No Place for the Political: Micro‐Geographies of the Paris Climate Conference 2015

Building upon post‐foundational political philosophies, this article scrutinizes the Paris Climate Conference in December 2015 from a micro‐geographical perspective. The analysis suggests that three different spaces exist at the site of the summit and reveals how their constituting practices and material arrangements rendered “Paris” post‐democratic. We begin with exposing the staged statements of the world's political elites in the meticulously orchestrated Leaders Event as different phenotypes of the post‐democratic condition. We then investigate the formal negotiations in the cordoned‐off backrooms, where positions within the system were at stake, but not the system as such. Finally, we wander through the strictly policed “trade fair” and unveil attempts to entice delegates into techno‐managerial solutions to the climate crisis. In the conclusion, we ponder over the prospects of environmental activism at the COPs in the light of their massive depoliticization.     

Making Markets Out of Thin Air: A Case of Capital Involution1

Abstract: This article traces the creation of a market for carbon sequestration by trees under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, describing the problems encountered by UN negotiators as they attempted to abstract, isolate, quantify and commodify a process akin to breathing, which takes place naturally everywhere, anyway. It starts with an overview of the history of the negotiations that defined the commodity and the rules to govern its trade, creating the scarcity conditions for the market to work. It then goes over the key problems encountered and how they were solved. The analysis draws attention to time and risk as critical elements in reproducing uneven development, and suggests that this new market can be understood as an instance of capital involution—that is, an instance where a narrow pattern persistently repeated leads to ever increasing complexity but, instead of evolving into something new, it generates further entrapment.     

Conventions of climate change: constructions of danger and the dispossession of the atmosphere

Climate change has emerged as one of the key issues of the early years of the twenty-first century, bringing together concerns about human relations to nature, the responsibility of rich nations to poorer, the links from local activities to global conditions, and the obligations of present to future generations. This paper focuses on three key ‘narratives’ that are enshrined in international climate policy – asserting that ‘dangerous climate change’ is to be avoided; that the responsibility for climate change is common but differentiated; and that the market (in the form of carbon trading) is the best way to reduce the danger. The goal of the paper is to analyse the origins of these narratives, the power relations they reflect and promote, and some of the concepts and images used to support them, including those of climate determinism, climate stabilisation, ‘burning embers’, ‘tipping points’, Global Warming Potentials, targets and timetables, and carbon credits. I argue that by choosing the market solution of trading carbon we have created a new and surreal commodity, unfairly allocated pollution rights to nation states based on 1990 emission levels, and established a new set north–south relations and carbon transactions in the name of sustainable development.