Forthcoming in:

Appel, Hannah; Arthur Mason and Michael Watts (Eds.) (2015) Subterranean Estates:

Lifeworlds of Oil and Gas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Carbon, Convertibility and the Technopolitics of Oil

Hannah Knox

ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), University of

Manchester

This chapter focuses on the way in which attempts to mitigate climate change through

reductions in carbon emissions are introducing new ways of imagining and talking

about oil. Inspired in part by Mitchell’s (2011) analysis of the epistemological and

material mechanisms through which oil came to establish its contemporary political

power, this chapter attends to what happens when theories of anthropogenic climate

change reconfigure fossil fuels as the primary source of emissions of carbon into the

atmosphere. In what follows, I explore how the identification oil and other fossil fuels

as ‘carbon’ has had the effect of unsettling the relations that have come to organise

the use and circulation of oil. The analysis proceeds through a consideration of two

empirical cases. Firstly, following a brief history of how carbon measurement became

a matter of political concern, I explore the introduction of carbon as a fungible unit of

trade in carbon markets in order to unpack the implications of carbon trading for our

understanding of the contemporary politics of oil. Secondly I draw on ethnographic

fieldwork conducted in Manchester, England, to explore how local efforts to reduce

the carbon emissions of particular territories are also affecting the imagination of oil

as a political substance. Through a consideration of the calculations and translations

required to reconfigure oil as carbon, I describe how recasting oil as carbon has had

the effect of placing fossil fuels into a relationship of similitude with other carbon

producing or absorbing entities which can be aligned and rendered definitionally

equivalent to oil. Observing the effects of the reconfiguration of oil as carbon extends

a core interest of this volume in the performativity of oil and gas, by exploring the

way in which the performativity of oil interfaces with other institutional, political and

environmental concerns. In particular it draws attention to the way in which

calculative knowledge practices are capable of destabilising the coherence of a

substance like oil. This has implications for our consideration of just what it is that is

being referred to, when people engage in different kinds of ‘oil talk’.

Making Carbon Political

Global climate change is in its very definition inextricably tied to carbon, although the

history of the emergence of the current theory of anthropogenic climate change

illustrates the complex social, political and technological relationships that were

required to produce the conditions within which a link between the burning of fossil

fuels and the warming of the earth could become established (Weart, 2008). From the

mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, the science of global

warming was concerned not with intervening in energy politics, but with merely

establishing the facts about the functioning of the global atmosphere, the climate and

the weather and the conditions that might lead to global temperature changes. This is

not the place to recount precisely how a link was established between the burning of

fossil fuels and global climate change, a story that is well rehearsed elsewhere

(Edwards 2010, Weart 2008), but suffice it to say that by the mid 1980s this link had

become sufficiently well established by mainstream climate science that a shift

occurred from the pursuit of scientific knowledge about anthropogenic climate change

for its own sake, to discussions of what kinds of political actions might be necessary

to mitigate the effects that human activities were having on the global climate system

(Lövbrand and Stripple 2011). During the 1980s and 1990s, a policy infrastructure

began to be established which aimed to turn the science of climate change into a

political, economic and social issue. This was to bring the science of climate change

and carbon to bear for the first time on the technopolitics of oil.

It was the UN conference on Climate Change held in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 that is

generally held up as the moment at which climate change became the basis of forms

of social and political reorganisation with implications for technopolitical life of oil

with which this chapter is concerned (Gough and Shackley 2001, Weart 2008,

Edwards 2010). The Kyoto protocol was the first legally binding global agreement

that attempted to put in place measures that would begin to tackle global carbon

emissions (Böhringer, 2003). The solution that emerged was the outcome of complex

political negotiations which focused primarily on the question of who should be held

responsible for reducing carbon emissions and by what amount. After protracted

negotiations it was agreed that developing countries would be excluded from the

protocol. In turn, developed countries would be expected to reduce their carbon

emissions to achieve an average reduction of 5.2% from 1990 levels by 2012

(Bachram 2004).

In setting out a methodology for achieving these emissions reductions targets the

protocol did two things. Firstly it established a legally binding agreement for

developed countries to reduce their territorial carbon emissions by a set amount.

Secondly it put in place the basic infrastructure of a greenhouse gas emissions trading

scheme, called the Clean Development Mechanism, which would allow developed

countries to direct funds towards carbon reduction projects in the developing world in

order to claim the carbon reductions achieved in these projects as part of their own

carbon reduction targets (Bailey et al 2010, Boyd et al 2011). Both territorial

emissions reductions and carbon trading were to require a reconsideration of the role

that fossil fuels play in driving social and economic development by posing the

question of precisely what the substantive composition of these fossil fuels should be

understood to be. By reconceiving of oil as carbon, the technopolitical management of

fossil fuels was to enter a new and highly politicised terrain which as we will see,

threatened to unsettle conventional forms of oil talk.

Carbon Markets

The development of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) was a negotiated

response to the problem of how to develop a policy intervention to reduce carbon

emissions in a way that would be politically and economically palatable. In the face of

reticence from countries like the USA who were concerned about the implications of

signing up to a treaty that would commit them to reduce their use of fossil fuels, and

in the face of the political un-palatability of regulation as a tool for global governance

(Boyd et al 2011), emissions trading schemes emerged as a compromise that would

introduce flexibility into the way in which countries could achieve emissions

reductions targets.

The CDM was based in large part on a previous emissions trading scheme that had

been developed in the USA during the 1980s to tackle the problem of acid rain by

reducing industrial emissions of sulphur-dioxide (MacKenzie 2007; Prins and Rayner

2007). The use of emissions trading to tackle acid raid had been broadly understood to

have been successful, prompting factories to invest in clean technologies with the

effect of significantly reducing sulphur-dioxide emissions. Using a similar mechanism

to deal with greenhouse gas emissions was put forward by the USA as a solution that

would allow high emitting countries to offset emissions produced by the burning of

fossil fuels, with emissions saved in other places through different kinds of activities.

The CDM was just one of a range of markets mechanisms that were developed post-

Kyoto to enable emission trading. One of the major criticisms that has been leveled at

markets like the CDM is the complex geo-politics that the structure of these trading

arrangements has effected. Crudely put, the CDM enabled developed countries to

trade units of pollution, categorised as ‘tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent’, with

units of carbon dioxide saved in the developing world. Apart from establishing a

trading relationship whereby developed countries ended up financing developing

countries to reduce their emissions whilst they are given a license to pollute (Bachram

2004), studies which have looked at the details of specific carbon offsetting projects

that have been established in countries like India and Brazil have also highlighted a

powerful neo-colonialist logic to carbon markets where the unit of carbon dioxide

becomes a mechanism, for example, for valuing forests as resources to be preserved,

rather than sites where people live and livelihoods are supported (Agarwal and Narain

1991, Robbins, 2007, Bumpus and Liverman 2008, Liverman 2009). However, whilst

much of the critical literature has focused on the geo-politics of carbon trading

mechanisms like the CDM, the focus of this paper is, in the spirit of this volume, to

ask less what carbon trading does to social and political relations, than to what carbon

trading does to oil as a politically and technologically constituted substance.

As noted above, trading mechanisms like the CDM work on the basis of exchangeable

units of carbon known as ‘tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent’ (TCO2e).

Standardised measures are used to determine the TCO2e of different fuel stuffs and

these are set alongside the estimated savings of carbon that can be achieved by

projects that achieve reductions in emissions by stopping activities that would have

emitted more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the scenario that would have

occurred without the intervention of the CDM. The differential emissions generated

by the replacement of one activity by another which emits less carbon is commonly

termed ‘additionality’ (Boyd 2011). This is achieved through various intiatives,

including projects to prevent the felling of forests which are reconceived as carbon

‘sinks’ (stores of carbon dioxide), renewable energy projects which involve a transfer

of energy use from fossil fuels to renewables, and projects which result in reductions

in industrial emissions.

The first effect of the emissions trading schemes is that a focus on carbon renders oil

and other fossil fuels as definitionally equivalent to objects and projects which would

previously have been considered of an entirely different order. Oil, reconceived as

TCO2e, becomes categorically identical, for example, to a particular acreage of non-

felled forest. William Boyd sums this up well:

‘Simply put, a ton of avoided emissions from reduced deforestation is

conceptually identical to a ton of avoided emissions from reduced fossil fuel

use, with the same permanence issues applying (in theory) in both cases. In the

former case, live carbon is left in the forest reservoir and prevented from

leaking into the atmosphere. In the latter case, the dead carbon is left in the

geological reservoir and prevented from leaking into the atmosphere’ (Boyd

2010:896).

In practice, offset schemes have focused on the former of these two scenarios - the

avoidance of emissions from reduced deforestation - precisely in order to prevent the

need to reduce carbon emissions by leaving valuable fossil fuels in the geological

reservoir. Transforming forests into carbon sinks has required a re-conceptualisation

of particular forests as part of a global ecosystemic infrastructure of forests, capable

of exerting a transformative planetary force. Boyd points out, for example, that,

‘Understanding forests as a problem of global carbon management …

depends on a conceptual understanding of the earth’s forests as a single,

aggregated component of the global carbon budget, as well as new synoptic

infrastructures for coordinating the observation of forests on a planetary scale.

This new way of seeing constitutes an immensely powerful technology of

simplification and legibility “dedicated to specific forms of globalist

information” (creating new “facts on a planetary scale”) that are in turn

shaping the content of specific regulatory responses’ (Boyd, 2010: 901).

Oil, on the other hand, is itself already configured by similar devices of measurement

and inscription in the fulfilment of a different kind of global role (see Limbert, this

volume). Rather than being seen as part of a global ecosystem, oil has been conceived

more along the lines of what Heidegger (1977) referred to as a ‘standing reserve’, a

banked resource which has the potential to act as the foundation for the ongoing

development of a technological society. As other chapters in this book attest, oil has

for a long time been conceived as a resource awaiting extraction and exploitation,

with all the political wranglings that the existence of such a resource entails. Already

inscribed as a foundational component of modern life (Campbell, 2005), reconceiving

of fossil fuels not as a reserve to be used, but as part of an ecosystem whose key

function is one of preservation, is highly controversial.

Whilst on the face of it, carbon trading might therefore appear to make all carbon

identical, we might also argue that it is precisely the political importance of allowing

oil to retain its status as a ‘standing reserve’ that has driven the pursuit of

methodologies which can establish the equivalence of oil and other carbon producing

entities. The purpose of making oil and forests equivalent in terms of TCO2e is not to

render them the same, but precisely to avoid the scenario where fossil fuels might

have to be conceived as carbon sinks, with the associated risk that this might draw

forth regulatory mechanisms that would prevent or slow down the rate of extraction of

fossil fuels. Indeed, the very reason why trading schemes were developed in the first

place, was to allow carbon reduction initiatives to proceed without affecting the

extraction and use of fossil fuels. Whilst carbon trading thus appears to establish oil as

definitionally the same as forests and other carbon-defined entities, its primary effect

has been to diminish the political significance of oil and other fossil fuels as carbon

by finding other kinds of carbon that can act as substitutes for fossil fuels as

participants in an atmospheric politics. Whilst carbon trading posits an equivalence

between different entities in terms of their capacity to absorb or emit carbon dioxide,

the aim of this equivalence is to enable a substitutability between oil and other kinds

of activities that are nothing to do with the oil industry. The establishment of an

equivalence between oil and other entities in terms of their participation in the carbon

cycle, operates as a means by which oil can remain shielded from concerns about

environmental politics. Carbon offsetting allows for the legitimation of the continued

pursuit and use of oil and other kinds of fossil fuels by enrolling other entities to

participate in carbon markets as proxies for the polluting effects of burning fossil

fuels (Bumpus and Liverman 2008).

This is not, however, to claim that the introduction of proxies does not in the end have

effects on the conceptualisation and circulation of fossil fuels like oil itself. As Boyd

points out, once carbon becomes a numerical proxy, the problem for the oil industry is

that ‘it may take on a life of is own, tempting all concerned to evaluate alternative

programs solely in terms of the number, without asking more fundamental questions’

(Boyd, 2010:904). Certainly this seems to have been the case with carbon trading,

with implications that have had tangible effects for the fluctuating price of fossil fuels.

Writing about the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) which was

established in 2005, for example, Donald Mackenzie points out that carbon trading

often produces highly perverse effects which are directly related to decisions about

the use of different fuel-stuffs. In the case of the EU-ETS, certain key industries have

been categorised as high polluters thus making them eligible for incorporation in

carbon trading schemes. In order to protect those industries with high levels of

pollution from what were seen as unfair penalties for their polluting activities, a quota

scheme was introduced which would allow high carbon dioxide emitters to

legitimately produce a certain level of CO2 emissions. Firstly assessed as to the levels

of carbon dioxide that they were emitting, these industries were then allocated a quota

of carbon dioxide that they were allowed to emit annually. The trading scheme

operated on the basis that companies that emitted more than their allocation could

bring their emissions levels down by buying carbon offsets. Meanwhile industrial

producers that emitted less carbon-dioxide than their allocation were able to trade

these savings on the EU-ETS (Mackenzie 2007).

Mackenzie’s fascinating analysis of the effects of establishing equivalences between

different fuels via the EU-ETS, highlights a perverse incentive that emerged in the

course of the development of the scheme. Far from encouraging high polluting

industries to invest in low carbon or carbon capture technologies, the EU-ETS

initially had the effect of encouraging high polluters to pollute more in advance of

their incorporation into the EU-ETS. Ironically the transformation of fossil fuels into

carbon acted as an incentive for industries to use higher polluting fossil fuels during

the period of their assessment. This enabled them to become eligible for larger

allowances thus meaning would have to do less to reduce their emissions in the future.

Moreover, Mackenzie also shows that the method through which carbon allowances

were allocated was highly influenced by powerful lobbying by industries who

campaigned for high quota levels which are widely regarded to have led to a general

over-allocation of allowances meaning that industries began to receive allowances for

more than they polluted. With industrial producers and power generators receiving

more allowances to pollute than the levels of carbon that they were emitting, they

were able to begin to sell the difference between the amount of carbon they emitted

and the amount they were allowed to emit, with the effect of flooding the market with

excess units of carbon. As a result carbon prices began to fall and from a peak of 31

Euros per tonne of carbon, it now sits at less than one Euro per tonne.

Whilst carbon allowances have clearly reduced the capacity of carbon trading to

incentivise investment in low carbon and carbon capture technologies, they also

reveal how the complex interplay of carbon politics also interfaces with calculations

about the desirability of different fuels in often surprising ways. Whereas carbon

trading on the one hand shields oil from being directly tackled as a source of

pollution, the complexities of carbon trading revealed by Mackenzie’s analysis

demonstrates that carbon has now become an additional dimension to the means by

which the choice of fuel is decided. With unstable carbon markets, the practical

implications for industry is that the carbon price of particular fuels fluctuates over

time. The desirability of a particular fuel is not tied to just to the levels of emissions it

produces, but changes according to the idiosyncrasies of the carbon market itself.

Even if the fuel is just as polluting as it has always been, the relative importance of its

carbon status waxes and wanes in ways that make choices over which fuel stuff to use

highly complex. Carbon markets potentially produce an additional uncertainty into

how people address fossil fuels as commodities. Not only is their price affected by

demand, but their desirability is affected by the shifting implications of the price of

their polluting effects.

In sum, the reconfiguration of oil as carbon through carbon markets has been shown

to have particular relational effects which do not always result in the choice of using a

lower carbon-emitting fuel. Measuring the carbon status of a fuel establishes an

equivalence between fuels like oil and previously non-equivalent entities like forests.

At the same time, the purpose of the establishment of this equivalence has been less to

demonstrate similitude than to introduce the possibility of substitutability. The aim of

substitutability is not to incorporate fossil fuels into carbon markets as carbon sinks,

but rather to enable the continued extraction and use of fossil fuels by introducing

numerical proxies that allow other things to stand in for oil, thus allowing oil to

remain coherent as a tradable economic commodity. At the same time, I have shown

that the generation of proxies does not entirely insulate fuels like oil from the politics

of carbon reduction. Via mechanisms that work to put a price on carbon, the price of

oil risks being further destabilised by experimental carbon markets which have

experienced large price fluctuations in the process of their establishment. Ongoing

attempts to reinstate the carbon-life of oil as a political problematic, focus on what

kinds of interventions might be able to repair the failures of carbon markets which to

date have reduced the price of carbon to less than one euro per TCO2e.

Carbon Reductions beyond Trading

Whilst the Kyoto protocol’s aim of reducing carbon emissions by making states

responsible for their territorial carbon emissions has been analysed in the literature

largely in terms of carbon trading, emissions trading in fact only accounts for a certain

percentage of the territorial emissions reductions that were required under the Kyoto

Protocol. Fankhauser and Skia (2009) have suggested that at least a third of overall

emissions reductions targets in the UK, for example, are expected to come from direct

reductions in the use of fossil fuels in sectors which are not covered by the emissions

trading schemes. Beyond carbon trading schemes then, an extended range of

techniques and methods have been under development which aim to directly reduce

carbon emissions and I suggest that these have also had the effect of disrupting what

we are terming here ‘oil talk’.

In this section I will draw on ethnographic work that I have been conducting on

attempts to bring about territorial emissions reductions through interventions into this

non-tradable domain in order to explore what these activities have been doing to the

conceptualisation and discussion of oil. Since 2010 I have been following activities of

people in Manchester who have been involved in strategic attempts and specific

initiatives to try to bring about reductions in carbon emissions through direct

transformations in energy use. Like other cities and regions that have pursued direct

reductions in carbon emissions (cf. While et al 2004, Rutland and Aylett 2008, Jonas

et al 2011) the primary focus of work in Manchester has been on how to increase the

energy efficiency of buildings and transport, and how to reduce the consumption of

energy through attempts at cultural or behavioural change.

The development of solutions to reduce carbon emissions in Manchester has been

oriented by an initial analysis which calculated the potential carbon emissions

reductions achievable within the local economy. Arriving at this base-line information

required definitional work which was carried out by scientists working for the Tyndall

Centre for Climate Research in Manchester. The scientists who carried out the

analysis utilised a cost-benefit model called MARKAL which works out the most

economically efficient way of dealing with carbon reductions in order to determine

where policy interventions for carbon reduction would be most effective. The model,

which had previously been used by the Committee on Climate Change to work out

UK emissions reductions targets, was applied to Manchester to work out a ‘realistic’

distribution of carbon reductions at the city level. Using ‘marginal abatement cost

curves’, the model promised to demonstrate the relationship between the impact of

different carbon reduction measures and the cost of achieving those reductions.

According to one of the scientists at the Tyndall Centre, the model assumes that ‘if the

cost is right the change will happen’. Whilst recognising that ‘it is more complicated

than that’, the scientists argued that model nevertheless produced a viable basis upon

which to frame the kinds of energy reductions that should be aimed for within the key

areas of action that the report identified: buildings, transport and energy, and within

what timescale. The purpose of the calculations was to arrive at a set of figures that

would both be indicative of what needed to be done to avoid catastrophic global

warming, and which realistically apportioned sites of action according to where

current technologies and methods of intervention were deemed to be already

economically viable.

One effect of the model, then, was to establish a direct relationship between the

ambition of reducing carbon and the financial implications of these activities. The

model incorporated calculations of both the costs associated with implementing

carbon reduction measures, and the potential cost savings that could be made by

reductions in fuel use which would result from the installation of these measures. In

aligning carbon reduction and cost in this model, oil and other fuels were

conceptualised as convertible both into carbon and, simultaneously, into cost savings.

Reconfiguring energy usage in terms of carbon reductions and cost savings was also

central to the broader use of carbon footprints as a technique that was being used to

help reduce people’s personal consumption of fuel and reducing the consumption of

fuel by businesses. An environmental organisation working in Manchester at the time

of my fieldwork, which I will call Efficas, was working with businesses to help them

achieve what they called ‘resource efficiencies’. A key part of the work of Efficas was

to assist in the overall reductions of carbon emissions for Manchester by encouraging

businesses to invest in technologies and management techniques that would reduce

both their carbon emissions and their energy costs. Companies who signed up to the

programme were visited by an analyst who conducted an audit of their business

mapping the various resources that they used in their organisation, including different

fuels, and then entering them into a spreadsheet. The figures on the quantities of

resources used by the business were then channelled through a set of ‘conversion

factors’. These conversion factors are standardised calculations which are updated

each year by the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), and which

enable a particular quantity of any fuel to be translated both into TCO2e and into cost.

In this way it was possible for a direct relationship to be established between energy

saving, carbon saving and cost saving, each capable of being converted into the others

at the click of a button.

So, what have the effects of these conversions been on the status and

conceptualisation of oil? Firstly I suggest that the act of conversion has focused

attention on the primary issue facing surrounding the use of fuel to be a problem of

quantity. In contrast to what Urry (2010) has characterised as a contemporary ‘culture

of excess’, which is preoccupied primarily with capital and resource accumulation and

ever increasing consumption, conversions between energy, carbon and money have

had the effect of introducing a politics of efficiency into discussions about the proper

manner of consuming fuel stuffs like oil.

One perennial problem that is posed as a result of rendering of fossil-fuels and other

resource as substances that need to be saved rather than expended, is the question of

what then happens to the money that is saved through efficiency drives. An oft

repeated example is the imagined scenario where a householder saves several hundred

pounds on energy costs by insulating their home, but spends the money that they have

saved on an overseas flight. Not only then, does the convertibility of energy into

carbon and into money create the foundation for an approach to fuel that is framed by

the question of efficiency, but it simultaneously raises the spectre of a twin problem

of what I will call here ‘transference’. Because almost everything that people living in

Manchester do, is understood to be based on carbon producing activities the issue thus

shifts from a question of how to improve the efficiency of people’s use of fossil fuels

like oil, to the problem of how to incorporate an understanding of the latent energetic

qualities of all of the things that they could potentially spend money on.

In order to tackle this problem, organisations like Efficas have begun to attempt to

understand not just the carbon impact of the use of particular fuels but to analyse the

carbon impact of all ‘resource use’. Unlike the Markal model, which was used to

calculate carbon reduction targets for Manchester as a whole and which focused just

on carbon dioxide emissions from the direct burning of fossil fuels within the city

boundaries or the use of electricity by city businesses and residents, carbon

footprinting which is carried out both for businesses and for individuals increasingly

incorporates an analysis of the carbon impact of things other than fuel. Rather than

focusing just on gas and oil (‘scope 1’ emissions) and electricity (‘scope 2’

emissions), resource efficiency and ecological footprinting techniques also

incorporate what are known as ‘scope 3’ emissions – that is those emissions that are

generated in the course of producing or disposing of any good or service.

Keen to pursue the most effective and transparent approach to carbon reduction

measures, since 2011 members of the city council environment team have been

pursuing the possibility of extending the measurement of carbon emissions conducted

by the Tyndall Centre scientists to move away from a focus just on fuel use as the

basis for a territorial measure of carbon reductions. The aim of the new analysis is to

include not just the carbon effects of the fuel burnt and electricity used within the

territorial boundaries of the city, but to acknowledge the broader responsibility that

the city and its residents should have for consuming goods and services whose carbon

production and distribution is located outside the territorial boundaries of the city. To

this end, the city council has been involved in attempts to develop an alternative way

of measuring carbon to that used in the Kyoto agreements, which has come to be

called ‘Total Carbon Footprinting’.

In 2011 Manchester City Council commissioned a report from an independent

consultancy called Small World Consulting, the Managing Director of which is also

the author of a popular book on consumption based carbon footprinting entitled ‘How

Bad Are Bananas’ (Berners-Lee, 2009). The book, written in a playful and accessible

style, sets out to demonstrate the counterintuitive effects of consumption-based

carbon emissions measurement, and promotes an educational message to help people

make the right consumption choices to reduce their carbon-producing behaviour.

Building up an escalating picture of the carbon producing effects of different

activities, the author discovers that reusing plastic bags has a minor carbon effect

compared to stopping eating meat and that flying on an aeroplane is about the worst

single thing you can do as an individual to emit carbon. The central aim of the book is

to provide people with the tools through which they can deal with the problem of

transference which lies at the heart of attempts to be environmentally aware by

pursuing cost savings through energy efficiency. The book provides a map of

consumption choices that people can make if they want to simultaneously participate

in a consumer society, and save carbon.

Building on the methodology used in this book, in 2011 Small World Consulting

developed a total carbon footprint for the whole of Greater Manchester. This resulted

in a pie chart which demonstrated where most of the carbon was currently expended

in the consumption habits of Manchester residents (fig. 1). What was most striking

was the relatively significant impact of activities that were not covered by the original

Tyndall report on the city’s contribution to climate change. Transport and Buildings

as sites of energy reduction activities now appeared alongside a new set of areas of

potential intervention, with the largest new area of intervention appearing to be food.

Fig 1. The greenhouse gas footprint of Greater Manchester residents broken down by

consumption category (total 41.2 million tonnes CO2e). Source: The Total Carbon

Footprint of Greater Manchester, 2011, Small World Consulting.

One of the immediate effects of re-analysing the activities that were responsible for

the city’s contribution to climate change, was that the work that had been done to

achieve reductions in carbon emissions by reducing the use of fuel by local businesses

and residents was being replaced by figures that showed that the carbon footprint of

the city, far from gradually being reduced, was in fact increasing. A UK analysis

using a similar methodology demonstrated that far from having reduced its carbon

emissions by the celebrated figure of 15% between 1990 and 2005, the UK could be

shown to have actually significantly increased emissions since 1990 by 19% (Helm,

2012). Why then, was this the case and what were its implications for our present

discussion about oil?

On the 17th January 2012, both Mike Berners-Lee and a representative from

Manchester City Council debated this very question at a meeting of the UK Energy

and Climate Change Committee at the House of Commons, which had been convened

to gather expert advice on the possibilities and limits of total carbon footprinting.

According to the discussion in the Committee meeting, and the diagnosis of others in

Manchester with whom I discussed the possible advantages and disadvantages of total

carbon footprinting, the reason why total carbon footprinting appears to increase the

UK’s responsibility for carbon emissions is that it expands the definition of territorial

emissions to consider all of the carbon dioxide emitted in the supply chain activities

that go into producing goods and services that are consumed in a single country. In

terms of what this does to fuels like oil, a shift from the ‘direct emissions’ method of

reporting which was established in the Kyoto Protocol to total carbon footprinting has

the effect of redistributing the locations where oil can be conceptually located.

Moving away from thinking of oil as a tangible substance existing in a particular time

and place, total carbon footprinting instead reconfigures oil and other fossil fuels as a

kind of echo or ghostly presence, imperceptibly contained in the biographies of all

goods and services. Total carbon footprinting thus appears to shift attention away

from oil itself as an identifiable thing in its own domain. Instead it dissipates fossil

fuels into a component of everything, establishing a potential carbon equivalence not

just between different kinds of fuel, but between all things and activities.

The analysis provided by total carbon footprinting thus draws attention away from the

commodity status of objects in their own right, towards the question of any object’s

energetic biography. One effect of an increased awareness of the carbon life of all

objects has been to draw attention to the problem of definitional instability. One

example that was often given to illustrate this instability was strawberries. During an

interview with the head of environment and energy at a medium sized supermarket

chain, he reflected upon the way in which his organisation had dealt with the often

counter-intuitive findings of carbon footprinting by recounting what had happened

when they too had conducted a carbon footprint of the strawberries that the

supermarket stocked. A carbon-biography of different strawberries had revealed that

the strawberries that they sourced from Scotland were, suprisingly, responsible for a

far larger carbon footprint than those they imported from Spain. This turned on its

head a general conceit that imported goods are more carbon-intensive than non-

imported goods because of the fuel expended in transporting them. In this case, the

reason for the difference came down to production methods. The footprinting had

shown that Scottish strawberries had been grown using peat, an agricultural material

that had a much greater carbon impact than the fuel burned in the transportation of

Spanish strawberries to the UK.

If the immediate effect of total carbon footprinting was to reveal suprising figures on

the carbon life of different objects, the issue of how to act on this information soon

drew attention to the politics of intervention. One of the primary concerns about the

interventions that total carbon footprinting would require to achieve a reduction in the

carbon emissions of goods and services, was the geo-politics this these interventions

would set in play. Although the methodology is not yet widely used, during the

Energy and Climate Change Committee hearing there were several scenarios put

forward which imagined the geopolitical implications of introducing a method like

total carbon footprinting. With total carbon footprinting appearing to enjoin

developed countries like the UK to acknowledge a greater contribution to climate

change than that identified in the Kyoto Protocol, one issue that arose was the extent

to which the UK should be expected to directly intervene in the production methods

of companies that produced things that were consumed in Britain, but which were

themselves located under different legal and regulatory regimes. People were

concerned about the political and moral implications of interventions into the energy

decisions of other countries that were currently protected from having to pursue a

legally binding reduction in fossil fuel emissions. Others put forward more pragmatic

arguments, suggesting that carbon pricing, if it could be made to work, would likely

raise the cost of commodities produced overseas because few attempts had yet been

made to reduce direct carbon emissions in many countries from which manufactured

goods consumed in the UK derive. Pre-emptively intervening in the energy systems of

developing countries was in this instance conceived less a form of ideological

imperialism and more a matter of national security: protecting one’s own citizens

against rising commodity prices becomes recognised as a necessity once all objects,

all commodities and all processes are re-imagined as materialisations of a chain of

relations which is revealed by a shift in attention to the carbon composition of fossil

fuels like oil.

Conclusion

In a recent article on carbon markets, Anders Blok describes the circulation of

conceptualisation and reifications of both global climate change and units of carbon as

what he calls ‘overlapping and clashing cosmograms’ (Blok 2010:910). Yet for Blok,

like for many others who are working to understand the complexities of global

climate change and contemporary energy politics, the dynamics of overlap and clash

are mainly analyzed in terms of their existence in the field defined by the focus of

analysis. As Bridge has pointed out, research on climate change and research on

energy continue to be pursued along parallel trajectories with few attempting to

explore the manifold interferences that we find between these two domains (Bridge,

2011, Lovell et al 2009). Inspired in large part by the same theoretical debates and

conceptual repertoires as Blok, the purpose of this chapter has been to shift beyond an

analysis of the technopolitical dynamics which might explain the epistemological

emergence and cultural significance of either climate change (Szerszinsky and Urry

2010, Wynne 2010) or energy politics (Nye 1990, Coronil 1997, Winther 2008,

Mitchell 2010) and to observe how the domains of expertise being developed around

carbon in response to scientific evidence on climate change is affecting the coherence

and stability of what we might call, following Blok, the ‘cosmograms’ of oil.

The Kyoto protocol was put in place in 1997 but yet since then global carbon

emissions have continued their exponential rise. In spite of proven emissions

reductions in some developed countries, overall global emissions appear to have been

hardly affected by the measures that have been put in place. The analysis provided

here gives some clues as to why. Whilst the transformation of fossil fuels into carbon

aimed to incentivize industries to invest in low carbon alternatives, the establishment

of an equivalence between fossil fuels and other entities that could also be conceived

in terms of their carbon properties, also had the effect of protecting oil talk from its

re-conceptualization in terms of carbon through what I have called a technique of

substitutability. This is not to say that fossil fuels have not been unsettled by moves to

re-conceptualise them in terms of their carbon polluting qualities. However, the

destabilization of oil and other fossil fuels has been accompanied by considerable

analytical, institutional, political and technical repair work that has attempted to

reinstate the purification (Latour, 1993) of fossil fuels allowing them to remain

primarily conceived as a ‘standing reserve’ for future human use.

In activities which have been focused on reducing territorial emissions through the

promotion of energy efficiency, this work has proceeded through techniques which

have aimed to establish a convertibility between energy, carbon and cost. However, as

we have seen, this in turn has produced a problem of transference, where

efficiencies/carbon savings achieved in one sphere of activity risk being undone by

spending/carbon expenditure in another. In response to the problem of transference I

have considered the implications for fossil fuels of a new method of measurement

which has been proposed in the context of my fieldwork on climate change mitigation

in Manchester, the method of total carbon footprinting.

Although recommendations are beginning to be made to shift the measurement of

carbon from a direct emissions-based method of measurement to a total carbon

footprinting based method, it remains to be seen what the actual effects will be on oil

talk. We have seen some tentative speculations as to what these might be, in terms of

both a moral crusade to implore other countries to also invest in energy efficiency

measures, and a pragmatic sense of the need for preemptive action against future

commodity costs that might be affected by taxes on pollution. For those who hope

that total carbon footprinting techniques hold the key to developing new forms of

legislation that might prove more effective than the Kyoto protocol at reducing carbon

emissions, it would seem imperative however, not just to assume that metrics change

the choice of which substance to use, but to acknowledge that the substantive stability

of different fuel stuffs is a simultaneously social, cultural and technical achievement.

As we move forward, understanding the politics of oil in the context of transition will,

I suggest, benefit from an ongoing attention to the interplay between different

methods of calculation, enumeration and definition through which the objects and

subjects of climate change and energy will continue to form themselves anew.

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