Emissions Trading, New Enclosures and Eco‐Social Contestation

Abstract

The central operating strategy within the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and most of the advanced capitalist world's environmental policy is to address climate change through the market mechanism known as emissions trading. Based upon government issuance and private trading of emissions reductions credits and offsets, this approach quickly rose to $135 billion in annual trading. But in the wake of the collapse of climate negotiations in Copenhagen and a world financial crisis which undermined market faith in derivative investments, carbon trading has an uncertain future. Linkages between deep-rooted financial market and emissions market problems are revealing in spatio-temporal terms, especially in the context of a deeper overaccumulation crisis and investors' desperate need for new speculative outlets. It is in the nexus of the spatial and temporal aspects of carbon financing amidst resistance to "new enclosures" by adversely affected peoples, that broader-based lessons for global/local environmental politics and climate policy can be learned.

Blockchain Enhanced Emission Trading Framework in Fashion Apparel Manufacturing Industry

“…Second, BCELF cannot fully solve all problems of existing ETSs [40,42,76]. For example, the merge of ETS across different industries remains a challenge due to different standards and the carbon emission allowances.…”

“…Since the "Kyoto Protocol" came into effect [39], the carbon emission trading market has become a commodity trading market with great potential. While the social and economic effects of the ETS are topics still being discussed [40][41][42], multiple ETS have been emerging around the world. The European Union Emissions Trading System, also known as the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), is the first large greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme in the world [43].…”

The climate crisis, carbon capital and urbanisation: An urban political ecology of low-carbon restructuring in Mbale

“…This process has been understood as the 'privitisation of the air' (Bond, 2011(Bond, , 2012, or the 'enclosure of the atmosphere' (Saharife, 2011), or even as a new form of coloniality (Bachram, 2004). These provocations demand attention at the urban scale and to be integrated with research on the carbon governance of cities yet have so far been limited (see for example Sharife andBond, 2009 andBond, 2012 on the controversy surrounding the CDM transformation of the Bisasar Road waste site in Durban).…”

“…This process has been understood as the 'privitisation of the air' (Bond, 2011(Bond, , 2012, or the 'enclosure of the atmosphere' (Saharife, 2011), or even as a new form of coloniality (Bachram, 2004). These provocations demand attention at the urban scale and to be integrated with research on the carbon governance of cities yet have so far been limited (see for example Sharife andBond, 2009 andBond, 2012 on the controversy surrounding the CDM transformation of the Bisasar Road waste site in Durban). This work needs to examine whether the operation of carbon markets within urban regions may also be facilitating new and expanding processes of capitalisation and capital accumulation (Liverman and Boyd, 2008;Layfield, 2013) or the protection of the existing carbon industrial complex (Splash, 2010), in ways that might mirror carbon financialisation taking place beyond city boundaries.…”

“…Yet this work tends to focus beyond cities, either on the operations of the markets themselves (Bond 2011(Bond , 2012Boyd et al, 2011), or on natural resources, such as forests (Corbera, 2012). The result is such studies have neglected the material transformations that carbon capital is enabling across urban regions.…”