Carbon

Kate Ervine

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781509501120, 9781509501113
• eBook ISBN: 9781509501151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Agriculture
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Carbon is the political challenge of our time. While critical to supporting life on Earth, too much carbon threatens to destroy life as we know it, with rising sea levels, crippling droughts, and catastrophic floods sounding the alarm on a future now upon us. How did we get here and what must be done?

In this incisive book, Kate Ervine unravels carbon's distinct political economy, arguing that, to understand global warming and why it remains so difficult to address, we must go back to the origins of industrial capitalism and its swelling dependence on carbon-intensive fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas – to grease the wheels of growth and profitability. Taking the reader from carbon dioxide as chemical compound abundant in nature to carbon dioxide as greenhouse gas, from the role of carbon in the rise of global capitalism to its role in reinforcing and expanding existing patterns of global inequality, and from carbon as object of environmental governance to carbon as tradable commodity, Ervine exposes emerging struggles to decarbonize our societies for what they are: battles over the very meaning of democracy and social and ecological justice.

CHAPTER ONE
The Problem of Carbon

It is only fairly recently that carbon has become an issue of grave concern globally, a major preoccupation for politicians, activists, citizens, and business leaders worldwide. If in the past many were content to leave the study of carbon to the natural sciences, this is no longer the case, primarily because carbon – or, more specifically, carbon dioxide – is the main heat-trapping gas in our atmosphere and it is dangerously warming our planet. And because of carbon’s central role in contributing to global climate change, it has become one of the world’s most contested resources. This condition is nothing if not paradoxical; while carbon is absolutely essential to supporting life on Earth, too much of it threatens to destroy life as we know it. This book has been written in part so that we might demystify the paradox. Indeed, if we are to have any hope of understanding how it has come to pass that carbon, this most critical of chemical elements, without which none of us would exist, has been transformed into an element capable of stoking our deepest existential anxieties, we must take the carbon out of ‘nature’, so to speak, situating it within the broader political, economic, social, and cultural processes that have shaped human history, good and bad, since the onset of the industrial era. Especially central to this history are fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas – whose energetic properties have powered economic growth and development globally since the onset of industrial capitalism over 200 years ago, and whose burning releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. At the time of writing, fossil fuels continue to make up over 80 per cent of the world’s energy mix, responsible for over 90 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions between 2000 and 2011. These figures hint at why dealing with global climate change has become so utterly intractable; as we will see below, carbon is embedded in the very fabric of contemporary society and its specific brand of politics, presenting us with one of the most complex and far-reaching problems ever to face humanity.

In order to illustrate this, it is fitting to begin a book on carbon with a reflection on the politics of the everyday. By drawing attention to mundane lived experiences, we are better positioned to recognize carbon’s ubiquity in so much of what it is we do. For me, today was a day that started like most. After waking to the sound of my electric alarm clock, I got out of bed, flicked on the lights, and took a hot shower powered by our electric water heater. From there, I turned up the oil-generated heat in our house, fed our cat her refrigerated food made with industrial chicken not destined for human consumption, and got myself ready for the day. The other members of my family engaged in a similar ritual, finally meeting downstairs to make breakfast. Without electricity – approximately 70 per cent of which comes from fossil fuels in my home province of Nova Scotia, Canada, with 55 per cent of that coming from coal, the most carbon-intensive of all fossil fuels – our fridge and blender would have been useless, while, without fossil-fuelled long-distance trade, shipping, and industrial agriculture, the bananas from Ecuador, apples from the United States, and hemp seeds from Manitoba would not have been available, especially in the middle of the Canadian winter. Having finished all of this, the kids went off to school and daycare with their dad in the family’s gas-powered car. I now sit at my laptop computer – one of two in the house – drinking coffee from Nicaragua, beginning a day of work from home. The pathway that eventually got me here included my time as a university student in the Canadian province of Ontario, when I was lucky enough to land a coveted high-paying job for three summers at General Motors, the auto manufacturer that employed my father for some forty years. As a graduate student, I was even luckier in securing a well-paid job for two summers in a steel mill. These jobs, in two of the most carbon-intensive industries globally, were critical sources of income to pay my tuition, my relationship with General Motors extending back to the day I was born and the income it provided to my family to buy the food, clothes, and shelter necessary for survival. Without a doubt – and whether I like it or not – my fossil-fuelled life, past, present, and future, is intensely carbonized, and it is certainly not unique.

Global society today is more fully fossil-fuelled and carbonized than at any point in history, with carbon emissions in 2017 reaching their highest level ever. While inequalities of power, class, race, gender, and geography mean that the extent of fossil fuel use and subsequent carbon emissions vary dramatically between individuals and countries, most of us are, nevertheless, deeply embedded in complex carbon networks and dependencies that are structured according to historically rooted patterns of growth and development. Dealing with the threat of too much carbon becomes especially difficult in this context. On the one hand, advanced consumer societies carry with them a particular cultural politics whose roots reach back to the advent of industrial capitalism, a system that emerged in tandem with stunning advances in science and technology. Though the expansion of this system has depended deeply on the exploitation and oppression of so many of the world’s peoples and environments, it has, nevertheless, always carried with it the promise of emancipation. In this, the grand narratives that continue to define what remains a largely fossil-fuelled and carbon-intensive industrial capitalism are rooted in powerful notions of the ‘good life’ – modernity, linear progress, security, and comfort. There is much that we as individuals have invested in sustaining these civilizational narratives, for acknowledging their cracks strikes at the very heart of whom we tell ourselves we are, and what we hope for ourselves and for our futures. On the other hand, addressing the problem of too much carbon is significantly complicated by the very basic necessities of biological and social reproduction. Where does one work to feed, clothe, and shelter their family, or to pay for school? How does one heat their home, keep the lights on, and cook their food? In this, the life opportunities of many, worldwide, remain dependent upon carbon-intensive modes of production and income. And while there are many across the globe who do not accept industrial society’s grand narratives, and many whose livelihoods remain minimally carbonized, the truth of the matter is that too many of us are fully immersed within and dependent upon carbon in one form or another, with our political systems all too often structured to respond to the interests of those with the greatest stake in maintaining business as usual.

According to scholars publishing in the prestigious science journal Nature in 2015, in order to have a 50/50 chance of limiting global temperature increase to below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels – the politically agreed, though insufficient, limit past which dangerous and catastrophic climate change is all but assured – 88 per cent of global coal reserves, 52 per cent of global gas reserves, and 35 per cent of global oil reserves cannot be burned. If you find 50/50 odds highly unsettling when gambling on the future of our planet, you would probably agree that those percentages demand a significant upward revision. Yet, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency (IEA), global fossil fuel subsidies on a pre-tax basis were US$493 billion in 2014. When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) calculated these subsidies on a post-tax basis to account for the social and environmental harm associated with fossil fuel use, they ballooned to over $5 trillion. Meanwhile, global subsidies to the renewable energy sector in 2014 were estimated at $120 billion, four times less than pre-tax subsidies for planet-warming fossil fuels. In spite of the scientific data predicting that we could be on course to a disastrous temperature increase of 3–6 °C above pre-industrial levels, hundreds of billions are spent every year to find, extract, and burn more fossil fuels than we can ever use, with trillions more spent to deal with the devastating environmental and social costs of our fossil fuel addiction. Given that over 90 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions come from fossil fuel combustion and cement production, with land use change, including agriculture and deforestation, responsible for the remaining 10 per cent, a book about carbon is necessarily a book about fossil fuels due to their disproportionate contribution to global climate change.¹

While it is tempting to reduce the problem of transitioning away from fossil fuels to a technical issue – one of simply replacing carbon-intensive energy sources with non-carbon energy sources – the carbonized networks, structures, and dependencies discussed above are shaped profoundly by very specific relations of power and wealth globally; a transition away from these networks, structures, and dependencies represents, thus, a serious threat to those who disproportionately benefit and profit from them. This is what makes carbon, in part, so deeply contested and conflictual. While fossil fuel companies are some of the most obvious beneficiaries of this system – recent research reveals that a mere twenty-five of these companies are responsible for half of all carbon emissions since 1988 – the benefits extend well beyond specific companies. When measured on a per capita basis, World Bank data shows that, between 2011 and 2015, the average Canadian citizen emitted 14.1 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) per year, the average American 17.0, and the average German 8.9. This compared to the average Chinese citizen’s per capita emissions of 6.7, the average Indian’s of 1.7, and the average Sierra Leonean of 0.2.² While per capita statistics fail to tell us who is emitting the most in any particular country, and we know that wealthy sectors of the population have higher carbon footprints than their lower-income and poor counterparts, this data hints at how carbon is implicated in global patterns of wealth and inequality. One of the most contentious issues that has complicated global efforts to address the problem of too much carbon has to do with the fact that it was precisely through carbon-intensive fossil-fuelled growth that the global North was able to achieve its advanced levels of wealth and development. And, in so many instances, this wealth and development depended on colonizing nations and peoples around the world, devastating their populations and limiting their ability to replicate the carbon-intensive path pursued by the North. This history, within which the few have consumed and polluted far beyond their fair share, simultaneously leaves the world’s poor and marginalized, those least responsible for climate change, bearing the devastating brunt of its impacts. There is a compelling case to be made that a book about carbon must also be a book about the quest for social and environmental justice and democracy, given the role carbon has played and is playing in our profoundly unequal world.

In the pages that follow, the story of carbon will unfold. Starting with the carbon atom, ubiquitous in nature and without which life on Earth would not be possible, we’ll examine how the planet’s long-term carbon cycle, largely stable for hundreds of millions of years, began to experience a dramatic destabilization some 200 years ago, with concentrations of CO₂ beginning their dramatic ascent to their present levels. From there, we will consider the perilous path that is unfolding with too much carbon in the atmosphere, examining its impacts in the here and now, along with the deep threats it poses to the future of human life on this planet. All of this will prepare the groundwork for chapter 2 and its focus on how we got here, and why it remains so difficult to kick the carbon habit.

Carbon as life

Carbon – C in the periodic table – is a chemical element abundant in the world around us. In its purest state, it is the diamond on one’s finger or the graphite in your pencil, but, once joined to other elements, it forms carbon compounds, of which there are millions. Carbon and its compounds are essential building blocks supporting all forms of life on Earth, but when it comes to this most critical of elements, you can have too much of a good thing. The carbon that forms the backdrop to this book, and whose increasing abundance in the earth’s atmosphere has already begun to warm the planet in highly destructive ways, is carbon dioxide, or CO₂, a gaseous compound forged when carbon and oxygen atoms bond. Before getting to CO₂ as greenhouse gas, however, it is useful to review why we cannot live without it.

All life forms on Earth need carbon’s energy to sustain that life, and to grow and thrive. We can trace carbon’s path to us as humans by starting with photosynthesis, the process through which the sun’s solar energy is captured and used by plants, algae, and some bacteria to convert atmospheric CO₂ and water into carbon compounds such as glucose, starch, and cellulose, used in the development of these species. These autotrophs, so named because they produce their own energy through photosynthesis, then serve a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 The Problem of Carbon
• 2 The Global Political Economy of Carbon
• 3 Trading Carbon to Cool the World?
• 4 Carbon Transitions
• 5 The Future of Carbon Politics
• Selected Readings
• Index
• End User License Agreement