One Tonne of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (1tCO2e)

Abstract

The ‘object’ of 1tCO2e has become central to how we imagine the problem of climate change and its possible solutions. This chapter explores the complex relationship between international law and 1tCO2e an as ‘object’. It demonstrates the way in which international law plays a fundamental and constitutive role in defining, stabilizing, and protecting the ‘object’ of 1tCO2e. It shows that there is nothing ‘natural’ or ‘inherent’ in thinking about carbon as standardized, commensurable, substitutable, and exchangeable, but rather that the imaginary of carbon as a fungible ‘object’ is a mode of legibility structured by international law. Simultaneously, this mode of legibility has been the enabling precondition for the marketized form that international climate change regulation and governance has taken. As such, this chapter analyses how the ‘object’ of 1tCO2e is thus both the effect of and the enabling condition for specific modes of international legal regulation.