Page 46 PoLAR: Vol. 39, No.

Jerome Whitington
National University of Singapore

Carbon as a Metric of the Human

In this article, carbon management is framed as a domain in which active reflection on
the uncertain significance of climate change takes material form in the construction of
new infrastructures of carbon accounting and carbon markets. Carbon refers not to a
chemical, per se, but to an imaginative space of global atmospheric relations rendered
material. The historical ontology of carbon and atmosphere together form a distinctive
global medium, as I describe. The atmosphere as medium is manifest in the informational
spaces of digital platforms meant to do work on the human subjects of climate change. I
describe the carbon accounting practices of two Beijing-based enterprises that are involved
in building out the infrastructure of carbon accounting for the purpose of decarbonizing
Chinese industry. Carbon is at the center of a contemporary formation that is imaginative,
materialist, heavily quantified, and oriented toward the technical modification of human
affairs. It supposes that humans as planetary agents have become significant in terms
of collective activity that is historically recent, highly unequal, and global in scope. The
human is configured not as a biological species, such as in debates on life itself or
distinctions between humans and other species, or even in terms of an essential humanity
that can provide the transcendent bonds of a moral community. Rather, carbon accounting
formulates the human ecologically and geologically with an eye toward imagining the
future forms these relations might take. Hence, climate change has identified the human
as a contemporary problem with particular urgency. [Climate change, carbon accounting,
carbon markets, anthropology, quantification, anthropogenesis, speculation, ontology]

Carbon accounting and carbon markets have emerged as the primary technical practice
capable of supporting the critical work and thought necessary to limit climate change. Al-
most all climate change policy presumes and requires the ability to systematically quantify
carbon emissions. Calculating the carbon emissions of a household, a product, a company,
or a forest promises efficacious numberwork for diagnosing and reformulating human
practices (see Freidberg 2013; Lippert 2012; Mathews 2014). With a certain amount of
ecological pathos, calculating ones carbon footprint is a kind of identification procedure
or signature that indexes ones responsibility for the tragedy of climate change (Paterson
and Stripple 2010). Global carbon markets cannot function without quantifying companies
carbon emissions. Determining the value of a carbon offset, which is a kind of financial
product, is tricky business indeed. Carbon provides a technically explicit site of interven-
tion, global in scope and focused on the ecology of differentiated economic activities. This
global capacity shows how climate change is organized with respect to a single variable,
anthropogenic carbon emissions, which may be used as a metric for peoples activities all
over the world. Due to the vast importance of carbon emissions to contemporary economic
life, carbon is one crucial site through which human ecology is formulated as problem
and site of intervention in the contemporary.

Accepted July 2014

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 39, Number 1, pps. 4663. ISSN
1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934.  C 2016 by the American Anthropological Association.

All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/plar.12130.

May 2016 Page 47

In this article, I argue that carbon is at the center of a contemporary assemblage that is
imaginative, materialist, heavily quantified, and oriented toward the technical modification
of human affairs.1 I theorize that carbon is neither simply a social construct nor merely a
chemical substance, but a materialsemiotic relation that affords striking new possibilities
for reworking global ecology. Carbon quantification is one site for experimentation with
technical forms designed to rework humanatmosphere relations. In doing so, it configures
humans as planetary agents that have become significant in terms of collective activity that
is historically recent, highly unequal, and global in scope. Carbon accounting problematizes
the human not as a biological species, as in debates on life itself or in distinction to other
species; or in terms of an essential humanity that can provide the transcendent bonds of a
moral community. Rather, carbon problematizes the human ecologically and geologically,
and with an eye toward imagining the future forms these relations might take. In that sense,
carbon as a metric of the human provides a materialist view of Earth as home, and one
can say that the serious attempt to deal with climate change implies materializing a novel
understanding of the human.
Two key terms in this formulation, the human and the contemporary, designate
problem domains for anthropology (Rabinow 2003, 2007; cf. Ong and Collier 2008). First,
the contemporary refers to anthropological engagements with problems that are emergent
and very much alivethat is, contemporary problems as they undergo processes of active
reformulation. The contemporary is not an epoch, as in the way modernity has been
conceived unsatisfactorily as a particular era. Neither is it concerned with novelty or
newness, per se. Rather, the contemporary refers to an actual object domain in the present
whose recent past, near future, and emergent forms can be observed (Rabinow 2007, 5).
Put differently, it is concerned with processes of formation in which the difference between
the recent past and the near future matters. Climate change is such an object domain.
Second, the human (or anthropos) refers to anthropologys object, taken not as a fixed
or essential human nature but as a question that continues to motivate philosophical and
empirical deliberation. Describing the anthropological relevance of the science of human
genomics, Rabinow (2007, 14) writes, Today, Anthropos is in question; this questioning
has multiple dimensions to it. One of those dimensions, but only one, is the rise of a powerful
new set of sciences. Climate change science, a remarkable achievement of the twentieth
century arguably on par with genomics, has opened up our understanding of what it means to
be human in ways that have not been resolved. Rabinows argument stems from Foucaults
(1971) demonstration that the positive sciences of humanity arose at a particular moment
in history in ways that mattered intellectually and politically (for example, the use of social
statistics in the formulation of society as the object of modern government). If humanity
cannot be reduced to a human nature that can be understood positively (e.g., Fuentes et al.
2010), then one way to organize current anthropological questions is to investigate how the
human is called into question and transformed, augmented in its capacities, and increasingly
formed as a site of intensive socio-technical activity.
Broadly construed, carbon as a metric is situated historically as a form of neoliberal,
global governance of risky late industrial environments (Fortun 2006; Ong 2006; Murphy
2008; Strathern 1992). Yet anthropogenic climate change cannot be understood as a purely
governmental problem. The transformation of the atmosphere due to humans collective
geological existence and the knowledge practices through which climate change is under-
stood as a problem constitute a historical ontology in which a new Earth and historically
specific forms of society come into being together (Hacking 2002; Miller 1996). Dipesh
Chakrabarty (2009) argues that the temporality of climate change collapses historical and
geological time through the large-scale geological activity of carbon energy extraction.
Page 48 PoLAR: Vol. 39, No. 1

Transformation of planetary ecology through billions of tons of fossil energy emissions,

and knowledge of that climatic transformation, generate powerful material relations that
push at the limits of thinking in planetary and geological terms (e.g., Mitchell 2009). When
subject to practices of enumeration, carbon takes on socially valid representations that spec-
ify the planetary stakes of the human by providing a powerful metric for these emerging
relationships.
My research investigates the work of practitioners involved in producing or using num-
bers about carbon, many of whom expect that the planet will change in profound but
largely uncertain ways. These practices are a privileged site for exploring the emerging,
linked forms of the atmosphere and the human. My fieldwork involved extensive interviews
in Beijing, Thailand, and North America addressing practices to understand and minimize
carbon emissions. I also observed United Nations climate meetings, carbon trading meet-
ings, and certain activist groups that target carbon markets. The ontological argument about
carbon, atmosphere, and the human derives from ethnography of these privileged practices
of contending with climate change.
I start with a single example of how carbon can provide for imagining the human in the
context of emerging material infrastructures, and then describe how carbon rests on a range
of quasi-physical, quasi-social assumptions about the atmosphere as a not-yet-established
political achievement. I detail two attempts to establish digital carbon platforms by groups
in Beijing: one is a start-up consulting firm and the other is a technically-minded advocacy
nongovernment organization (NGO). Human atmospheric activity is materialized in carbon
emissions, which in turn provide the basis for working on what new forms the human might
take.

Carbon as a Tradable Human Right

The drama of the human does not lurk in the shadows waiting to be teased out by es-
oteric social scientists, but is explicitly marked in the practical opportunities of carbon
management. In the late 1990s, noted Indian environmental activists associated with the
Centre for Science and the Environment (CSE) articulated a concept of tradable, quantified
per-capita rights to pollute the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, as a general proposal for
an equitable and comprehensive way to reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
(Agrawal and Narain 1999). The idea was that the industrial North was largely responsible
for existing GHG pollution in the atmosphere, through which it both damaged the earth
and built up its own industrial development. Given that the atmosphere could not bear
much more GHG emissions, these remaining, future emissions would need to be divided
uppotentially in a way that would provide a measure of equitable distribution.
Put differently, climate change seemed to anticipate geopolitical competition over the
atmosphere as a new natural resource. The idea of atmospheric rights, articulated as equal
rights to pollute, not only specified a human dimension of the atmosphere writ global, but it
did so in strikingly concrete terms. Indeed, with the signing in 1997 of the Kyoto Protocol,
core aspects of the technical system were already in place and carbon emissions were
being traded between developed and developing countries in a legal context that explicitly
acknowledged the goal of economic redistribution. As two U.S. activists wrote:

One way or another the air is going to become property, and the way forward,
it seems to us, is by fighting to make it common property, property that we all
share, equally, by virtue of our common rights as human beings. (Athanasiou
and Baer 2002, 113)
May 2016 Page 49

For activist groups, technical means might secure per-capita rights as a matter of practice.
Carbon promised to reconfigure global inequality through a specific technical mechanism
linking individual behavior to the atmosphere writ global.
The proposals short life anticipated the fractious, highly controversial terms of global
climate negotiations, and served to focus activist and state-centric preoccupations with jus-
tice and fairness over who should bear the liability of unprecedented economic intervention
and ecological harm. Far from identifying a generic we or global humanity (Miller 1996),
the diagnosis of inequality vis-a-vis global economic rights has been essential to formulat-
ing the human as the target of climate change politics. In the formulation of CSE, and later
the U.S. group EcoEquity, the power of the proposal to codify rights to the atmosphere
depended on the ability to rigorously quantify the inequality of human carbon emissions.
The proposal was not merely a utopian assertion of rights. It was linked to a definite
material architecture already implicit in the United Nations climate change convention. It
involved explicit recognition of the atmosphere as a relationship, especially in the ideas of
finite atmospheric space and a global carbon budget (discussed below). Tradable carbon
rights, although only an idea, were based on an infrastructural mechanism through which
the metric is able to work on contemporary forms of the human.
Certain technically inclined U.S. activists took up the proposal in their conviction that, if
Northern environmentalists wanted a chance to deal with climate change, they should heed
the developmental concerns of the global South. Prominent among these was EcoEquity
(Athanasiou and Baer 2002). Its position drew on the work of the CSE, but by then critiques
of neoliberalism had made association with markets unpalatable for CSE. Furthermore,
EcoEquity seemed committed to the idea of markets out of a commitment to the efficacy
of information for efficient distribution of costs and resources. But the debate went to the
core controversies of the United Nations negotiations. Elite scientists, funded in part by
Ford Motor Company, BP and Shell (Chakravarty et. al 2009), turned to the debate with
a complex mathematical projection of future emissions from developing and developed
countries. The argument was that developing countries would soon become complicit with
the populations of Europe and North America as elite consumption continued to rise. It
relied on a mathematics of anticipation to shift the politics of global carbon from questions
of historical responsibility to projections about future responsibility.
After backing away from per-capita emissions rights, EcoEquity worked with Germanys
Heinrich Boll Foundation on a further attempt to rigorously quantify different countries
respective liability for climate change, this time in terms of what they called Greenhouse
Development Rights (Baer et al. 2008). It took the form of a numerical index that quantified
each countrys relative responsibility for and capacity to deal with carbon pollution. The idea
of per-capita carbon rights was eventually abandoned, but it had done its work. Emphasis
shifted from a profound articulation of rights to redistribution to a gentler purview of
humanitarian groups such as Christian Aid and Oxfam, which officially endorsed new
work with the Heinrich Boll Foundation. Nonetheless, the material infrastructure of global
quantification and redistribution of carbon demonstrates the imaginative space in which
the human could be posed as a problem for the atmosphere. Its emergent form, like that of
carbon accounting generally, was imaginative, materialist, and oriented toward technical
modification of contemporary human affairs.

Atmospherics Materialized
Apparent differences between activist groups and commercial groups belie important com-
mitments to information as a materialsemiotic practice through which they inhabit a
common practical field. They are building an infrastructure through which numbers about
Page 50 PoLAR: Vol. 39, No. 1

carbon can do work. Carbon takes its social form as information. The practitioners in ques-
tion run NGOs or businesses that, for instance, build information systems, set up databases,
leverage investment pressure on polluting corporations, offer carbon accounting services,
develop standards and protocols, establish carbon credit projects, or train people to be
carbon accounting technicians. Moreover, these organizations often differentiate their work
from that of government and United Nations programs in a way that downplays shared
assumptions about the material capacities of the atmosphere as an object of management.
Underlying high-minded debates are a commitment to informational efficacy; a mathe-
matics of projection; and a willingness to try practices to see how they will work, fully
expecting a future in which their current innovations and achievements will have to be
revised. In the following I describe certain key assumptions that constitute atmosphere and
carbon as political objects through their materialization as relational media.
As a vernacular term, carbon refers to an atmospheric relationship, not directly to
a chemical substance. The relational term is derivative of carbon dioxide, the chemical
gas that forms a small component of the atmosphere (about 0.04 percent, or 400 parts per
million, and rising) and which plays an essential role in regulating the earths energy budget.
Carbon markets, carbon accounting, carbon risk, and carbon space are terms commonly
used that refer to this relational aspect. For example, carbon markets generally do not involve
transfer or delivery of any greenhouse gas.2 Popularly, carbon refers to the collection of six
greenhouse gases (GHGs) regulated by the United Nations, that is, atmospheric gases that
trap infrared radiation and alter the energy balance of earth. More generally, carbon refers
to emerging global practices that incorporate those gases in nonobvious ways (Bumpus
2011; Lovell and Liverman 2010).
The easiest demonstration that carbon refers to a relationship, and not directly to a
chemical or collection of chemical compounds, is that GHGs are measured in such a way
that they become equivalent to each other (MacKenzie 2008; Shackley and Wynne 2009)
using a common measure of their warming effect on the atmosphere over a one-hundred
year period (carbon dioxide equivalence, or CO2 -e, is also known as global warming
potential). For example, methane has an accepted global warming potential of 21 over
100 years, but calculated over a 20-year period it rises dramatically to 72i.e., it traps
72 times the energy as would carbon dioxide in that period (IPCC 2007). It is the warming
effect that has meaning and ecological value, and the one-hundred-year period is arbitrary
(and contested). In general, carbon refers to practices in which the gases cannot be
taken for granted but are actively problematized. For this reason, carbon affords a highly
partial or narrow index of human ecology, but I am wary of too rapidly assuming carbon
amounts to carbon fetishism (Swyngedouw 2010). Ethnographically, the question is the
extent to which practitioners in question use carbon to problematize or remediate existing
human-atmosphere relations.
As a relational concept, carbons counterpart is the atmosphere, taken as a global medium.
The atmosphere is not simply a physical thing like a scientific object. The atmosphere is
a medium in a material sense, as a distinctive matrix amenable to work and as a matter of
real historical possibility for preempting or forestalling climate change. The atmosphere is
a medium for continued work on the future of climate change, and a sink for the residuum
of human activity for which the inputs and outputs can be measured and controlled, at least
in theory (see Figure 1). This depends on a series of assumptions that bridge sociocultural
practices and physical relationships. Understanding atmosphere as a medium is essential for
understanding how previously tacit material connections are invested with new meanings
and with the potential to transform human affairs.
May 2016 Page 51

Figure 1: The atmosphere as carbon sink, represented within a minimal-context setting

common to ethnographic work on carbon accounting and climate change. Photo courtesy
of Climate Interactive; used with permission.

There are four main assumptions undergirding the carbon metric for regulation of atmo-
spheric chemistry:
r Atmosphere as medium assumes the general diffusion of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere so that their effects are planetary rather than localized. For example,
a ton of carbon dioxide emitted in California can be viewed as equivalent to a ton
sequestered in a forest in Mexico.
r Carbon emissions can be counted in such a way that they may be valued as a key
dimension of human activities, such as driving ones car to work, disposing of
waste, or switching to a more energy efficient technology.
r Carbon accounting posits a potential or future maximum limit on the amount
of greenhouse gases the climate system can safely bear, sometimes referred to
as atmospheric space or a carbon budget, which would be the topic of a political
agreement on a quantitative cap on future emissions (Allen et al. 2009; Knaggard
2009).
r A planetary carbon budget rests on the principle that what goes into the atmo-
sphere must either come out or accumulate; this forms an operational principle for
quantitative regulation.

These assumptions stand as the not-yet-achieved result of scientific work and political
negotiation. Quantification makes carbon into an object or medium for work because the
activity of human polluters is codified as a problem. In that sense, the atmosphere is a
medium because it carries the potential to forestall or affect climate change, so that it does
not appear immediately, as it were.
Carbon neither directly indexes the activities of individuals conceived as autonomous
rational subjects (e.g., consumers) nor pertains to the human species or to society as
a statistical phenomenon. Especially pertinent for commercial practice, carbon account-
ing rules have detailed provisions for attributing responsibility of carbon emissions, and
the pragmatics of measurement indicate anxiety about identification and boundaries. In
Page 52 PoLAR: Vol. 39, No. 1

determining the boundary around a polluters activity, the critical factor is who is able to
make meaningful choices about the technical aspects of pollution. On the one hand, it is
readily acknowledged that individual consumers have very little choice over the technical
processes that emit greenhouse gases. For example, the home-goods company Ikea has
recently made a strong push to sell only low energy LED light bulbs on the recognition that
it has much more control over energy-use pollution than do individual buyers. On the other
hand, some people have changed planetary ecological conditions far more so than others.
Carbon as a metric of the human increasingly serves to sort out the highly unequal but
collective effects of human affairs on the atmosphere. Even people with very little direct
responsibility for carbon emissions are dependent on an economy that requires continued
fossil energy consumption. The figure of the human that emerges is situated in a complex
political ecology of technical and economic practice that is global in scope, collective, and
highly unequal.
The atmosphere is, therefore, a literal medium in that it affords an ecology capable
of sustaining life. The atmospheres warming of the earths biosphere depends on the
quantitative concentration of atmospheric CO2 , expressed in the number 400ppm, which
conjoins the political and the scientific. An activist from an international network put it
like this in an e-mail that draws directly on the idea of atmospheric space to establish its
urgency:

There is no more safe absolute ATM [atmospheric] Carbon Space left any more,
AND that to bring the atmospheric CO2 levels to safe levels within about
40 years (by 2050), the total global emissions have to be within 89 billion tons
CO2 per year from 2010 itself, whereas, it is about 38 billion tons today.
He concluded, With the present political scenarion [sic], all of these may sound
Utopian/absurd, but will that change the realities of the crisis of the system? The question
displays a crush of symbolism concerning dire but potentially optimistic futures, and a
plausible scientific basis for imaginative reasoning in explicitly quantitative terms.
In this activists comment, common during the late 2000s, the organizing metaphor is
that of atmospheric space, that is, the quantity of carbon dioxide that can be safely emitted
into the atmosphere. It organizes imagination of the future and a transformative optimism.
Already in the work of Svante Arrhenius (1896), the scientific question of atmospheric
carbon dioxide had taken the speculative and quantitative form it maintains today. That
is, what would be the change in Earths temperature given a hypothetical doubling of
atmospheric CO2 ? It would be much laternot until the 1950swhen it ceased to be
merely a neat way to state a scientific question and took the form of a real historical
possibility that humans might be fundamentally changing planetary conditions (Callendar
1958; Keeling 1960).3 Yet the question now is also the inverse. Who would we polluting,
unequal humans become if emissions were halved or even eliminated? What might we
humans become if emissions continue to rise inexorably? The acute political stakes of
climate change are apparent in the absence of answers capable of resolving these questions
at a global scale. Since carbon is so integral to the global economy, speculation about
decarbonization captures and motivates the twin possibilities of threat and opportunity that
characterize anthropogenic climate change.

Platform
When viewed as a matter of efficacious work, decarbonization requires considering carbon
in relation to information technology. In isolation from the political stakes of climate
May 2016 Page 53

change, carbon management fits nicely with the frame of advanced liberal governmentality
as articulated by Nikolas Rose (1996, 1999); that is, government that works through
the activation of individual commitments, energies and choices (1996, 337) of subjects
who are auditable and who assume risk as a condition of their personal investment in
deliberately organized market competition. A dominant approach to carbon accounting
emphasizes the political metrology of sociotechnical rationalization (Barry 2002; Lovell and
MacKenzie 2011; Swyngedouw 2010), but it fails to adequately attend to future uncertainty,
speculation, and experimentation represented by attempts to change how people live in
response to generative ecological and material commitments. Similarly, MacKenzie (2009)
and Callon (2009) investigate carbon markets but demonstrate their lack of interest in the
broader ecological problematic of climate change: the carbon market for them is simply a
sociotechnical system interesting for what it says about markets in general.
In particular, the sociotechnical approach has not fully taken into account the rise of
digital mediation that, as Kelty (2008) emphasizes, is caught up with the immodest,
perhaps even reckless . . . enthusiasm for the perpetual modifiability of activity coded
as information (280). Here I refer to research conducted in Beijing in 2011 and 2012,
where I sought to document governmental, NGO, and private sector groups attempts
to establish competing carbon management platforms.4 Through digital platforms and
informational protocols, economic activity becomes remediable. Carbon is materialized in
the platform, an integrated information management package to which people or companies
must commit, and which entails certain obligations and benefits. I view the platform as
any structured digital social form (such as Instructables.com or Etsy.com, to take two
unrelated examples) that mediates digital interactions and translates between software
coded and non-coded worlds (see Boellstorff 2008). The platform is enabling and structuring
with respect to narrow bands of sociality that are spatialized in novel ways. A platforms
key parameter is access, that is, what a user must commit to, such as privacy or public
disclosure, in exchange for certain benefits. As a political form, platforms collect people
rendered as information. The main contrasting design features for carbon platforms include
whether they are regulatory or voluntary, the measurement protocols used, requirement of
third-party audits, control over public disclosure, and whether there is a carbon trading
component.
Internat Energy Solutions is a tiny start-up company in Beijing. Operating from a small,
tightly organized hotel suite that serves as their office, the three business partnersFrench
and Chinese citizens, and all menwent to college together in Canada and spent their
time between Toronto, Paris, and Beijing. Their personal comportment matched the am-
bitiousness and open-ended nature of their business plan. Closely linked to the French
Agence de lenvironnement et de la matrise de lenergie (Agency for Environment and
Energy Management), they were working with Chinese governing bodies to implement a
carbon management platform meant for enterprises such as factories or businesses, as well
as projects, products, industrial campuses, or events. They exemplified, as Kelty (2008,
29) argues, how geeks argue not only using but also through technology (see also Ed-
wards 2010; Star and Ruhleder 1996). These men are specific intellectuals whose personal
life goals are caught up in thinking about and tinkering with the design possibilities for
problems of public concern.
Their business model centers on an integrated system that links measurement standards
to a reporting platform called an emissions registry. One can think of a registry simply
as a database listing emissions data by polluting entity (such as a business with many
campuses, a single industrial facility, an organization such as a government, or a territorial
unit such as a city), along with metadata (the measurement protocol used, whether the report
Page 54 PoLAR: Vol. 39, No. 1

was audited). Information about carbon is a prerequisite for any carbon trading program,
which would include an additional financial component into a registry to financialize the
carbon information. During my time in Beijing, there were at least four registries under
development by government and NGOs, taking analogous forms with different design
orientations.
Internat viewed its advantage in this new, competitive carbon space as a result of its public
partnerships with Chinese regional governments (sustained with French financial support,
using the French national software Bilan Carbone), its commitment to data sharing, and
its extensive accounting of supply chain and product life-cycle emissions. Accounting for
these value chain emissions, Internat held, makes the initial work of carbon accounting more
difficult but ultimately vastly more valuable. If a company is only interested in managing its
risk due to changing laws and regulations, perhaps it is not so crucial, a partner explained.
But if you want to assure yourself about energy price risk then scope three [emissions
accounting] is what makes carbon accounting truly introspective. So you can cut some
fat. The metaphor of carbon accounting as weight loss, hardly unique to Internat, evokes
the sense of personal transformation as a quantitative metaphor for managed emissions
reductions.
It was a hard sell in China, but Internat was not alone in trying to make the case for
companies to use publicly disclosed data to manage carbon. Another partner said, For
us the reason for the open-source approach is that the important part is to emphasize not
quantification [alone] but for thinking in relative terms. What really matters is action, [which
can be achieved through] comparison of data across carbon inventories. Internat struggled
with a common problem, namely that Chinese firms were deeply reluctant to disclose
emission numbers for fear that competitors might be able to identify their vulnerabilities.
Like many start-ups, Internat was rapidly running out of money and was searching for
collaborators. One of the partners told me, Unless we find an up-scaling strategy soon, we
will miss the boat. The orientation toward achievement, open information systems and a
risky relationship to success capture a certain reckless enthusiasm concerning the urgency
and uncertainties of climate change.
The Energy and Carbon Registry (ECR) is another carbon-management platform, created
by the Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation (ICET), a Chinese engineering-
focused environmental NGO that has worked to develop clean air standards for passenger
vehicles, life-cycle analysis for low-carbon fuels, and an adapted reporting protocol for
carbon emissions. Working with a U.S.-based NGO, it developed ECR as an online platform
(www.chinaclimateregistry.org) on which registered companies can publicly report their
carbon emissions in a standardized, quantified format. The initiative was spearheaded by
ICETs founder and president, a Chinese Ph.D. engineer with a host of scientific and design
collaborations with U.S. and Chinese institutions.
ECRs rationale was contrasted to government-run platforms associated with climate
exchanges (i.e., markets for tradable emissions) that at the time of the research were
expected to come online by late-2013 but relevant mainly to large polluters. The strategy
of those who designed ECR was to parallel the government policies requiring extensive
carbon reporting and trading systems for the most heavily polluting regions. The idea was
to convince smaller companies to think about their carbon emissions through a process of
public disclosure, with the hope that co-benefits such as reduced energy costs might offer
a reason to lower their emissions.
ICET spent considerable time consulting with companies that might be willing to volun-
tarily disclose their carbon data to the registry, but, at the time of my research, had found
few takers. As one of the project developers put it, I think the basic, the biggest concern
May 2016 Page 55

from the industries is the data security for their business secrets. . . . If I disclose my
data, will other people line up on my baseline? The entrepreneurs viewed participation
as ultimately in the interests of Chinese companies; however, in their experience, Chinese
companies rarely considered longer-term business plans. The overarching sense of their
program was that Chinese companies needed to take part in reducing the causes of climate
change and to begin a process of decarbonization. It is time to show our responsibility,
one ICET staff member put it, invoking a subject position and pathos of global relation.

We thought [the registry] is a really good idea for China because, you know,
even now China is at a very early stage for Chinese companies to account for
their data and record their data. We think it is a really good time because NGOs
should work in advance of the government decision, let NGOs try.
The repeated reference to the nation not only points to a conversation with a foreign
researcher, but also to the cosmopolitan project of Chinese participation in global environ-
mental affairs.
Decarbonization implies an explicit diagnosis of Chinese capitalism, especially apparent
in the governments pilot attempts to regulate energy use and carbon emissions. The goal of
reducing carbon emissions plays directly into the pervasive semantics of the low carbon
life, often dismissed as the latest government propaganda. My research assistant mocked
the low carbon life: Its more like a slogan. Everyone is talking about it. You even have
a low carbon television talk show. But carbon emissions correlate closely to the severely
unhealthy industrial pollution that plagues Chinas industrial centers and forms a major
public complaint. Moreover, the government views decarbonization as a crucial element in
creating higher-value production for industry through capital investment in new energy and
manufacturing infrastructure. Chinas seven pilot carbon trading systems were still under
design at the time of my research. But one young man working for CBEEX, the Beijing
environment exchange responsible for creating the extensive rules (and computer code) for
a functioning market there, remarked with characteristic optimism:

After 2013 we will focus on [the pilot carbon trading system] because the
carbon market is quite potential and the future is very bright in China. . . . Its
quite an opportunity, not only [for] consultants, but also, I mean, [for] each part
of the supply chain because its the initial stage we are at. We need to build up
everything, thats why its a golden opportunity.
If carbon is viewed as a business opportunity in Beijing, it is because the accepted reality of
climate change science figures into a diagnosis of the limits of current economic structures.
Information about carbon is meant to situate Chinese economic activity relative to similar
global activity; and to create potentially global financial arrangements to complement those
of the United Nations carbon market, to which China has been the largest seller of carbon
offsets. The grammar and informational infrastructure of carbon metrics are global, and
debates about whether the climate is changing due to human influence are nearly absent
in Beijing. Carbon as a metric of the human rests on a reasoned, imaginative orientation
toward potential futures; on quantification practices that bring polluters in relation to each
other; and on an anthropogenic orientation in which carbon regulation is meant to remediate
basic features of social organization.
No matter how these different trial-and-error projects may turn out in the long run, the
imaginative and anticipatory element best describes the lived dimensions of practice for
situated actors thinking technically about the uncertain potential of a dynamic moment. An
Page 56 PoLAR: Vol. 39, No. 1

anthropology that tarries in the specificity of climate change must attend to the speculative
reason of a host of projects and proposalslike that of per-capita emissions trading in the
service of global wealth redistributionthat may turn out for naught in the end but, in that
process, do unexpected work on the contemporary.

Anthropogenesis (The World Needs a Cap!)

One of the key assumptions outlined above, finite atmospheric space, is a crucial organizing
metaphor for many carbon accounting practitioners and activists, for it aptly captures the
urgency of a binding cap on global emissions, held to be paradigmatic of serious climate
change regulation. Waning somewhat following the failure to secure a global climate
agreement in 2009, and enjoying only weak support in the climate change agreement
forged in Paris in 2015,5 it was and is especially pronounced among certain activists who
tend to view climate change as a sign of more fundamental evils of capitalist modernity.
But by far the most vocal proponents of a carbon cap were carbon trading interests who
viewed a binding global emissions cap as essential for emerging carbon markets.
Carbon trading interests sought to define a new resource scarcity in a purely abstract
commodity, that is, carbon, financialized and available for new forms of market oppor-
tunism. The World Needs a Cap! was a phrase that decorated the brim of promotional
knit stocking caps distributed by Barclays during the International Emissions Trading As-
sociation conference of carbon trading firms that ran parallel to the UN negotiations in
chilly Copenhagen in December 2009. At the time, Barclays was the worlds largest private
carbon market participant. For certain activists, the finite cap would have guaranteed that
climate legislation was serious and polluters could be held accountable. For carbon finance,
it was an opportunistic gambit to secure a multitrillion-dollar market designed to decar-
bonize the global economy. Among those committed to a binding cap on global carbon
emissions, political commitments for a transformed future were starkly variable.
At issue in my argument is that carbon information infrastructure forms an imaginative
space of real material possibility for transforming the industrial economy into something
else. A company whose proponents I interviewed at the carbon traders meeting character-
ized the market orientation and the variety of ethical commitments real people bring to this
work. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist discussed with me the plans of his big data
software platform for tracking, analyzing, and acting on carbon metrics for very large firms
and municipalities. Describing himself as an investor-entrepreneur, he was a former senior
vice president of governance and risk at SAP, the information systems giant. He plied me
with questions about my views of the ebb and flow of the UN negotiations and where the
politics was headed, with the attentiveness of someone wary of whom he was talking to.
When I mentioned the view that a global cap on emissions seemed essential, he heartily
agreed, and I wound up spending more time with him and some other colleagues after
the meetings dispersed that evening. His business partner, however, made the story more
complex. They were working together on a credit card system that would automatically
incorporate carbon offsets into purchases, requiring a massive database of estimated carbon
footprints for products and services (technically and politically dubious, in my view). Yet
this same business partner was also involved in linking racial justice activism to environ-
mentalism and had written compelling literature on environment and civil rights with other
notable climate justice activists.
This imaginative relation to a future open to perpetual modification partly echoes the
cultural milieu of the related computer and information industry. In his ethnography, Two
Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Kelty (2008) argues that open source
programming in the 1990s formed a domain of technical practice in which computer
May 2016 Page 57

geeksa term he defendscould live and work in an emergent public domain: Geek is
meant to signal a mode of thinking and working, not an identity (35). Like the Internet
in which free software geeks lived and worked, the cultural milieu of carbon exceeds the
narrow frame of certain peoples technical work on hammering out solutions to climate
change. Software geeks and carbon accounting geeks, after all, hail from very similar
cultural milieus, for the latter are essentially a similar class of technical entrepreneurs
whose work with information systems is transposed onto climate change. Thus, one can
say of many of the people involved in carbon accounting what Kelty says of free software
geeks and the Internet, that through their work the atmosphere could become the kind of
thing they can inhabit and transform (68).
Carbons potential for threat and opportunity underscores the anthropogenic dimensions
of the atmosphere as an imaginative ecological and practical space. The term anthropogenic,
when applied to GHG emissions (some 46 billion tons a year6 ), refers to emissions caused by
humans and thus implicates human activity in the geological carbon cycle. Yet the material
infrastructures of carbon metrics enable thinking practically and imaginatively about the
emerging forms anthropos might take. In the expectation of massive ecological risk, these
technical entrepreneurs are not attempting to secure the purity of nature; to return to an
imagined past; or to prescribe a static, utopian future. Rather, carbon management practices
seek on-going modification of existing relationships by drawing their power directly from
the scale and intensity of global GHG emissions. These practices seek to induce, through
definite sociotechnical means, a change in the contemporary form of society without
prescribing what a low carbon future might look like. In anticipation of material threats
and opportunities, these practices are not constructivist or determinative, but affirmative
and speculative.
Two comparatively trivial proposals show this speculation on the material capacities of
the atmosphere. One company submitted a proposal to generate carbon offsets by culling a
population of some two million wild camels as part of Australias Carbon Farming Initiative.
More than an attempt to use carbon finance to slaughter wild animals, it also entailed un-
derstanding the atmosphere as a planetary emissions sink and quantifying camels methane
emissions. The proposal was rejected. Another was the idea of an entrepreneur-inventor
based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, whom I was able to interview for his project Atmocean,
which was searching for investors. With its clever and inventive name, Atmocean sought to
build a large number of buoys to circulate on the open ocean. The buoys would be equipped
with passive deep-water pumps that would lift nutrient-rich waters to stimulate plankton
growth for carbon sequestration. After the failure of the 2009 UN climate conference, like
many entrepreneurs, Atmocean abandoned its plans to commodify carbon sequestration
technologies. That these ideas did not out work underscores that the atmosphere functions
as an imaginative and practical space.7
The speculative orientation is essential to the emerging ontology through which carbon
brings into relation the atmosphere and the human. Practitioners tend to view ecological re-
lations as enabling rather than determinative (or as productive rather than cataclysmic), and
regard climate change as an emerging potentiality rather than, say, an end to civilization
even if that emerging potentiality can look very scary indeed (see Rojas 2016, this issue).
The practices are opportunistic and risk-oriented rather than grounded in authoritative,
foundational knowledge; they are driven by a relation to knowledge that asks not under
what conditions can we determine truth, but what does this specific set of relations make
possible?
This speculative materialism relates directly to the constitutive uncertainties surrounding
the anticipation of climate change (Whitington 2013). It is common to associate climate
Page 58 PoLAR: Vol. 39, No. 1

change discourse with apocalyptic ecological collapse (e.g., Zizek 2010). Yet the ways in
which some pop climate discourse repeats eschatology is less relevant to what is actually
happening with the emergence of new sociotechnical forms. These practices neither repeat
the temporal horizon of a secular apocalyptic imagination nor produce quantification as
mere rationalization of nature (Barry 2002; Swyngedouw 2010). One cannot presume a
future of rationalized climate control any more than one can presume the apocalyptic end of
time. No one will fix climate changewith all the finality it impliesany more than the
world will end. As a metric for elucidating and potentially regulating humanatmosphere
exchanges, carbon helps create a speculative and materialist sense of the atmosphere as an
earthly space that may be inhabited and transformed, even if the prognosis for now remains
bleak. Given practitioners broad range of environmental and social values, anthropogenesis
can be taken to signal the as-yet unknown forms that the human might take under different
ecological and economic conditions. Change planetary ecology, and new forms of the
human may await.

Conclusion: The Activity of Living

Whatever is at stake in managing the chemistry of the atmosphere, there is little presumption
of the rational control of nature, creating an artificial climate, or a return to a purified state
in which the climatic conditions of Earth could be taken for granted. To manage climate
change means to manage (barely) the manifold not-natural, not-cultural dimensions of
climate. It means continual responsibility and adjustment. It articulates not with life itself
at the level of genetic code or the body of humanitarian intervention but with the magnitude
and diversity of human activities of living.
The anthropogenic dimension of climate change should not be taken to imply human-
ism or anthropomorphism. Tim Herzog (2009), of World Resources International, put the
problematic succinctly: One of the greatest challenges relating to global warming is that
greenhouse gases resultdirectly or indirectlyfrom almost every major human industry
and activity (n.p.). Carbon is a variable for mapping human activity via the quantifica-
tion of chemical relations to the atmosphere. In this assemblage, the carbon metric serves
as index for activityrunning a business, making managerial decisions, flying off on
vacation, cooking with an efficient wood stove, or deciding not to vent waste gases to
the atmosphere. Canguilhem (2008) argues for a systematic understanding of technical
inventions as behaviors of the living (95). In mapping the plethora of human technical
activities according to the single variable of atmospheric GHG emissions, one can trace a
vast plurality of material practices understood in their mediating role as planetary activities
of living.
For entrepreneurs and optimists, the question is how to produce a decrease in carbon
emissions for the discrete technical practices that constitute human living in the contempo-
rary. What counts as being human in this configuration is the plurality of economic activities
broadly valued. The metric is nontotalizing in the sense that it explicitly excludes nonpol-
luting activities, which remain unmeasured and unaccounted for. Managing atmospheric
chemistry means reforming human activity with respect to this single variable. Carbon, as
one ecological variable of contemporary industrial economies, implicates people in climate
change in highly differentiated ways. Put differently, it is not an undifferentiated humanity
that has caused climate change. In a partial sense, the activity of living is what makes con-
temporary humans human, and it remains at stake in the ecological changes of a warming
planet. Taken with respect to collective, planetary ecological activity, it remains to be seen
what anthropos may yet become.
May 2016 Page 59

Within contemporary carbon practices, what counts as human echoes many of the
nonessentialist views that have characterized debates about human biology, emergent form,
and posthumanism (e.g,. Franklin 2010; Murphy 2008; Rabinow 1996; Wolfe 2010). While
hardly dissolving all boundaries between humans and nonhuman subjects, much of the
work of carbon quantification is explicitly concerned with extended material relationships
that are simultaneously not natural and not cultural. Can carbon metrics make explicit the
geological and atmospheric dimensions of the contemporary human? Does it collapse the
longue duree historicism of a world transformed into the merely presentist and behavioralist
concern with numerical value? Mostly, it is too soon to tell.
However, the ontology of the human here does not depend on criteria that define essential
characteristics of the human, such as common biology, culture as second nature, tool use, or
capacity for language. Rather, it is defined by what people are capable of being and doing,
which is historically and technically contingent, and expansive rather than reductive. Nor
does it presume an environmental determinism. The material dimensions of carbonas
threat and opportunity, as fossil energy and as informationare uncertain and enabling
rather than determinative, and pluralizing rather than essentializing. It is not clear how hu-
man habitation of the planet will change even as temperatures continue to rise and economies
may or may not succeed in substantially lowering carbon emissions. Practices surrounding
carbon suggest that fossil energy is understood as enabling plural capacities for living;
these capacities are currently called into question and rendered open to intervention. This
openness (or lack of environmental determinism) defines carbon as a metric of the human.
Any ethnography of climate management must bear in mind daily acts of emitting
greenhouse gases and the values ascribed to them, at minimum, as the backdrop to the
stakes of climate politics. The material and legal infrastructures of fossil energy extraction
dominate and dwarf the brittle information infrastructure of carbon metrics. The speculative,
science-fiction idea is that the fossil dinosaurs will one day go out of business, remediated
into irrelevance. Yet while carbon accounting and carbon market infrastructures are being
steadily rolled out, few governments or polluters are materially committed to the often-
voiced long-term vision of a world that uses only 20 percent of current fossil energy usage.
Nobody knows what that world would look like. In strictly realistic terms it is very hard to
imagine it. Even the most prophetic of climate change scientists, James Hansen, believes it
is unachievable without major investment in nuclear power (Schrope 2013). Questions of
who should change, exactly how, and by how much, remain profoundly unresolved.
To question the value of a form of life, it is important to resist the caricature of specific
consumers (the North American soccer mom, the businessman flying business class) and
also the collection of anecdotes of people implicated in greenhouse gas emissions (fast boat
drivers on the Mekong River during my fieldwork, who ran souped-up Toyota engines; a
coal mine manager who gave me a tour in West Virginia). In fact, carbon accounting is the
most descriptive genre currently available for any systematic deliberation on the meaning
and value of GHG-emitting activities writ global. Internat, the Beijing-based company,
described the process as introspective. Decarbonization implies evaluating how one goes
about acting and living; if only by one partial variable, carbon serves as a metric of the
ecological potential of living in the contemporary.
Anthropologists characteristic emphasis on ethnographic method and contextualization
(e.g., Barnes et al. 2013; cf. Hastrup 2013) does not go far enough to establish the dis-
ciplines relevance to anthropogenic climate change. The generative moment surrounding
climate change is that existing understandings of anthropos are troubled by the likelihood
that humans have provoked subtle but pervasive changes to planetary conditions of liv-
ing. Knowledge about the human practices that cause climate change, the vast political
Page 60 PoLAR: Vol. 39, No. 1

controversies, and the very dimensions of global climate that create a viable planetary
home, is itself knowledge of the human. Far from a new essentialism of the human, climate
change poses the human as a problem in the contemporary with particular urgency.

Notes
This research benefitted greatly from research assistance by Marvin Nala and Miao Sun.
The author would also like to thank Rosalind Fredericks, Gokce Gunel, David Rojas,
and three anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and instructive comments on
various drafts of this article; shortcomings remain my own. Parts of this research were
funded by the Ford Foundation through the Climate Justice Research Project at Dartmouth
College and by the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.

1. For assemblage, see Ong and Collier 2008. By materialist I mean to emphasize aspects
of materialsemiotic relations that are reliable or forceful; form the possibility for work;
are available to the senses; or leave the subject vulnerable to surprise or uncertainty. See
Keane 2003 or Law 2009.
2. Gunel 2016 (in this issue), describes an exception involving a group of people far more
concerned with the chemical substance than the mainstream practitioners I describe. To
avoid confusion, I use greenhouse gases or the names of specific chemicals whenever
emphasizing the physical chemicals per se. Describing carbon as a materialsemiotic
relationship avoids the implications of theorizing it as a social construction, or the realist
assumptions of carbon as merely chemical.
3. The question here concerns when it was convincingly demonstrated that anthropogenic
CO2 was accumulating in the atmosphere, so that the doubling of atmospheric CO2
could be understood as a real historical possibility rather than simply a heuristic that
enabled research on a scientific question. I take that moment as when Keeling developed
sensitive technical instrumentation and a suitable spatial methodology for determining a
consistent global value for atmospheric CO2 , thereby demonstrating its inexorable rise.
4. Interviews were conducted in Mandarin and Chinese, with translation of direct quotes
in the following passages provided by Miao Sun.
5. In fact, the Paris agreement is organized by a somewhat different logic, since it involved
collecting voluntary pledges for emissions reductions from national governments rather
than a legally-binding global cap. Critics countered that the negotiations were ignoring
science, i.e., ignoring the putatively scientific carbon budget as discussed, for example,
by Allen et al 2009.
6. CO2 -e, based on World Resources International data for 2010 (see http://cait2.wri.org/).
7. Even if these stories are thin (Marcus 1998), they also stimulate the ethnographic
imagination, because such people articulate their relation to the atmosphere in surpris-
ing ways. Here I am interested in their ideas vis-a-vis the emergent potential of the
atmosphere, that is, the forms of imaginative and productive reasoning induced by a
quantitative understanding of anthropogenic influence over the carbon cycle.

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