ETS in contestation over its reform are explained as outcomes of the contradictions faced by states in managing marketised environmental policy. Overall, the thesis argues that the EU ETS and its links with the Kyoto mechanisms have worked to entrench the production of climate change, necessitating a more efficacious and democratic approach to climate policy that directly targets the biggest corporate and state polluters.