Counting Carbon: Calculative Activism and Slippery Infrastructure

Abstract

The environmental movement in the global North is in a state of impasse. It appears that despite the renewed international focus on climate change, and the actions of innumerable social movements, a “solution” to the problem appears as one, without a viable solution. It is the contention of this paper that climate change has no clearly viable solution as it is a seemingly impossible problem. This paper investigates how the problem of climate change is constructed as a global object of political action and how it functions to render politics into a matter of calculative action, one that seeks—but fails—to take hold of a slippery carbon infrastructure. It concludes by suggesting one possible solution to this dilemma is to turn away from the global scalar logic of climate change and towards a situated focus on questions of infrastructure, or what Dimitris Papadopoulos calls “thick justice”.

Resource geography II: What makes resources political?

“…It is tempting to conclude that carbonized democracy and the embeddedness of the 'fossil fuel landscape' prevent political constructions of a post-carbon future (see Carton, 2017). Beuret (2017) explores how the global framing of climate change forecloses a political solution through national states. Much research has explained how the so-called solutions of carbon markets (e.g.…”

“…Bryant, 2016) or international treaties (e.g. Weisser and Müller-Mahn, 2017) fail to actually solve the problem by offering any avenue toward a needed transformation of the energy infrastructure (Beuret, 2017). On the other hand, Haarstad and Wanvik (2017) critique the vision of 'permanence' of what they call 'carbonscapes' and, instead, highlight the profound instability of the fossil fuel landscape.…”

Sharing the Burden: Climate responsibility beyond the nation-state

“…Although there is a clear and pressing need to reduce the impacts of climate change, decisive actions culminating in sufficient reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs) or an increase in adaption measures have continually failed to gain traction, despite an intense international focus on climate change, particularly in the Global North (Beuret, 2017). This is not to deny that attempts have been made, nor wins achieved, in addressing a notoriously difficult and wicked problem on a global scale (Incropera, 2016;Sun & Yang, 2016).…”

Sea Change: The World Ocean Circulation Experiment and the Productive Limits of Ocean Variability

“…Overall, this exploration of WOCE reveals what I call the productive limits that constitute Western knowledge of the planet’s systemic character. The concept of productive limits builds on studies of knowledge infrastructures (and infrastructures more generally) that analyze not simply the development, concretization, and stabilization of infrastructures but also their multiplicities, seams, and heterogeneities (e.g., Benson 2012; Beuret 2017; Howe et al 2016; Vertesi 2014). It also contributes to a literature that theorizes the complex relationships between uncertainty, fact, and unknowability in scientific knowledge production and the worlds that scientific practice makes.…”