Constructing Carbon Market Spacetime: Implications for Neo-Modernity

Abstract

Capitalist development is framed in two epochs with distinctive (if overlapping) socio-political, economic and cultural features-modernity and post-modernity. Constant through each epoch has been the drive to increase control of collective organization in space and time. This paper suggests that a new epoch has emerged, where humanity has become such a force of nature so as to destabilize its own environment and ultimately threaten its survival - neo-modernity. This paper explores the creation of markets to commoditize the atmosphere and control greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon markets are an important infrastructure to enable humanity to integrate nature into its socio-political and economic organization. The carbon markets are the beginning, the embodiment of a process designed to reorganize human activities, but also to organize a newly elevated natural environment. As with other epochs, the key to success in neo-modernity is organizing complex and divergent human activities across space and time. Using an institutional approach, built on case-studies and close dialogue with market participants in the London, New York, Chicago, Paris and Washington D.C. this paper analyzes the construction of carbon markets, including 1) how the markets organize the environment in space and time, and 2) how market members organize themselves in space and time. Particular attention is paid to the compressions of the spacetime of carbon commodities through the establishment of platforms, exchanges and verifiers. This paper argues that markets are coordinating networks - the epitome of neo-modernity infrastructure.