VOLUME 42

Carbon Metrics
Global abstractions andecological epistemicide

An essay by Camila Moreno, Daniel Speich Chassé and Lili Fuhr

CARBON METRICS

PUBLICATION SERIES ECOLOGYVOLUME 42

Carbon Metrics

Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide
An essay by Camila Moreno, Daniel Speich Chassé and Lili Fuhr
With an introductory preface by Wolfgang Sachs

Edited by the Heinrich Böll Foundation

The authors
Camila  Moreno is a researcher at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro and follows climate
negotiations since 2008. Her main study subject has been the interfaces between reasoning on climate change and the greening of capitalism. Her forthcoming book Carbon Metrics and the New Colonial Equations will be launched in Brazil mid 2016. Contact: cc_moreno@yahoo.com
Daniel  Speich Chassé is professor for history at the University of Lucerne. He studies the evolution ofknowledge systems in the modern world since 1800. He focusses on the governance of the environment and the economy. His most recent monograph inquires into the global working of the economic
abstraction of a GDP.
Lili  Fuhr heads the Ecology and Sustainable Development Department at the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftungin Berlin. Her work focusses on international climate and resource politics. Contact: fuhr@boell.de

Photo credits
S. 15 Kyle Spradley – Flickr (cc 2.0 by-nc, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0)
S. 24 Erich Ferdinand – Flickr (cc 2.0 by, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)
S. 32 Carbon Visuals – Flickr (cc 2.0 by, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)
S. 39 Carbon Visuals – Flickr (cc 2.0 by, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)
S. 44 Balaji Kasirajan – Wikimedia (cc 3.0 by-sa, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
S. 51 Axel Hartmann – Flickr (cc 2.0 by-sa, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)

Published under the following Creative Commons License:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 . Attribution — You must attribute the workin the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or youruse of the work). Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No derivatives — If you
remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.

Carbon Metrics – Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide
An essay by Camila Moreno, Daniel Speich Chassé and Lili Fuhr
Volume 42 of the Publication Series Ecology
Edited by the Heinrich Böll Foundation 2015 (second revised edition 2016)
Design: feinkost Designnetzwerk, Sebastian Langer (predesigned by State)
Copy-Editing and translation (preface): Christopher Hay
Cover photo: The Ameriflux tower at Baskett Wildlife Research and Education Center, USA. The 100foot tower is part of a global network of sites that are outfitted with analytical equipment measuring
CO2 etc. [Kyle Spradley – Flickr (cc 2.0 by-nc, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0)]
Printing: Druckerei Arnold, Großbeeren
ISBN 978-3-86928-145-2
This publication can be ordered from: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Schumannstraße 8, 10117 Berlin
T +49 30 28534-0  F +49 30 28534-109  E buchversand@boell.de  W www.boell.deCONTENTS

Preface
Introduction

7
9

1. Calories and temperature13

2. Carbon accounting

16

3. Economic growth accounting

22

4. Increasing visibility and invisibility at the same time30

5. Decarbonization?

41

6. Metric mindset, capitalism and epistemicide

48

Concluding remarks

53

Preface

PREFACEThis publication is a warning call. But warning of what? That we are being misguided
by the dominant discourse on halting catastrophic climate change. That some solutions could actually exacerbate the disaster. That the style of thinking advocated for
managing it could result in a less hospitable world. The heat is on, and we are in danger of leaping out of the frying pan into the fire.
Usually climate negotiations are publicly pilloried for creating confusion aroundthe problem and delaying action. But the time has also come to inquire into theirunintended effects on our thinking. So the authors of this essay have little interest ina first-order critique of the kind that has already and amply been set forth by numerous commentaries and conference observers. Instead, they are concerned with a second-order critique, because they ask: What do strategies for managing climate change
do to us and to our relationship with nature and society? Some strategies may be more
effective than others, but what consequences do they have for our worldview and ourself-conception? This line of questioning is reflective; it asks about the world we are
creating when we undertake particular reforms. And this is not done nearly enoughin environmental policy, or global domestic policy, which has been its real status forsome long time.
Tinkering with climate policy goes on all over the world. At the Earth Summit heldin Rio de Janeiro in 1992, it was announced that a silver bullet had been found: climate policy means reducing CO2 emissions; in other words, tackling the output side.
Accordingly, in the ensuing period, cars and household appliances, power plants andentire industries were made more efficient. Yet even back then, other approaches
would have been worth a try. The input side could have been tackled, for example, bylimiting fossil fuel prospecting and extraction rights or regulating mining and oil companies. A history of environmental policy as the history of forgotten alternatives has
not yet been written. And that story would give a prominent place to a second wrong
turn in global climate policy: the fungibility of emissions arising from the burning offossil fuels against emissions coming from land, plants and animals, i.e. biological processes. Only this fungibility creates the perception of paddy fields and cows as emission sources and tropical forests and bogs as emissions sinks – expressed in units ofcalculation known as CO2 equivalents. Decisions like these came along camouflaged
as science, but have enormous political consequences. And a third misstep: trading inemissions certificates. «More flexibility» was the watchword of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which is used by the industrialized nations to this day to dodge some of their absolute domestic reduction commitments by contributing to relative emissions reduction
beyond their borders. Not only did this water down global climate change mitigation

7

Berlin, October 2015
Wolfgang Sachs
8

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

but definitively steered it into the complexity trap. At the same time, it paved the way
for a stealthy reinterpretation of reality: the carbon-centred worldview.
Against this backdrop, the authors draw our attention to a key concept that has
migrated from the natural sciences into policy jargon and common parlance alike.
A few years ago «carbon» would still have required some explanation; today everybody talks about it. No climate negotiations without «carbon accounting», no green
consumer without a «carbon footprint», no climate impact without «carbon offsetting». This year, «decarbonization» even found its way through the hallowed portalsof the G7 Summit at Elmau Castle. Undoubtedly the actors are acting out of concern
for the climate, but they are not in the habit of holding themselves accountable forthe implications when eco-radical reforms suddenly turn into global policy proposals.
The present text offers a tentative answer to this. What are the implications, if «carbon»
becomes the accounting unit of society? What are the implications for dealing withthe crisis of nature? Does it foster or hinder a turnaround in policy and mentality?
Scepticism is appropriate, and not without good reason. For modern societies
have learned certain lessons about figures. An illustrative example is GDP: The calculation of economic output in terms of gross domestic product was certainly innovation at the time of the Second World War, but in the following decades it turned into astatistical custom with a trophy-like quality, and ultimately a frustration from which
there is almost no escape. GDP hogs the limelight like an all-powerful autocrat, bathing the money economy in its glare and consigning the non-economic values to darkness. Thus, GDP epitomizes the monstrous distortion of our economic system. Is there
a risk of a similar trajectory – from innovation via custom to frustration – if «carbon» ismade the negative measure of prosperity for all societies?
Quantification can be illuminating but it can also act as a blindfold. Like car headlamps on full beam: within the light cone, the view of the road is crystal clear, but
outside it the blackness of the night is all the more striking. Seeing the world in carbon
units has a similar headlamp effect. If we go over to calculating and comparing all
nations and economic activities in carbon units, we become blind to other requirements in ecology and society. Blinded by numbers, we fail to see the diversity ofnature, culture and lifestyles – outright «epistemicide»! What is more, when carbon
units are bundled and sold on so-called carbon markets, norms like respect for nature,social cooperation and an individual sense of honour fall by the wayside.
The authors invite their readers to grasp a well-intentioned trend in climate policy
and brush it against the nap. In the process they demolish the famous maxim that we
can only manage what we can quantify numerically. That is the ideal pursued by conventional economics – under the added assumption that what is not countable does
not exist. The danger is that «carbon accounting» is just one more round in the historyof quantification, which is luring us rather more deeply into the «iron prison» (Max
Weber) of the modern age.

INTRODUCTION

Introduction

There is no doubt about the fact that the environmental crisis is real, urgent, and of
global reach and significance. We live in a time in which climate change is framed as
the largest and most urgent threat. Yet, surprisingly, this threat is seen almost exclusively as a problem of too much CO2 emissions to the atmosphere. Is global warming
the result of the «greatest market failure the world has seen» (Lord Nicholas Stern)?
Is climate change more important and more urgent than the loss of biodiversity, thedegradation of arable soils, or the depletion of fresh water? Can any of these phenomena even be considered in isolation from each other?
How exactly do we apprehend, talk about and communicate «humanity’s greatest
challenge» (Ban Ki-moon)?1 This paper argues that the way we describe and frame aproblem very much predetermines the kinds of solutions and answers that we canconsider. To be very clear: human-induced climate change is happening and happening fast. But exactly because of the urgency of the crisis we would like to invite
our readers to take a step back and reconsider how we frame the problem in the firstplace. Our argument is that while framing the problem in a specific, carbon-centricmode creates knowledge and possibilities for global communication and politicalaction, it also excludes and even destroys knowledge at the same time. We elaborateon the metrics of carbon, which creates a new global abstraction – and we ask for thecost of this form of communication. In this respect we talk of the risk of an ecological«epistemicide».
Climate change results from the burning of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are embedded in every realm of the material world as most people know it. Fossil fuels feed
the everyday flows of energy and matter around the globe that make the economy
and middle-class lifestyles what they are, in a truly all-embracing sense. This ranges
from food over synthetic clothing to the materials used to build houses and make theobjects that are omnipresent in daily life.
Try for a moment to abstract all plastic items from your life: from your toothbrushto your computer/cellphone case. Try, for instance, to abstract in a supermarket theadvent of plastic for the packaging industry and, thus, the possibility for the existence
and circulation of what we recognize and have naturalized as commodities – such as
bottled water. We live in a carbon society and around the word «carbon» we have beenshaping content and meaning that is central to political discourse and action in the
21st century.

1«Climate change is the single greatest threat to a sustainable future». http://www.un.org/sg/
statements/index.asp?nid=7592
9

2
3

10

Yergin, Daniel (2008): The Prize: the epic quest for oil, money & power. Free Press, New York.
Mitchell, Timothy (2011): Carbon Democracy. Political power in the age of oil. Verso, London/
New York.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

Petroleum is transmuted into a myriad of raw materials and products through thepetro-chemical industry, as is gas on a smaller scale. Oil, as a crude fuel (be it gasoline,
diesel, bunker fuel or other forms), feeds with gas and coal the fossil energy base-loadon which our globalized economy depends. Fossil energy is the central engine thathas historically been the material basis for the emergence of modern society since theindustrial revolution. When oil emerged and gained global scale from the late nineteenth century on, the infrastructures and networks to extract, transport, refine andburn carbon energy have materialized a geopolitical order.2 The current possibilities
and limits for political action and democracy are tied up with the growing recognition
that our de facto political system and political power are not primarily shaped by attitudes and ideas – instead we need to recognize how deeply we are embedded in the«socio-technical worlds» that characterize the age of oil.3
In order to challenge how deeply power is entrenched into what we ultimately
refer to, sometimes superficially, when we talk about «carbon», let’s think it through inan example that illustrates quite dramatically how dependent we are on fossil inputs
and their web of power, from cradle to grave: the global agro-food system, by which
we mean the production of grain and meat, but also fiber and, on a growing scale,biomass for agrofuels (biodiesel for your car, pellets for home heating, etc.) and industrial feedstocks. It was shaped over the last 50 years through the Green Revolution
and is maybe the strongest example of concentrated corporate power we all rely on.
This system was responsible for making the world food production and supply intrinsically – and dangerously – reliant on fossil inputs: to produce fertilizers and chemicals, to run on heavy mechanization, processing and long-distance transportation,
refrigeration and storage. To free the agro-food system from its fossil fuel dependencecannot be done without a radical transformation – and re-localization – of production
systems and trade, with impacts on recovering soils and resilient agro-biodiversity.
Such a shift will challenge the established or «given» diets (like the ones based on
the meat industry). It will have repercussions upon the availability of non-seasonal
year round products, fast-food culture, food prices, jobs, a fair balance between ruraland urban populations, local markets, land issues, insurances, public policies, etc. An
agro-ecological revolution in terms of practices and knowledge is needed to overcome
the oil-addicted paradigm and mindset of agrochemical agriculture. And this is just a
glimpse of what is at stake when we are talking about really «phasing out fossil fuels».
So how come the current discourse focuses on «carbon» and not on fossil fuels
when framing climate change? Is «decarbonization» of the economy a consistent andreliable pathway out of the climate crisis? We wish to elaborate an answer to this question which highlights the political dimensions. It is important to keep in mind thatthe products of just ninety private companies, state-owned enterprises and government-run industries (including the biggest producers of coal, oil, gas and cement) areresponsible for two thirds of global emissions to the atmosphere since the beginningIntroductionof industrialization.4 We argue in this paper that translating a multi-dimensional andcomplex ecological and social crisis such as climate change into tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (that we can measure, count, own, put a price to, and trade) not only
narrows our vision of what would be truly transformative actions, but allows the actors
and interests running the current system to remain unchallenged.
In constructing a political answer to the above question, we chose an epistemological and historical critique of the way in which global environmental crises are subject to knowledge regimes where our thinking must fit into the hegemonic framing of
the economic reason. Or to put it more clearly: we suggest studying quantification.
Indeed, quantification has become the chief mode of political communication andis strongly linked to the subjection of all possible social issues to an economic logic.
Quantification offers a kind of currency in international exchange and allows for aredistribution of responsibility in governing Planet Earth. Carbon counting is closely
connected to global communication, action and responsibility. It is merely the mostrecent example of the ubiquitous quantitative mode of communication. One of itsvery important predecessors was the counting/accounting of economic potential andperformance through the abstraction of a Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Our argument thus includes a historical primer on the evolution of national accounting overthe last seventy years.
The post-1945 era saw the turning of political issues into a quantitative mode.
The carbon metric bears witness to this move, which has a broader history. International organizations made global issues quantitative as of the founding of the United
Nations. The invention of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) allowed measuring the
economic productivity of any social group. The shorthand of a growth rate of GDP per
capita made past performances commensurable with current situations and brought
separate localities into one shared perspective. This global abstraction radically simplified political communication across the globe at the moment of imperial decline,
when a quickly growing number of allegedly independent new states came to replace
the imperial systems of domination. Almost overnight the world map was populatedwith many different countries at different levels of economic development and power
relations seemed utterly complicated and manifold. Equally today: green growth strategies try to take a short cut to solving the environmental crises by relying on one single measurable unit. Carbon metrics are a scale for environmental injustice; they arethought to offer a universal lens to see the world and the problems we face (as we live
in a CO2 society) and anchor a consistent indicator for environmental degradation;and they are thought to offer a policy tool to change the world.
The familiarity between counting economic potentials and carbon metrics is notaccidental. As we will recall in this paper, experts at the centers of global expertise(such as the World Bank) explicitly connect the issues, comparing natural capital
accounting – carbon included – to the earlier policy move, when GDP was invented.
Today, through a carbon metrics lens, the world consists of geographically very
diverse mitigation potentials measured in tons of CO2 equivalents. These units can
4www.carbonmajors.org
11

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

be «accounted» under an opportunity costs rationale. The trade-offs under this world
view may perfidiously pave the way for new resource grabs in the Global South, offering, for example, through offsets or the «net zero» sum, an easy way out for those witha lot to lose if we were to actually address the root causes of the problem and, instead,challenge the status quo of power distribution and historical responsibility.
In fact, counting has a history that counts. The shared historical logic in the production of global abstractions is what we would like to explore in this paper. The
assumed objectivity of counting environmental and economic global issues (be it carbon or GDP) can not be detached from the risk of over-simplifying complex issues,
thus making opaque – or even invisible – major issues of power.

12

1. Calories and temperature

1.			Calories and temperature

We count calories. Every industrialized bite we eat, sip or drink, or even the food wegive to our pets, has «nutritional information» printed on its label or packaging: themain element of this is the calorie content, expressing the «nutritional energy» of what
we are feeding into our bodies. We can read it and make sense of it because we have«calorie literacy». We are generally well informed and have somehow internalized thebasic calorie content of many things: a can of coke, a hamburger, a small portion of
French fries, one cup of rice, a chocolate bar, a banana, an apple, one table spoon ofjam, a slice of bread, a glass of beer and many other options, depending on your personal dietary concerns. We don't ask anymore how/when/why we have acquired thisskill, although all generations before us – considering when this phenomenon took
global scale about 20 or 30 years ago – never had this kind of information to makesense of their daily lives and what they were eating.
Of course in science the notion of calorie existed long before. But at some point,
as the influence and presence of industrialized food grew, «calorie literacy» became
an essential item of the repertoire of the modern and urbanized citizen. Today wehave online «calorie calculators» and all sorts of Apps that support and guide your«calorie accountancy». Counting calories can become an obsession and even hinders
truly healthy eating habits. We find it very natural to reduce what we should eat interms of nutrition to some recommended «daily calorie intake». If we are under a dietthat restricts calories, we can spend, for example, our entire daily «calorie budget» onchocolate or sausage and still consider ourselves on a diet, in caloric terms. But are wewell nourished?
Calories simplify complex things.5 They abstract and reduce the nutritional energy
provided by a certain food from its whole nutritional content. Have you ever heard
about «empty calories», food such as solid fats and/or added sugars supplying energy
but little or no other nutrition?
Over the years we have learned to read the labels for other «data» on nutritional
value beyond its expression in «calories»: we want to know how many calories arefrom proteins, total fats (and what percentage is saturated fat or transfat), or carbohydrates. The level of detail can become yet more complex, including dietary fibers,
sodium content, added vitamins, etc. We use this info to make informed choices that
affect our own health and well being, and for others if we are caring for someone likechildren or the elderly. There are scientifically established global parameters that recommend an ideal calorie intake per day and they differ with respect to age and sex. We
5Cullather, Nick: The Foreign Policy of the Calorie, in: American Historical Review 112 (2007) 2,
pp. 337-364.
13

6

14

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/calorie

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

access and measure hunger and undernourishment in calorie levels, despite knowingthat diets include many other relevant aspects, like culturally appropriate food, whichcannot be addressed solely in terms of numerical nutritional facts. Calorie intake canserve as an indicator of a successful policy or action – or to point out and prove its failure. Although nutrition is a complex issue, at the end of the day, if you are on the brinkof starvation or on a diet in order to lose weight, the calories are what count.
We can count calories and make sense of it in our brains and in our world because
we have acknowledged the notion of «calorie» as a global abstraction, a basic unit, aparameter universally agreed upon, that serves to measure and express «nutrition» ina scientifically and quantifiable, thus objective, manner. One calorie expresses a unitof «nutritional energy» defined as «the approximate amount of energy needed to raise
the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius».6
The centigrade – renamed in 1948 «Celsius», after the Swedish astronomer Anders
Celsius (1701-1744) – is the main scale with which we measure temperature. Fahrenheit and Kelvin are other existing thermometric scales, but they do not refer to decimals. Calories and centigrade are built upon a previous convention invented at someplace and time in history: the metric system.
We don't dispute the fact that we can all think and communicate in terms of Celsius degrees (C°). In fact, it is because we have the metric system (and the centigrade
scale within it), that we can communicate global warming as an objective, measurable, temperature change that features at the core of the 21st century global agenda.
This example shows why and how global abstractions need to be assessed in epistemological (i.e. cognitive) and political terms as well as with regard to their respective
historical contexts.
That we can frame a problem of such magnitude and complexity – climate change– in numeric and accountable terms is a consequence of a very specific frame of mind(or «mentalité», as the French call it), which is in itself the result of a historical process. Since its invention and dissemination/imposition around the world, the metric system was key in standardizing the way we think. It was also a major change in
how counting – and accounting – was wired into our minds and everyday practices insocial life to a point that today the very meaning and sense of «reasoning» have, to alarge extent, turned into the equivalents of mere «calculating». This refers to the circumstance that nowadays, commonsense reasoning, or the ability to make inferences
about properties and events in the everyday world, is being constantly dragged into –and reduced to – a cost-benefit analysis. With its origins in economic theories devisedin the 19th century, the concept of Homo oeconomicus portrays human rational choice
as judgments guided to maximize utility and economic profit, made by self-interested
actors. This debate goes beyond the scope of the argument presented here and entails
a multilayered and long-term socio-cultural process. However, the calculation of consequences and its pervasive effects on the widespread utilitarian approach to ethics is
an important dimension of the equation we want to highlight here.

The apprehension of reality in calculable units lies at the core of the way in which
we think today. It is the reason why we can frame – and reduce – key political issues of
our times in terms of a calculation of costs and benefits, and, for example, talk aboutclimate change in terms of the «price of inaction» (and the opportunities and profits
of action), or translate a major ecological crisis into the management of carbon units.
There are actors and economic interests that profit from this kind of mindset. In
the case of calories it is big food and retail companies wanting to sell their junk food
who are not interested in being held accountable for the damages their products are
causing. In the case of carbon the answer might not seem that obvious. What we would
like to bring to the public debate is the key role played by the carbon metrics agenda: it
implies a monumental shift in how we as a society are pre-determining and mediating
our access to, understanding of and action within the global environmental crisis. It
also pushes vested interests in the name of climate change while securing their profits.

Source: Kyle Spradley – Flickr

Checking the stats of the measuring system installed at the Ameriflux tower.

As we once started to count calories, we are now learning to count carbon. «Carbon»
as a unit of reference and intelligibility is embedded in many levels of our daily life,social contexts and interactions. We refer to «carbon» at this point of our argument
without getting more specific, because the simplicity of the notion is what makes it sopowerful. Our further reasoning aims at demonstrating the complexity of the issue.
Today consumers can calculate their own «carbon footprint» through a series of
online tools.7 The environmental impact of your lifestyle in terms of carbon is measured according to the type of house you live in (its size and with how many people
you share it), how much heating you use (and the fuel that powers it, whether it is gas,
diesel, wood pellets, etc.), whether your electricity comes from renewable sources, thekind of transport you take, if you fly, how much meat you eat, etc. As previously withcalories, we can now read the carbon content info on the label of our food that comesfrom the grocery shop. Products sold under the brand name Casino, a French supermarket group, come with a «carbon index», a proclaimed innovative labeling that
«allows a supplementary parameter for the shopper/consumer to become an «actor»of his/her consumer act».8This is related to the idea that besides accounting for carbon, neutralizing throughoffsetting carbon is rapidly being incorporated into a wide array of everyday actions,
gaining social meaning and becoming naturalized as part of a new form of calculus,
entrenched in the daily choices of the conscious consumer, all over the world. It is
possible to buy a plane ticket online and pay in the same transaction, with the same
credit card, to «neutralize» the «carbon footprint» of your travel. Think for example of
CO2ZERO by KLM, a program that says it offers «the easiest, most effective and least
costly way to fly CO2 neutral».9 While music bands release «carbon neutral» albums(as Coldplay or Pink Floyd do), fashion shows can be «neutralized» as much as mega
events such as the World Cups and the Olympic games. A decade ago, the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin and the 2006 World Cup in Germany inaugurated the format ofcarbon neutrality for large sporting events. The effectiveness of this «neutrality» hasbeen repeatedly contested and its impacts reported. This is becoming especially central with the growing acceptance of ideas such as «zero net emissions» within «decarbonization» plans. This point will be treated in a section further down the argument. 10
7
8
9
10

16

http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx
http://www.produits-casino.fr/developpement-durable/dd_indice-carbone-demarche.html
http://www.klm.com/travel/br_en/prepare_for_travel/fly_CO2_neutral/together/termsconditions.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/1517031/How-Coldplays-greenhopes-died-in-the-arid-soil-of-India.html

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide2.			Carbon accounting2. Carbon accounting

As with calories, there are hundreds of examples of how carbon awareness isalready becoming deeply rooted in our lives – and is here to stay. Most of those reading this text have at least basic «carbon literacy» and are increasingly acquiring «carbon accounting» skills. As reality can gradually be expressed, or reduced, in terms of«carbon» (content, intensity, equivalency, etc.) «carbon metrics» becomes a key reference to understand this new and fundamental dimension of how we perceive, measure, value, judge – and act upon – the world around us.
Over the last two decades at least, carbon dioxide (CO2), or the über simplified
term «carbon», has been growing in relevance as a fundamental category throughwhich we apprehend the world we live in. «Carbon» has become a central element
because it captures and communicates the Zeitgeist of our times: the obsession withclimate change and the threats it poses to the continuity of life on Earth.
Anthropogenic or human-induced climate change is equated with the intensification of the greenhouse effect through the release into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide (CO2) resulting from burning fossil fuels: coal, oil and gas. The greenhouse effectis a naturally occurring phenomenon: the trapping of heat in the atmosphere which
regulates Planet Earth’s temperature. In this process, greenhouse gases (GHGs) suchas water vapor (H2O), ozone (O3) or CO2 absorb and emit infrared radiation. However, since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have interfered in this process
through the increased release of (mainly) CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, leading toan increase in the parts per million (ppm) concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The increase in CO2 ppm is correlated to the rise in global average temperatures.
Under the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC) adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, countries
seek to limit the increase of the global average temperature to no more than 2˚C inrelation to pre-industrial levels – this is what is considered by current scientific knowledge to be a safe level of warming to avoid catastrophic consequences of climatechange. Since it was adopted over two decades ago, countries are still negotiating tofully implement the UNFCCC. The Paris Agreement signed in December 2015 madesome steps in that regard (we will come to the problems associated with that later).
Under the Convention, one important step was the adoption of the legally binding
Kyoto Protocol, which came into force in 2005, and set emission reduction targets andcommitment periods for countries listed in Annex I to the Protocol (i.e. developed
countries). The Kyoto Protocol regulates the following greenhouses gases: carbon
dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) and threegroups of fluorinated gases (chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)
and perfluorocarbons or fluorocarbons (PFCs)). Emissions of any of those gases canbe expressed in terms of a CO2 equivalent, of which the basic unit of reference is one
metric ton of CO2.
However, not all «emissions» are the same. They can be pulsating (sporadic) orsustained over time. Furthermore, each greenhouse gas has different properties, radiative forcing effects, and, as they can persist for long times in the atmosphere andemissions are cumulative over time, holds uncertainties. Each gas has distinct values according to its Global Warming Potential (GWP) or Global Temperature change
17

11

18

http://www.eia.gov/tools/glossary/index.cfm?id=G

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

Potential (GTP). While these metrics both serve to «weight» emissions, they also
differ fundamentally as they contain distinct limitations and implicit value-related
judgements. A chosen time horizon greatly influences the results: short time horizons include the warming due to short-lived emissions, whereas longer time horizons
exclude those effects. GWP is one type of simplified index based upon radiative properties that can be used to estimate the potential future impacts of emissions of different gases upon the climate system in a relative sense, based on a number of factors,
including the radiative efficiency (infrared-absorbing ability) of each gas relative tothat of carbon dioxide, as well as the decay rate of each gas (the amount removed fromthe atmosphere over a given number of years) relative to that of carbon dioxide.11 But
it is not directly related to a temperature target. The GTP metrics, on the other hand,tries to calculate climate response. It includes the estimate of the temperature change
in year Y in response to the radiative forcing of certain GHG emissions. This serves toevaluate the «climate efficacy» of policies and actions, as well as to monitor, verify andattribute quantifiable responsibility.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the body responsible
for scientifically informing climate policy negotiations. In its assessments over theyears it has been progressively reviewing and changing the GWP of each of the GHGs
as the warming potential is defined in relation to a reference gas – CO2 – which is in
itself a moving target. It changes constantly in aerial concentration, atmospheric permanence, the level of radiative efficiency, climate sensitivity and other dimensions.
The choice of a metric can be made in terms of its scientific performance, as forassessing complex interactions of those different gases in the atmosphere. Or the
choice of a metric can aim at its benefits for policy making, for example in terms ofquantifying impacts of emissions. A common metric such as the «CO2 equivalent»allows us to put emissions of all greenhouses gases on a commensurable scale. Ideally,
the same equivalent CO2 emissions would produce the same climate effect, regardlessof which gases contribute to that equivalent CO2 and irrespective of the geo-social
circumstances of its emission. In this sense, the common metric provides a sort of«exchange rate» that allows the climate effect of emissions of gas X to be comparedwith emissions of gas Y (in this case, CO2).
While the metric per se does not define policies or goals, the choice of the metrics
depends on the policy that it aims to fulfill. For example, in order to consider carbon
markets as an effective policy tool, a basic premise is the fungibility of all emissions tocarbon. So it makes sense, from a physical science basis, to trade carbon credits (i.e.
units of one metric ton of CO2 equivalent). This exchange gets more complex whenfossil (dead) carbon emissions are allowed to be offset by living, biological carbon (forexample from living trees), or when it is assumed that such a thing as «net zero» emissions resulting from an offsetting equation can have a real positive effect upon theatmosphere. This assumption permeates much of the pathways and proposals around«decarbonization», a point to which we will return later.

2. Carbon accounting

Indeed, carbon serves to simplify very complex things. Yet in the face of ecological disruption, as with human-induced climate change, a fundamental assumption isthat the carbon metric is central to lead our way towards a safer future path. Climate
negotiations and a potentially global agreement rely entirely on the cornerstone ofcarbon metrics.
Undoubtedly, the environmental crisis we face is real and deeply serious. But it isalso multidimensional and highly complex in the way it influences the interdependent interactions that constitute the delicate and intricate web of planetary life. In amanner analogous to calories in nutrition, «carbon» can simplify in an extreme modevery complex things. However, in the real world, environmental challenges include
biodiversity and agrobiodiversity loss, genetic erosion, genetic contamination due tothe increasing release of GMOs, monocultures, invasive species, deforestation, soil
erosion, loss of soil fertility, soil and water depletion, contamination of undergroundwater with pesticides and heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), electromagnetic pollution, nuclear contamination, residues, air pollution by particulatematter, soil impermeabilization related to widespread urbanization and many othersocio-environmental issues such as the loss of traditional and indigenous knowledge.
All add together and operate in synergy to foster the greater picture of global climatechange.
Is it assumed that all these multidimensional aspects of the man-made environmental challenge facing us not only correlate, but can also be tackled and solved bysimply addressing the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in parts per million in
the atmosphere? Can a stable temperature in a scenario with so many variables be
sufficient in order to restore the equilibrium and resilience of the ecosystem and the
intricate balance of all natural cycles on Earth? The most convincing answer to thisquestion is no. As it is with calories in respect to our private diet, if we only counted
carbon, as if only carbon were to count, our ecological system would scarcely be wellnourished and balanced. Can proposals that promote further expansion of monocultures, industrial agriculture and GMOs, or even nuclear energy, really be considered«climate smart» simply because they result in a reduction (or even «net» reduction) of
carbon in the atmosphere?
In spite of these ecosystem complexities, carbon has emerged and settled as a
privileged metric for sustainability and the stick to measure and guide us through thechallenges ahead. What may be the unintended consequences of prioritizing carbon
in addressing climate change? Within the carbonocentric frame, what is being left out
and what consequences this may lead to in the future? Is «carbon» really the best way
to frame the problem in the first place?
The Paris Climate Change Conference in December 2015 had to meet very highexpectations. Building momentum towards this landmark there has even been a contribution of Pope Francisco’s Encyclical, Laudato Si. On care for our common home,speaking to all faiths but aimed to show the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church– with estimated followers between 1.1 and 1.3 billion worldwide – on the ecological

19

12
13

14
15
16
17

20

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papafrancesco_20150524_
enciclica-laudato-si.html.
«The strategy of buying and selling ‹carbon credits’ can lead to a new form of speculation which
would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide
a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but inno way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may
simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries
and sectors.» Laudato Si, p. 171.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/world/europe/pope-targets-carbon-credits-economistsfavored-path-to-change.html.
Marx, Karl (1867): Das Kapital, I, chapter 26.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm.
Polanyi, Karl (2001 [1944]): The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of
Our Time, 2nd ed. Beacon Press, Boston.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicideand social justice concerns in times of climate change.12 The Pope clearly voiced
opposition to «the buying and selling of carbon credits» because in his view it leads
to a «new form of speculation which will not help reduce the emission of polluting
gases worldwide».13 The Pope has been criticized for making this point, because carbon trade stands as the economist’s favored path to change.14
Although intangible in daily life – one cannot see, hear, touch, or smell it – carbon
has become a global commodity and is traded in the form of carbon credits in regulated or voluntary marketplaces like the European Union Emission Trading Scheme(EU-ETS), China’s Pilot Climate Trading Scheme, the Chicago Climate Exchange(CCX) and others. While we see carbon as a new metric making its way into all dimensions of social life, we observe the emergence of a new commodity in the form of«carbon rights». This new form of property rights to sell and benefit from reducing
emissions is a crucial issue in the context of having markets play a key role in climate
action. Creating new commodities has always been a turning point in human history.
The emergence of tradable carbon emission rights must be seen against this historical background. It can be compared to the process that once transformed communally held land titles into private properties. This earlier process, which did not
happen overnight, ignited a major political transformation in European history during
the 19th century, as described in the writings by Karl Marx.15 According to Marx primitive accumulation through the enclosure of formally communal lands into private
holding of land titles «plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in
theology».16 As Karl Polanyi has argued, the historical emergence of land and fungible
units of human labour as «fictitious commodities» were at the basis of capitalism’s
global expansion.17
Might the turning of a CO2 emission into a tradable private property right, a commodity, have a comparable impact on world history? The emergence of carbon as a
new form of individual property right and the trading of carbon rights signals a longterm move with major social and economic implications, raising important questions
that remain marginal if not completely absent from the on-going climate debate.
In Europe the emergence and expansion of individual property rights (as referred
to by Marx) proceeded through transforming a previous regime of communal

2. Carbon accounting

ownership of the land and forests into private property (of a few); this was done at
the cost of enclosing the commons – a process marked by opposition, resistance andviolence. The creation of carbon rights through privatization and commodification ispointing in a similar direction.18
In fact, the common ground and central idea of the current mainstream environmental discourse is the economic point of having a «carbon price».19 Around that basic
premise you can have carbon budgets, carbon targets, carbon markets and carbon
rights as a marketable commodity. Another approach uses a carbon tax to fuse citizens to states through environmental concerns. Carbon metrics are not only a matterof discourse and political debates. They are being matched on the ground by the ruleof law. In fact, the legal context has central importance in shaping and managing environmental regimes. A Global Climate Change Legislation Study (Globe 2015) foundthat in 99 countries, which represented 93 per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions, there
were 804 climate change laws and policies, half of which were passed by the legislative
branch and half by executive organs through the definition of policies and issuance of
decrees. Over 75 percent of global emissions stemming from the combined economic
activity of 45 countries are today covered by legal carbon reduction targets (with the
EU counting as a block).20 Environmental science, biochemistry, economic logic andlegal practice have fused.

18
19
20

Bogojević, Sanja (2013): Emissions Trading Schemes: Markets, States and Law. Hart Publishing ,Oxford.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/10cb1a60-9277-11e4-a1fd-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3TXv5ByAu
http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/publication/2015-global-climate-legislation-study/21

As we count calories and carbon, we once learned to count economic growth. This
happened after 1945, when Europe was in disarray due to the devastation caused byWorld War Two. At the same time the European empires started to lose their grip on
most of the world and new sovereign countries like India or Indonesia emerged. In
the course of these events the reconstruction of whole national economies captured
global political imagination in a way that is comparable to today’s focus on carbon.
Counting economic potentials was as important then as counting CO2 emissions is
nowadays.
Carbon is a proxy for very complicated processes that result in global warming.
Counting carbon simplifies this challenge and gives politicians the illusion that they
can do something against environmental degradation. In the case of carbon, quantification offers a kind of currency in international exchange and allows for a redistribution of responsibility in governing Planet Earth. Carbon counting is closely
connected to global communication, action and responsibility. The same is true for
the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the politics of economic growth accountingthat were invented roughly seventy years ago.21 As we will highlight in the following
section, leading officers of the World Bank today reflect upon the similarities between
the counting of economic potentials and the current move towards accounting andquantification in environmental policy. It is thus helpful to cast a glance at the historyof the GDP.
The immediate phase post-1945 produced several innovations. First were novel
institutions of global politics such as the United Nations founded in San Francisco in
1945. The idea was to give the anti-fascist War alliance a future outlook. The UnitedStates called upon all of humanity to potentially organize itself into one «parliamentof man».22 This ideal vision seemed to offer a way to solve the most pressing global
problems in a shared endeavor that was supposedly free from national power politics.
The idea was that humanity’s capacity for reason should prevail. Of course, the emerging supranational and intergovernmental organizations never worked in a power-freeway. But those organizations did become the most prominent place for deliberating
shared global responsibility and for defining action on all issues that transcended theterritory of one single sovereign nation state – as environmental problems most often
do. It seems almost natural that today the threat of global warming is debated at very
21
22

22

Speich, Daniel (2011): The use of global abstractions. National income accounting in the periodof imperial decline, in: Journal of Global History 6, 1, pp. 7-28.
Kennedy, Paul (2007): The Parliament of Man. The United Nations and the quest for world government. London.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide3.			Economic growth accounting

3. Economic growth accounting

large meetings in an international negotiating framework like the COP. But for a very
long time in human history such an approach would have been rather improbable.
The second innovation post-1945 was bringing experts into politics. They haveremained there ever since. On the supranational and intergovernmental level scientific and technical experts were assumed to transform the reconciliation of divergent
national interests into the unambiguous terms of technocracy. This move promiseda science-based «one best way» for solving all problems.23 Before the rise of international organizations, global political debate was the realm of smart diplomats who
were trained in diplomatic protocol, in legal studies and international law. After WorldWar Two, technical experts, for example in agriculture, health or education, started toaccompany the national diplomatic delegations at international meetings. At the first
United Nations conference on the environment that was held in Stockholm in 1972
(which gave rise to the United Nations Environment Programme UNEP), the motely
crew of natural scientists joined in. But the single most important group of experts
in international politics post-1945 was the economists. The experts ignored the rulesof diplomatic protocol. They simply adhered to their findings. They were considered
important solely because of their expertise in their respective fields.
Scientific experts in agriculture, health, education, the natural sciences, and economics have since been working hard for a global public purpose. Never in history
have so many technical reports on so many different topics been written as in thedecades following World War Two, but few of them were ever read. Ministers, headsof state, and diplomats saw no need to get into the details of the experts’ reports.
They simply used the summaries as arguments in their political deliberations. Bringing experts into global politics did not make international debates more objective –despite the fact that it was exactly for this promise of more objectivity that they werewelcomed to the sphere of political communication in the first place. What happened
was that politicians and their diplomatic representatives could now not only build
upon military threats or economic strength or other traditional tools in the great gameof international power politics – but they could also draw upon expert advice whentrying to push other politicians or other states in a certain direction.
A third innovation was turning all political questions into economic issues. This
move is very closely connected to the British economist John Maynard Keynes, whoheavily influenced domestic British politics in the 1930s and 1940s. Keynes left hismark on international political communication during a conference at Bretton Woods
in 1944 that gave rise to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development(World Bank), to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and to a still-born World
Trade Organization. Keynes’ main message was that governments could improve
the living conditions of their subjects locally and globally through adjusting government spending and government revenues.24 His interventionist vision was criticizedby many liberal theorists like Friedrich von Hayek or Milton Friedman who assigned
23
24

Fischer, Frank (1990): Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise. London.
Skidelsky, Robert (2000): John Maynard Keynes. Volume Three: Fighting for Britain 1937-1946.
London.
23

more importance to the individual action of economic agents. But it is from Keynes
that we have inherited the conviction that «the economy» can solve all possible humanproblems, including environmental issues. Remember Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992 when he simply stated, «it’s the economy, stupid!»25 We can learn from
Clinton that we are stupid if we don’t appreciate the academic work of economists– be they Keynesian state-interventionists or applying some neoliberal mixture of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. Among the social science disciplines, economics has successfully ventured into an «economic imperialism». Its methodology
is conquering all neighboring disciplines and currently also colonizes all concerns
about the environment.26
The fourth innovation post-1945 was the shift of political issues into a quantitative mode. The numeric of carbon bears witness to this move, which has a broader
history. International organizations made global issues quantitative as of the founding of the United Nations. Most prominent was the invention of the Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) that allowed measuring the economic productivity of any social group.
The inventors of the UN were initially confronted with 44 different countries. Numbers enabled them to handle this multitude. One problem was how to distribute the
25
26

24

Breslau, Daniel (2003): Economics Invents the Economy. Mathematics, Statistics, and Models in
the Work of Irving Fisher and Wesley Mitchell, in: Theory and Society 32, 3, pp. 379-411.
Hodgson, Geoffrey, M. (2001): How Economics Forgot History. The problem of historical specificity in social science. London/New York.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

Source: Erich Ferdinand – Flickr

Coal-fired power plant releasing its fumes.

3. Economic growth accounting

cost of the new organization among the member states. Rather quickly, the diplomats
agreed taking their relative economic wealth as a basis for solving this problem. The
rich states should pay more than the poor ones. But how could national wealth becompared? The abstraction of the GDP figure was the answer.
In addition, connecting the GDP to the population census made it possible toconstruct a GDP per capita for every sovereign political body. This was an even more
abstract indicator that turned economic outlooks all over the world into one single
figure and paved the way for all sorts of inter-national comparison in space and time.
The shorthand of a growth rate of GDP per capita made past performances commensurable with current situations and brought separate localities into one sharedperspective.27 This power of simplifying the world geographically and historicallymade the measuring of economic growth according to the figures of national income
accounting very prominent in the political communication of the post-war era. Today
we can get these comparative figures easily from digitally available data sources suchas the Groningen Growth and Development Centre or the Penn World Tables.28 Statistical offices in all countries update the figures. They produce the information resource
for whole departments of applied economics at which thousands of doctoral students
and hundreds of professors craft yet another complicated statistical regression inorder to create new scientific expertise.
The end of World War Two encompassed a major break in the organization ofinternational politics. First it brought up new international organizations. Second it
brought scientific experts into politics. Third it turned all political questions into economic issues. And fourth it gave way to a ubiquitous mode of quantification. Carbon
metrics have to do with all these innovations.
The metrics of carbon reduce a complex threat to a simple set of assumptions thatenable certain actions while they prevent others. The same mechanism of reducing
complexity initially gave rise to the economic calculus of the Gross Domestic Product. World War Two had not only devastated production facilities and transport infrastructure across Europe but also destroyed the fabric of social and cultural life. The
war left Europe in complete disarray. Under these extreme circumstances politicians
welcomed the reductive capacities of economic expertise. Everybody was happy topretend that the consequences of the war were mainly economic and that it was economic growth that would lead out of the impasse.29 Alternatively, one could also havedealt with this complication in the terms of a loss of cultural identity, but no otherexpert language was available for dealing with the issue than economic statistics.
This quantitative mode of supranational and intergovernmental politics has
spilled over from the field of economic policy advice to the environmental protection
27
28
29

Maddison, Angus (2007): Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD. Essays in macro-economic history. Oxford/New York.
http://www.rug.nl/research/ggdc; https://pwt.sas.upenn.edu.
Speich Chassé, Daniel (2014): Towards a global history of the Marshall Plan. European post-war
reconstruction and the rise of development economic expertise, in: Grabas, Christian, and Alexander Nützenadel (Eds.): Industrial Policy in Europe after 1945. Wealth, Power and Economic
Development in the Cold War. Basingstoke, pp. 187-212.
25

30
31

32

26

OEEC (1952): A Standardised System of National Accounts. Paris.
World Bank (2011): The Changing Wealth of Nations: Measuring Sustainable Development in
the New Millennium, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ENVIRONMENT/Resources/ChangingWealthNations.pdf.
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/sna.asp.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

issue. First were the problems of economic growth and the comparative numeric of
GDP per capita. Second were the problems of environmental degradation and thenumeric of carbon. Both these modes of international knowledge have their bookof rules. The measurement of carbon emissions is being objectified since the 1992
Rio Conference. National economic bookkeeping unfolded according to a System
of National Accounts that was issued in a combined effort by the statistical office of
the UN and OECD as of 1952.30 The counting of environmental and economic global
issues shares a historical logic.
Economic growth accounting was a prime example of the turn of global politics
towards quantitative communication. It shows how politics embraced quantitative
indicators. Yet accounting for economic growth is not only an example, it is also atemplate for this move. While the first guide for composing national accounts was
but a short booklet, economic statisticians today have to deal with manuals runningto thousands of pages. The national accounting framework has been under constantrevision since its invention in 1952 in order to make these figures more compatible
and more appropriate. Economic statistics aim at depicting all aspects of collective
life. Their result is an image of «the economy» as social reality in itself. Everything has
become economic or at least potentially approachable through economists’ theories,
models and statistics. Many social groups have tried to introduce their specific claims
into the statistical framework. Think of the feminist claim that unpaid reproduction
work in middle-class households should be accounted for as an important economic
activity. Starting with the first UNEP Conference in Stockholm in 1972, environmental
concerns have also become increasingly important issues in all societies of the world.
It is no wonder, then, that environmentalists started trying to integrate environmental
concerns in this very powerful measurement scheme that is economic statistics.
«Green GDP» is a case in point. Dubbed as the new «wealth of nations», the intangible assets that comprise natural capital need – thus the argument – to be monetized,
registered, transformed into financial titles and traded at financial markets. How
to evaluate carbon stocks in monetary terms and how to factor them into national
accounts are two tasks currently undertaken within the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) of the UN Statistics Division. Adjusting net savings in order
to include carbon dioxide emission damage is one of the many issues here.31 SEEA
gathers internationally agreed standard concepts, definitions, classifications, accounting rules and tables for comparable statistics on the environment and its relationshipwith the economy. The SEEA framework follows an accounting structure similar to the
System of National Accounts (SNA)32 and even uses concepts, definitions and classifications consistent with the SNA in order to facilitate the integration of environmental and economic statistics. The World Bank – a key actor in the introduction of GDP
accounting in developing countries – today is advising these same countries through3. Economic growth accounting

the Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) initiative.33 Thisinitiative models the earlier form of making global political problems manageable
through counting and accounting. It aims to profit from the power function of a global
numeric metric.
Commenting on the task of assisting countries on accounting their natural capital,
World Bank vice-president and special envoy for climate change Rachel Kyte in 2012said:«[…] Natural Capital is something fundamental to what we do as WB and what
we want to be, […] to work with natural capital accounting is to go back to our corebusiness. After the WWII, in the 50s, we went from country to country helping them to
put their national accounts in order. Today, assisting countries to factor natural capital
into their national accounts and make this a reality is central to the answer of the multiple crisis we face, from climate change to food price volatility».34
National income accounting and the compilation of a sum total of all social
interactions in an abstract GDP has been one of the greatest successes in the historyof political communication. However, mankind also possesses an archive that renders quantitative approaches to global problems questionable. The introduction ofnational economic bookkeeping was by no way simply an issue of «putting national
accounts in order», as the World Bank official Rachel Kyte wrongly recalls. It wasinstead connected to a heated and fundamental debate on epistemological issues that
also touched the question of what «the economy» was and what the science of economics was about. At the very heart of the matter is the fact that national economic
accounts have no a priori order, according to which a national statistics bureau canarrange its figures in an orderly way. There is no single right way of counting the economy, and there is no wrong way either. It is all about conventions, and about who has
the power to define the statistical order.
The first to object to the obsession with numbers in global politics were not someradical scholars or activists, but the economists themselves. All through the 1930s, the1940s and the 1950s economic statistics was the object of controversy among economists. Their imagination was not easily captured by the idea that an all-encompassing
statistical system could inform policy decisions through concise figures like a grossor net domestic product or investment and savings ratios. Politicians and diplomats
crazed for global comparative numbers. But the economic experts were confronted
with an almost Babylonian confusion concerning terminology and basic entities
that in their view overshadowed such a perspective. Different political traditions andcultures, racial segregation, differing trajectories of governmental statistics and differences in the economic organization of societies made comparative investigations
scientifically difficult. Economists in the 1940s were shocked by the prospect of one
single figure – the GDP – reducing social life everywhere to one comparative framework of accounting for growth.
33
34

https://www.wavespartnership.org/en.
Personal communication. Side event: Mainstreaming natural capital and the CDB objectives. At
COP 11, Convention on Biological Diversity, Hyderabad, India (October 2012).
27

35
36
37

28

Kuznets, Simon (1949): National Income and Industrial Structure, in: Econometrica 17, Supplement (July), pp. 205-241, here: p. 209.
Kuznets, Simon (1933): National Income, in: Seligman, Edwin R. A. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of theSocial Sciences. New York, pp. 205-224.
Richard Stone, quoted in Milton Gilbert (1949): ‹The measurement of national wealth: Discussion›, Econometrica, 17, p. 261.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

The American economist Simon Kuznets for example, who won the Nobel Prizefor his statistical work, understood his invention as a tool only to better understandthe economic fabric of one industrialized community, but not as a device in global
communication.35 He was interested in the 1930s in better understanding the distribution of wealth in the US-American society and he thought it helpful to separate volumes of production and input according to the different sectors of industry. When hestarted to sum up statistics he first had to clarify which activities were to be considered«economic» and which instances of work had to fall out of his tables. Most prominently, Kuznets decided not to include unpaid female reproductive work in the middle-class households. He did so for methodological reasons in view of his academic
research interest, not because he considered this field of activity in any general sense
to be irrelevant. In other economic environments, as in relatively remote rural communities for example, work by women outside the monetized cycle obviously was ofgreat economic importance. Consequently Kuznets always emphasized the fact that
his statistical method only applied to the US. If one were to compose economic statistics for other countries, economies or societies with other academic research interests in mind one had to first go back to the basic question of which activity was to
be included and which not. Thus, Kuznetsian economic statistics were not suited tospread across the globe. As one had to design a different system of categories for each
entity under scrutiny, the end results and the sum totals could never be compared.36
The usefulness of comparing international macroeconomic statistics was controversially debated in the journal Econometrica, the publication of the Econometric Society, in the early 1940s. At the society’s annual conference in 1947, which washeld in conjunction with the world congress of the International Statistical Institutein Washington, the problem was the topic of several specialized sessions. Here theconsensus emerged that sum totals of national accounts could only meaningfully becomposed if it remained clear to what end such an operation was conducted. A GDP
figure that was detached from specific research or policy aims did not seem useful tothe majority of experts. Notably, Richard Stone, another Nobel laureate in economic
statistics, asked at the Washington meeting:«Why do we want to compare the United States with, say, China or India? Whatpossible interest is there in it? Everybody knows that one country is, in economic
terms, very rich and another country very poor; does it matter whether the factor isthirty or fifty of what? I suggest that . . . we should content ourselves with comparisonsof a rather simple kind; and furthermore that we should not always expect to be able
to sum up the relevant position in a single figure.»37
Kuznets also ridiculed the commensuration of states like China and the USA
according to a single GDP figure. He quoted from a study that showed Chinese per3. Economic growth accounting

capita GDP to have been below 40 Dollars annually in the period between 1925 and1934 and fundamentally questioned the value of such a statement for the American
reader:«If we ask, could people live in the United States during 1925-34 for several years
on an income substantially below $40 per capita, the answer would be «yes», if they
were sufficiently wealthy to have lots of provisions to sell, sufficiently lucky to haverich relations, or sufficiently bold to rob other people. The one-third to one-half ofthe pre-industrial population of the world would scarcely be in that position; and if
we assume that all they have produced and could consume per capita was less than
40 international units for several years, the conclusion would be all would be dead by
now.»38
In his view, this was simply nonsensical science. Saying that an average Chinese
lives on $40 per annum was not a meaningful proposition because it obviously meantthat Chinese people had some kind of resources which were not accounted for in thiscalculation or at least that the accounting framework did not depict their reality in ameaningful way. However, the idea that half of the world was on the brink of starvation
became an important topic in the global political imagination, and the methodological care taken by Kuznets and Stone somehow got lost when international organizations started to assist countries in putting their «national accounts in order». The
economists were overrun by the demand for their expertise and finally started to produce those highly cherished figures, however reluctantly. Referring to the new GDP
abstraction, one expert stated at the 1947 international conference in Washington:«These figures have been produced and people use them. They will continue tobe produced, and people will continue to use them. If we were starting afresh, I would
have a great deal of sympathy with what has been said about not using a single figure,and not even producing one. But the way the thing stands now is that in every governmental problem where a multiplicity of regions or countries is involved, national-income figures are used. (…) And every international organization that has been
formed has used national-income statistics in one way or another. Therefore, I think
the statistician cannot bury his head in the sand in this matter. He should know thepractical politicians will use his results and probably will misuse them. And therefore
I do believe that it is imperative to make the best single figure that is possible and touse a few very simple rules for its application.»39
This is precisely what Richard Stone then did when he designed the famous System of National Accounts on behalf of the United Nations Statistics Division and theOrganization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) in 1952.
As we count calories and temperatures today without reflecting the improbabilityof such ventures, and as we tend to take quantitative economic reasoning as a basis
for global politics, these earlier doubts are very important to remember. Counting has
a history that counts a lot.
38
39

Kuznets, Simon (1949): National Income and Industrial Structure, in: Econometrica 17, Supplement (July), pp. 205-241, here: p. 209.
Quoted in Gilbert, Milton et al.: The Measurement of National Wealth: Discussion, in: Econometrica 17 (1949) Supplement: Report of the Washington Meeting, pp. 255-272, here: p. 270.
29

The counting of calories, carbon and economic growth makes things visible thatwould otherwise remain hidden from global communication. But every reductionof complexity through more visibility implies invisibility of all other realities and of
their linkages. Statistics increase visibility and thus produce new knowledge, thereby
empowering people to act upon that knowledge. At the same time they disempower
people by rendering unwanted facts and realities invisible, robbing them of their reasoning for alternative solutions and answers.
This ambivalence is not easy to understand because it is very deeply rooted in
the way modern societies relate to what they think is the real world in which they are
set. The ambivalence of quantification is a direct outcome of the modern scientificworldview. Statistics have become a symbol of this worldview. They are a major toolin scientific inquiry and their history refers to the historical trajectory of the naturalsciences. In order to understand this very broad context of today’s carbon metrics,
we need to look even further back in time than seventy years. We have to go way into
the17th century, when a new approach to nature gained ground in Europe. During
the Early Modern Epoch the secular European intellectual elites began to separate
their immediate sensual experience of the natural environment from an analytical
approach to nature. This move has been termed a «great bifurcation» that became thefoundation of the modern sciences.40 Its core was the laboratory.
The laboratory is the crucial place of modern science.41 We can understand it asa technical apparatus designed to represent nature. A laboratory is like a carpenter’s
workshop where a rough piece of timber is being fixed and treated until it turns intoa table or a work of art, like a statue. In his workshop the carpenter isolates a piece ofwood and he himself is temporarily isolated from the weather, from his daily routines,
and from the politics of his community. The laboratory is shut off from the rest of theworld. In this artificially enclosed space the scientist starts experimenting on an isolated piece of nature in order to better understand general mechanisms. So there arealways two trajectories involved in modern science: one is the isolation part, whichmeans the shutting of the laboratory’s doors, the reduction of complexity and the creation of invisibility. The other part is the innovation that brings new insights to thefore. Scientists usually produce an image of their object of study on paper and they
40
41

30

Whitehead, Alfred North (1920): The concept of nature. Tarner Lectures 1919. Cambridge.
Arabatzis, Theodore (2007): Experiment, in: Curd, Martin and Stathis Psillos (Eds.): Routledge
Companion to the Philosophy of Science. London.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide4.			Increasing visibility and			invisibility at the same time

4. Increasing visibility and invisibility at the same time

subsequently work on this paper issue and distribute their findings accordingly. The
stabilizing of the manifold occurrences of life in the isolated setting of a workshop/
laboratory and the proliferating of results on paper is the essence of scientific work.42
What we touch here very briefly is the very strong epistemic move that defines theessence of modern rationality. Natural scientists (who are an ideal image of modernman) separate nature into two dimensions. One is their subjective environment thatneeds to be made invisible. The other is their object. This process creates objectivity bybifurcating the (subjective) individual experience of environmental conditions fromthe (objective) scientific study of nature. Social scientists took some time to catch up
with this hard epistemic model, because they lacked a laboratory setting. As a matterof fact, the social sciences have tried all through the 20th century to gain the status ofa natural science and to emulate these epistemic procedures.
Economists like Simon Kuznets or Richard Stone also searched desperately fora laboratory and they found it in statistics. Despite their criticism cited above, they
were not at all against quantification but rather to the contrary: they both were important agents in a methodological revolution that changed social science in the decades between roughly the 1880 and the 1940. During this phase an «Age of Economic
Measurement» began and the study of economic social interaction changed from ahumanities discipline that was close to history and literary studies into a mathematical field populated by numbers, models, and equations.43 Large amounts of data andsophisticated techniques of statistical regression turned the complexities of reality
into assumedly stable conditions, as if the world was a piece of timber in the workshop
of a craftsman.
But the world is a complicated place. Kuznets and his colleagues were always fully
aware of the merely representational characteristics of their statistics. They knew thatthey only talked about models, not about the real world, and that they reduced its
complexity. This was precisely how they wanted to attribute more objectivity to theirendeavors. Even today all academic economists are aware of this basic methodological mechanism. But when the results of their inquires travelled into the world of political communication, the knowledge about the artificiality of statistical facts did not
travel along but remained in academia. Methodological considerations never foundtheir way into the newspapers or the conference halls at international political gatherings. They stayed hidden in dull appendixes while the findings themselves gained thestatus of a reality – or a second nature, as it were.
The historical and epistemological critique of quantification in this paper showsthat we are confronted with a naturalistic fallacy. The widely held assumption that
numbers are the «hard facts» of the real world needs to be refuted. One way to do thisis to highlight the ambivalences of visibility and invisibility and of empowerment andoppression that are inherent to the metrics.
42
43

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg (1997): Toward a History of Epistemic Things. Synthesizing proteins in
the test tube. Stanford, California.
Klein, Judy L., and Mary S. Morgan (Eds.) (2001): The Age of Economic Measurement. Durham/
London.
31

Source: Carbon Visuals – Flickr

One day's carbon dioxide emissions in comparison with Manhattan NYC

4. Increasing visibility and invisibility at the same time

Let us transpose the metaphoric of the carpenter/scientist to statistical quantification, such as the quantification of carbon or GDP, and first focus on the innovative sidethat enhances the vision. Statistics bring processes into view which would otherwise
rest in oblivion. A key issue in the move towards accounting in politics is making previously unseen phenomena visible. This allows for making new claims. Accounting fornature, so runs current discourse, makes visible the costs and benefits of ecosystemservices by pricing nature. One speaks of the «valuation» of ecosystems. This term,
which in German is «Inwertsetzung» and in French «mise en valeur», was also important in colonial economic policy, to which we will return later. Accounting for natureis understood as a tool to make the claim for environmental protection more plausible. Furthermore, the quantitative turn to economic growth in international politics
seventy years ago brought new problems to the fore and allowed for the articulationof political claims.
When imperialism was still largely uncontested, that is prior to 1945, nobody inEurope thought of the colonies as economically backward regions. In the colonizer’s
imagination the colonies appeared as being racially inferior and culturally backward
but rich in economic resources. In the statistical mindset of the economists, however,the peripheries suddenly turned into economically «under-developed» countries andeventually into the «Third World.»44
In this move, one British economic statistician was important: Colin Clark, a complete outsider in the profession at the time. In a book on «The conditions of economic
progress» that he published in 1940, he compared the national income of all countries
and territories of the world.45 When he looked at his comparative tables he realizedthat the world was basically a poor place. His epistemic tool rendered wealth only inWestern Europe and in the northern and far southern part of the Americas. The richest
countries in his compilation were the United States of America, Canada, Great Britain,
Argentina, Switzerland and Holland. The poorest places were China, British India, theDutch Indies, and all other colonial territories in Africa, Asia and Oceania. The Soviet
Union figured in the lower part of the middle section somewhere between Italy andPortugal and way below Brazil. The chief discovery connected to Colin Clark’s metrics of economic issues was global inequity between the Global North and the Global
South. And the major political claim connected to this discovery was the call for political independence from the colonies.
For reasons which have nothing to do with Colin Clark and the epistemology of
economic science, but a lot with economic constraints, the European empires went
into decline after World War Two. A number of new countries in Asia and Africa
emerged and the quantitative economic terms came in handy to conceive of thesenew political entities. Latin American so-called «under-developed» nations alsojoined this metric discourse. It were the metrics of economic growth accounting thatmade Western politicians realize that the world was much more diverse than colonialadministrators had thought it to be. To their surprise it consisted not only of powerful
44
45

Prashad, Vijay (2007): The darker nations. A people’s history of the Third World. New York.
Clark, Colin (1940): The Conditions of Economic Progress. London.
33

46

47

34

For the French Empire see Sarraut, Albert (1923): La mise en valeur des colonies françaises.
Paris; for the British Empire see Havinden, Michael, and David Meredith (1993): Colonialism
and Development. Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1850-1960. London.
See on the fundamental dichotomy between the «West and the Rest» Hall, Stuart (1992): The
West and the Rest, in: Hall, Stuart and Bram Gieben (Eds.): Formations of Modernity. Milton
Keynes, pp. 275-320.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

centers and dependent peripheries, but also included new political agents who now
became visible and who before had remained hidden behind the European conviction of having a mission to «civilize» the world – with racial prejudice obfuscating theissue additionally.
Global power relations and the legacy of the declining empires proved to be complex. As with European post-war reconstruction, in this global perspective too everybody was happy to conceive of the inequity between the members of humanity as
a problem of economic numbers. Alternatively, one could also have addressed thiscomplication in terms of cultural identity, but again, as in the case of European postwar reconstruction, no other expert language was available for dealing with the issue
than economic statistics. Colin Clark’s statistics depicted the world in a politically useful way. His statistics made a new problem visible and at the same time suggested
that it could be solved through the magic of economic growth and development. Thisturn towards practical policy advice is where the problem of invisibility came in. But
before we address the invisibility side of the problem, the visibility issue needs further
attention.
Late colonial rule in Paris and in London was far from a statistically transparent
vision. The French had designed a policy of «mise en valeur», that is an economic «valuation» of the colonies, in 1923. And the British colonial authorities invented a newpolicy of «colonial development» during the Interwar Period.46 The Germans would
probably have spoken of «Inwertsetzung» if they still had colonies at that time. The
wording sounds familiar. Yet this discourse was all about strengthening colonial rule,
not about emancipation. The authorities in Paris and London tried to make social andeconomic life in the «Rest of the World» functional for supporting relatively high levels of economic wealth in the «West».47 In contrast, Colin Clark’s statistics brought up
a more transparent view on the economics of the world. Politicians from the Global
South drew upon his statistics in order to make their state of oppression quantitatively
visible and thus politically important.
Decolonization strengthened the quantitative approach of accounting for economic growth in a worldwide comparative scheme. It is thus no wonder that the first
generation of nationalist politicians in the emerging Third World embraced economics. Upon the achievement of independence every new government in the Global
South was quick to design symbols of sovereignty such as a national flag, a national
anthem, and a national economic account. Without GDP their nations simply would
not exist in global political debate. A Western observer was quick to mock this symbolism when stating in 1963, «today in many independent countries national accounts
are regarded, alongside the national flag and the national anthem, as symbols of
independence». And he critically added: «This mystical belief can be turned to the4. Increasing visibility and invisibility at the same timeplanners’ advantage … . We at least should not become creatures of our own national
accounts slogans».48 A strong trust in the power of economic experts as policy advisors was rampant at the margins of the former empires. As the Ugandan intellectual
Mahmood Mamdani recalls: «We were Africa’s first generation of postcolonial intellectuals. Our political consciousness was shaped by a central assumption: we wereconvinced that the impact of colonialism on our societies was mainly economic.»49
This quasi-unconditional focus on economic issues and on the respective statistics
that had proliferated with the rise of economic experts shaped a new collective identity of poor states in global politics.50 The comparatively «poorer nations» powerfully
stepped into the international arena at the first UNCTAD conference that was heldin Geneva in 1964 and subsequently convinced the General Assembly of the United
Nations to issue a resolution on the creation of a «New International Economic Order»
in the 1970s.51 This was the heyday of economic reasoning and of economic statistics.
However, the statistical framework was not completely neutral. Western academic endeavors built upon prefigured sets of concepts, terms and assumptions
when «going abroad» to places other than the USA. In order to give a full account of
the global historical impact of economic metrics it is important to also highlight the
oppression side of the issue and the many instances of creating invisibility. When the
System of National Accounts became an international norm in 1952, economic statisticians were challenged to account for economic life in the colonies according to theemerging global template. But this was very difficult. Phyllis Deane, for instance, travelled to the southern regions of the British African possessions in order to count theeconomy. But her resulting 1953 publication on colonial social accounting in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland bore witness to the fundamental problems of the task.
Deane stated quite clearly in that book:«The problem of obtaining adequate data on the rural economies of Africa is themost serious obstacle in the way of framing satisfactory national income estimates
for these territories. … The accounting problem is not simply that of the acute scarcity of quantitative data … it is also a qualitative problem, which brings into question
the fundamental validity for primitive communities of the social accounting concepts
themselves.»52
Deane was frustrated by the fact that the compilation of national accounts
required quantitative information in the form of money prices. But subsistence production and barter trade largely dominated the entities of her study, in which the surprisingly widespread use of money was occasional and did not represent continuous
48

49

50
51
52

Barkay, Richard M. (1963): The Statistical Macro-Economic Framework Needed in Development
Planning in Africa, in: Samuels, L. H. (Ed.): African Studies in Income and Wealth. Chicago, pp.
66-88, p. 85.
Mamdani, Mahmood (2001): Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities. Overcoming thePolitical Legacy of Colonialism, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, 4, pp. 651-664,
here p. 651.
Prashad, Vijay (2013): The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Verso, London.
Murphy, Craig N. (1984): The Emergence of the NIEO Ideology. Boulder, Colorado.
Phyllis Deane, Colonial social accounting, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953, p. 115.
35

53

36

Prest, A. R., and I. G. Stewart (1953): National income of Nigeria. HSMO, London, p. 4.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

economic flows. Furthermore, these entities lacked internal cohesion to such an
extent that it became questionable whether they should be represented as single economic units at all. While it seemed extraordinarily difficult to render all economic
activities of the Central African territories within one single framework, it clearly
turned out to be impossible to calculate a single figure – a GDP – that could reasonably be compared to other entities, such as the United States or Great Britain. Other
economic statisticians encountered similar problems when conducting their African
fieldwork. In a study on the national income of Nigeria published in 1953, A. R. Prestand I. G. Stewart observed the absence of a functional division of labor, in view ofwhich most of the categorical divisions of national accounting collapsed. Prest and
Stewart found the separation of a private sphere of the family from the public realm of
wage labor completely useless. In Nigeria, they could not easily differentiate between
consumption and production, or between investment and consumption, or between
different economic branches or types of activity. In their view, economic activity inrural Africa was completely different from those realities that the American and British pioneers of national accounting had had in mind. They perceived Africa as being
largely pre-modern and stated: „It is the pre-industrial revolution economics of Adam
Smith and not the economics of the modern American college text-book which is therelevant standard».53
In other words, Prest and Stewart were unsatisfied with the statistical tools ofnational accounting and scanned the history of economics in order to find more
adequate approaches. More specifically, they argued that within single Nigerianhouseholds a range of economic transactions were taking place that rather often had
a monetized form and needed to be included in the sum total of economic activity.
They thus violated the principle of national income accounting according to which thefamily was considered non-economic and all transactions within single households
were excluded from the statistical compilation. Phyllis Deane did not go that far, but
she too found the concept of the household highly impractical for African studies. All
these authors were well aware of the progress in establishing international standards
for the compilation of national income accounts, the center of which was at that time
the Cambridge Department of Applied Economics, which in these years came under
the direction of Richard Stone. Standardized categories were crucial for strengthening the analytical power of national income accounts. But the problem of difference
proved complicated. Applying a standard category such as the household to rural African economies did not simplify the task of the economic statistician. When Kuznets
described the United States, disregarding middle-class household work eased his
description. But to the European statisticians working in Africa, households seemed
to be important because they formed the core motor of economic life. In the industrial countries of the West relevant labor worked in factories and the core of economic
activity was to be found in the industrial sector. Paid labor in the West stood opposed
to unpaid work in the household in Nigeria and other African territories. To the statistician’s eye fundamental differences in economic organization prevailed, which made

4. Increasing visibility and invisibility at the same time

it utterly impossible to estimate the sum total of economic productivity in a way thatwas comparable to – say – Simon Kuznets’ national account of the USA in the 1930s.
The economic statisticians who worked early on in Africa were challenged by
the emerging political communication through statistical abstractions. While international organizations like the UN demanded orderly national economic accounts
and while the leaders of the new states based their fight against the former imperial
overlords upon statistical numbers, the economic statisticians at the research front
voiced severe objection. In the history of macroeconomic abstractions one often finds
instances where the authors of such abstractions exhibit great zeal in estimating values and sum totals while at the same time calling the validity of their results fundamentally into question. The 1953 work of Phyllis Deane is a case in point. One reviewerof her book wrote in 1955: «The most valuable chapters are those describing the problems that must be solved if native African economies are to be forced into this moldthat fits European and American economies only imperfectly. Unfortunately these
sections will be read and quoted less widely than the estimates themselves. … The
book itself speaks with two voices: the straight face with which the estimates are presented is disturbingly inconsistent with the bewilderment expressed in later chaptersover the problem of evaluating native activities in units commensurable with thoseused for the European part of the economy.»54
The ambivalence highlighted in this quote was a major challenge to most economic statisticians who worked on the former colonies. Some of them were completely
opposed to any quantification of non-monetized African economic transactions
according to the unfolding global template of the System of National Accounts.55 They
felt that the quantitative and comparative approach of economics was not very well
suited to create useful knowledge about the different economic realities in, say, theUnited States and Nigeria. Not economics, but anthropology seemed more suited toaccount for global differences. Until roughly 1950, anthropology was the chief mode ofsocial scientific knowledge production about extra-European places. Anthropologists
designed observational techniques, grounded in the substance of local phenomena,and tried to arrange them in a way that did not produce too many things invisible.
But anthropology lost ground as an informant of global politics, ceding pre-eminence
to the economists’ quantitative view. Concurrently, the quantitative turn in economics increasingly weakened the economists’ sensitivity for special local features. They
lost interest in the findings of the anthropologists, which they once had. Economists
now adhered instead to universal categories and models. With the unfolding of global
political communication post-1945, economists gained great power in defining theissues at hand. Despite their initial doubts concerning global comparison they werequick to make the tool of economic growth accounting a standard procedure in global
politics. By 1960 experts had learned to understand global economic interaction bymeasuring the objects under scrutiny against the industrial countries of Europe and54
55

Jones, William O. (1955): Colonial social accounting, in: Journal of the American Statistical Association, 50, 271, p. 665.
Seers, Dudley (1972): What are we trying to measure?, in: Journal of Development Studies 8, pp.
21-36.
37

56

57

38

Robertson, M. M. (2006): The nature that capital can see: science, state, and market in the commodification of ecosystem services, in: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24(3)367-387 (http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=d3304).
Powerful post-colonial critiques of development economics have been put forward by anthropologists in the 1990s. See Escobar, Arturo (1995): Encountering Development. The making andunmaking of the Third World. Princeton, New Jersey, chapter 2; Mitchell, Timothy (1998): Fixing
the Economy, in: Cultural Studies 12, 1, pp. 82-101.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

the Americas as the universal standard. Now, underdevelopment, which is a relative
thing and the result of complicated comparative inquiries, became a global fact.
While many economists involved in the «valuation of ecosystem services» today
claim to be merely interested in making visible natural wealth and dismiss the allegation of simply working towards putting up price tags and creating new market
schemes, it is clear that as their work progresses they will rely a lot less on the work of
ecologists to explain the world to them. Morgan Robertson in his paper «The naturethat capital can see» describes his fieldwork among ecosystem assessment technicians in the US wetland banking scheme:56»[…] the primary directive for monitoring technicians is not to produce falsifiable
results that can circulate within a hypothetico-deductive paradigm […]. It is insteadto produce data that successfully circulate in the networks of law and economics.
As workers in a forum of articulation between science and capital, we made use of scientific codings and principles, but, ultimately, scientific operational logic was rejectedin favor of the ad hoc logics (our «shared myths») that worked better to bridge the twosystems.»
Once species and ecosystems have been entered into accounts, there is no needto look further into complexities, uncertainties and interlinkages. Ecology might wellsuffer the same fate that anthropology did when economics took over.
Decolonization occurred in step with an age of economic planning, in which statistical observation, macroeconomic modeling, and economic policies went handin hand. Economists used quantitative comparison and gauged the respective difference. They defined non-European social worlds as being different from the European template in the negative terms of not yet having reached a Western economic
form. Statistics made the non-West visible as a deficient entity, but not as a creative
multitude. Thus, while offering powerful tools for decolonization, development economics also prolonged colonial structures of domination into the post-colonial world.
A sharpened vision of the new «under-developed» states emerged but the assumed
supremacy of the West remained unchallenged.57
The example of development economics shows that building up a numeric has
an emancipatory potential and at the same time can help to stabilize power relations. Across the colonies in the epoch of decolonization, new techniques of quantifying macroeconomic interaction and new promises of the feasibility of plannedsocial change gained ground. Late colonial policy took up this trajectory and gave
rise to a heightened interest of Western economists in the poor parts of the world. In
this, statistics offered two outlooks. First, it entailed a universal mode of describingsocial interaction irrespective of assumed racial or cultural differences. And second it

4. Increasing visibility and invisibility at the same time

Source: Carbon Visuals – Flickr

Actual volume of one metric ton of carbon dioxide gas.

opened up a perspective on economic development that meant more efficient techniques of exploiting labor and natural resources in the colonies. Emancipation andoppression came together.
Such a contradictory setting also applies to the metrics of carbon. Subjecting carbon emissions to a numeric is a potentially powerful move. But history shows thatwhen one turns global problems into merely quantitative issues it is not clear whether
the basic assumptions also change. The «valuation» of the colonies has lead to thepolitical independence of new states in Asia and Africa. But it also prolonged Western
supremacy. Accordingly, the «valuation» of environmental system services might leadto a more sustainable global economy. But it will also prolong capitalist exploitation by
allowing those in power to accumulate newly established «carbon rights» and control
over ecosystems in the Global South. When we critically reflect on carbon metrics wehave to take this ambivalence of empowerment and control / exertion of power into
account. Who owns carbon? How can intangible «carbon» possibly be transformed
into a new form of property rights? Is this new «layer» of property really detachable
from the land and forests where this carbon is stored and/or produced?
A carbon-centric vision of the world that translates all living and dead biomass
into fungible CO2 equivalents can easily look at the Global North with its high fossil fueldependency as poor in terms of «mitigation potential» and the Global South as «richin mitigation potential» with its vast amounts of bio-carbon stored in biomass, soils
and forests: these are often conveniently considered free of inhabitants, «degraded» or«marginal» lands when in fact they are public lands, indigenous territories, pastoralist
39

58

59

40

The Planetary Boundaries framework was first introduced in 2009, when a group of 28 internationally renowned scientists identified and quantified the first set of nine planetary boundaries
within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come. Crossingthese boundaries could generate abrupt or irreversible environmental changes. Respecting theboundaries reduces the risks to human society of crossing these thresholds. http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/research-programmes/planetary-boundaries.html
The «planetary boundaries» framework can also serve to justify conservative positions. There isan ongoing critical reflection on the boundary setting issue, raising important issues like: whichperspectives have a voice? Who/what is excluded? What is relevant ? (See for example the workof Barbara Muraca). Feminist scholars as Barbara Muraca often criticize natural scientists forblindly reproducing the specific gender and power relations which led to the current socio-ecological crises.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

landscapes, etc. Echoing old ideas, like the colonial legal fiction of «terra nullius» –no man´s land – this view of the world that is common among today’s climate policy
experts can be interpreted as a new form of imperialism. The North can offset its fossil
fuel emissions by paying the South to do what exactly? To implement forest protection, agriculture and land conservation practices that point to (often indigenous) local
communities as the drivers of deforestation and let Big Business (big agrochemicalcompanies, industrial meat industry, mining companies) off the hook. It is throughthese practices that carbon metrics meet GDP accounting and both merge into Green
Growth strategies. When the dominance of GDP growth as a target marking political
success remains untouched but needs to fit within a carbon constrained world, it ismore than convenient not to have to equally deal with all the other planetary boundaries58 or even the social and justice dimensions of the ecological crises.59

5.			Decarbonization?

The reference to «carbon» has turned into an unavoidable element of how we talk,make sense, communicate and act upon reality, and, in a very fundamental way, how
we envision and plan the future. Around the word «carbon» we have been shaping
content and meaning that is central to political discourse and action in the 21st century. Global executives tend to use superlative wording. Take this statement by Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC as an example: «This is the firsttime in the history of mankind (…) that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to change the economic development model thathas been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution. That will not
happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change, be
it COP 15, 21, 40 – you choose the number. It just does not occur like that. It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation.»60
Carbon has undoubtedly gained center stage on the international political
agenda. Activists are confronted with a number of programmes and concepts. Theyreach from the Paris Climate Conference 2015 call on all countries to formulate «longterm low greenhouse gas emission development strategies» and UN backed country
plans for a Deep-Decarbonization Pathways Project61 to the EU Roadmap for moving toa low carbon economy in 2050,62 private sector pledges to achieve carbon-neutral supply chains, bold moves like the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition63 (supported by
74 countries, 23 sub-national jurisdictions and more than 1,000 companies) or evenmore wild proposals like to «imagine a future where carbon is really the currency of the
21st century», permeating the imagination of key World Bank officials.64«Carbon» seems to have been incorporated in a very fundamental level within the
discourse and strategies of the hegemonic actors: mainstreaming «carbon» in politics
has even reached the G7. Under the slogan «Think Ahead, Act Together», G7 leaders
at their latest meeting, in June 2015 at Schloss Elmau in Germany, agreed to back therecommendations of the IPCC, the United Nations’ climate change panel, to reduce
global greenhouse gas emissions at the upper end of a range of 40% to 70% by 2050,
using 2010 as the baseline. The group, comprising the largest high-income economies

5. Decarbonization?

60
61
62
63
64

Figueres, Christiana (2015): Executive Secretary at the UNFCCC. Emphasis added, 11 February.
https://europa.eu/eyd2015/en/unric/posts/questions-cristina-figures-cop21
http://unsdsn.org/what-we-do/deep-decarbonization-pathways/;http://unsdsn.org/wp content/uploads/2014/09/DDPP_Digit_updated.pdf
http://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/roadmap/index_en.htm
http://www.carbonpricingleadership.org/what/
http://www.redd-monitor.org/2013/10/11/climate-change-at-the-world-bank-you-can-imagine-a-future-world-where-carbon-is-really-the-currency-of-the-21st-century/
41

65

66

42

https://www.g7germany.de/Content/DE/_Anlagen/G8_G20/2015-06-08-g7-abschluss-eng.
pdf?__blob=publicationFile. «Mindful of this goal (hold the increase in global average temperature below 2 °C) and considering the latest IPCC results, we emphasize that deep cuts in global
greenhouse gas emissions are required with a decarbonization of the global economy over thecourse of this century. Accordingly, as a common vision for a global goal of greenhouse gas emissions reductions we support sharing with all parties to the UNFCCC the upper end of the latest
IPCC recommendation of 40 to 70% reductions by 2050 compared to 2010 recognizing that thischallenge can only be met by a global response. We commit to doing our part to achieve a low-carbon global economy in the long-term including developing and deploying innovative technologies
striving for a transformation of the energy sectors by 2050 and invite all countries to join us in thisendeavor. To this end we also commit to develop long-term national low-carbon strategies.»«In its 2014 report, the IPCC struck a note of urgency on the need to use all available low-carbon
technologies to avert climate change. The sixth assessment report is not due until the end of thedecade, and it’s premature to speculate about what it will say regarding nuclear power. But trends
suggest that major intergovernmental agencies increasingly view nuclear energy as an essential
climate wedge within a global climate stabilization system. Two OECD agencies – the International Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency – projected that nuclear power will have todouble by 2050 for the world to meet the international goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius». http://thebulletin.org/timeline-ipcc%E2%80%99s-shifting-position-nuclear-energy7975.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide(the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Canada)
jointly announced the commitment of its members to «decarbonisation of the global
economy over the course of this century».65
According to the IPCC report of 2014, for example, nuclear energy can be grouped
under the category of renewable energy and figures as a key element of a low-carbon
energy system, with the report’s scenarios showing how nuclear power boosts decarbonization efforts.66 Under strict «carbon criteria», will nuclear be justifiable? Other
contested technologies are also seen by the IPCC as key contributors within «decarbonization» pathways.
Indeed, carbon metrics support some very odd reasoning. The world can continue
to produce emissions, as long as there is a way to «offset» them. So, if you have emissions in one place, and carbon sequestration (or «avoided» emissions) elsewhere, is it
possible to consider the former neutral, or to have a «net zero» result? Then, insteadof embarking on a radical emissions-reduction trajectory, we can continue to emit
massive amounts of CO2 – and even build new coal-fired power plants? Claiming to be
taking climate action, for example, highly questionable technologies of «carbon capture and storage» (CCS, usually referring to the mechanical capture of CO2 emissions
from industrial sources, but the term can also include geoengineering) are gaining
ground. For instance, Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) is being
promoted as a key technology under the new «overshoot approach» of net-zero emissions. BECCS entails planting a huge amount of grass and trees, burning the biomass
to generate electricity, capturing the CO2 that is emitted, and pumping it into geological reservoirs underground. Some argue that BECCS would have enormous development implications, provoking large-scale land grabs, most likely from relatively poor
people or those without a clear tenure or land title. This is not some farfetched scenario; rising demand for biofuels has spurred devastating land grabs in developing
countries for many years.

5. Decarbonization?

There is growing interest in «carbon capture and storage» technologies, whose
claims to be climate-friendly should be treated with great caution. Carbon captureand storage usually denotes the mechanical process of trapping CO2 emissions fromindustrial sources, but can also be used in geo-engineering, in other words, vast-scaletechnological intervention in the climate system. «Bioenergy with Carbon Captureand Storage» (BECCS), for example, is being promoted as a key technology. It is theposter technology for the new «net zero emissions» approach, which purportedly justifies exceedance of bio-capacity. The concept of BECCS involves large-scale plantingof trees and crops, which extract CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow, the use of thisbiomass in electricity generation, and the application of CCS to inject the resulting
emissions into geological formations. However, the use of BECCS and the associatedland-use change would have very serious impacts on the environment and lead toland grabbing, with particularly serious impacts on communities which are alreadyrelatively poor or lack formal tenure or titles to their land. This scenario is by no means
far-fetched: growing demand for biofuels has been driving devastating land grabs indeveloping countries for many years. The BECCS debate has gained further traction in
the wake of the Paris Climate Conference and the ambitious commitment to «Holding
the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial
levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels» (Article 2, paragraph 1 (a) of the Paris Agreement); this is because all the
scenarios produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to limit global
warming to 1.5°C (and most of those that look at 2°C) rely on the use of negative emissions technologies such as BECCS. As the international community’s decision-making
is reliant on the advice given by the IPCC, this leaves a bitter after-taste: given the highlevel of «ambition» underlying the Paris Agreement’s objectives, the current de facto
moratorium on geo-engineering imposed by the Convention on Biological Diversity(CBD) is unlikely to last for long.
What largely justifies this type of reasoning which entails vast social and environmental consequences is the prerogative of carbon over biodiversity. Biodiversity itself
is increasingly being referred to as a «carbon co-benefit». For the sake of producing
measurable, reportable and verifiable results (and thus to receive results-based payments), climate policies can support fast growing monoculture tree plantations, suchas genetically modified eucalyptus, for carbon farming or biomass to produce biofuels: after all, it is carbon that «counts».67
Those are the kinds of issues that are beginning to take shape and will grow as
challenges in the years to come. Acknowledging the wide implications entailed by the
global spread of carbon metrics for our contemporary thinking – which have largely
remained unconsidered as yet – what are the legitimate questions to be raised?
Our idea here was to propose a reflection on these questions and other basic
assumptions, bringing some issues into perspective and shedding a different lightupon the mainstream debate. What can history teach us, how can the collective

67

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/nov/15/gm-trees-bred-world-energy.
43experience of mankind inform us? Are we addressing, or, instead, virtualizing, major
issues of power?
As global, national and local public policies are all being shaped around «carbon»,evoking shift, transformation and transition, we acknowledge an attempt, going on foralmost a decade now, to analyze and communicate the economic benefits and costsof acting on climate change and to incorporate this dimension in shaping a new economic thinking, from the pioneering The Economics of Climate Change (2006; known
as The Stern Review after its lead author, Sir Nicholas Stern) to broader initiatives suchas The New Climate Economy (2014 and 2015).68
In October 2006 the Economics of Climate Change report was launched with amajor media impact. Known since as the Stern Review, the report was a watershedin the consolidation of the greening of the economy as a hegemonic and programmatic response of capitalism to a new stage of accumulation.69 Its main point was to be
the pioneer of a new economic logic, where the environmental crisis enters the main
68
69

44

http://newclimateeconomy.net/
Moreno, Camila (2013): Las ropas verdes del rey. La economía verde: una nueva fuente de acumulación primitiva, in: Lang, Miriam, and Claudia López, Alejandra Santillana: Alternativas alcapitalismo/colonialismo del siglo XXI. 2ed. Buenos Aires: Fundación Rosa Luxemburgo/Abya
Yala/Ediciones America Libre, v. , pp. 63-97.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

Source: Balaji Kasirajan – Wikimedia

A eucalyptus plantation in final stages at Arimalam.

5. Decarbonization?

stage of international politics, because climate change represents the greatest market
failure – but also a great opportunity. The transition to a green, low-carbon economy
would offer enormous opportunities for better and stronger economic growth.
The main point of the Stern Review was that it was able to translate for the firsttime into economic terms the costs – but also the business and profit opportunities –of climate change, thus turning the environmental concerns over global warming intoa «serious» economic case. According to the report, the lack of action and the maintenance of current emissions standards could have as costs the reduction of approximately 5% of the world GDP, reaching 20% GDP reduction in the worst case scenario.
In contrast, the costs of stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions would represent theequivalent of 1% of global GDP annually until 2050.
According to the Stern Review, the «benefits» of fast action are considerably higher
than the «costs». In values ​​of 2006, the study found among its main conclusions: every
ton of CO2 we emit causes damages worth at least $85 in value, but emissions can be
reduced at a much lower cost, $25 per ton. Putting the world on a low carbon path
could, eventually, benefit the economy as much as $2.5 trillion per year; by 2050, markets for low carbon technologies may be worth at least $500 billion. Based on these
economic reasons, the study called for quick action: «what we do now can have a limited effect on the climate over the next 40 or 50 years; but what we do in the next 10-20
years can have a profound effect on the climate in the second half of this century».70
To this end, its main recommendations were three: carbon pricing, technology
policy and energy efficiency. Carbon pricing, more taxes, emissions trading or regulation, would show to society the «true cost» of their actions. The integrated goal should
assign a global price on carbon, across all countries and sectors of the economy; emissions trading schemes, such as the one that operates for the whole European Union,
should be expanded and linked. Technology policies should lead to the development
and widespread use of a variety of low-carbon and high-efficiency products; norms
and international standards may be introduced to classify these products. Climatechange should be fully integrated into development policy and the rich countries musthonor their pledges to increase support through overseas development assistance.
Much criticism has been directed at the review. For example, it can be said that its«technical» recommendations about the economic benefits of investment and adoption of low-carbon technologies, such as those attributed to biofuels, served as a key
trigger for the land grabbing boom that followed the release and impact of the report,with consequences on land price speculation, evictions, expansion of monocultures,
hunger, etc. But perhaps the biggest criticism that can be made of the Stern Review is
the laconic way in which it crystallizes the mentality of its time, a mentality shaped by
the consumer culture. On the occasion of the report launch in London in the second
half of 2006, its lead author, Sir Nicholas Stern (member of the British nobility, Baron
Stern of Brentford and former vice-president of the World Bank)71 said:

7071

http://www.wwf.se/source.php/1169157/Stern%20Report_Exec%20Summary.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Stern
45

72

46

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/29/climatechange.carbonemissions.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide«Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen. The
evidence on the seriousness of the risks from inaction or delayed action is now overwhelming… The problem of climate change involves a fundamental failure of markets:
those who damage others by emitting greenhouse gases generally do not pay […]». 72
However, we ask: does the «polluter pays» principle also embrace the logic thathe or she who can afford can, therefore, also pollute? Is there something like a «rightto pollute» which can be purchased? This idea corresponds to the increasing introduction of flexibility mechanisms that allow individuals to comply with the rule (law)without the need for traditional instruments of sanction. Under this logic, environmental and climate policies are no longer based on human and collective rights, but
consider citizens first and foremost as consumers and even conceive of the «right topollute» and degrade the environment as a commodity. «Rights» can thus become anew branch of «services provision» directed by the markets in a world where buying«emission permits» (or biodiversity offsets) is already embedded in public policy - amajor trend criticized also for the risks implied with the «financialization of nature».
In its origins, the carbon narrative was intended to capture and simplify the complexity of the environmental crisis and the challenges we face. Facilitating communication and action through «units», as carbon, is consonant with the instrumental
rationality that permeates our contemporary thinking in general and, to a great extent,
furthers the widespread social acceptance and naturalization of a trend towards market based/minded environmentalism. While reference to carbon means to express
energy content, carbon functions as a performance metrics and also as an indicator,
allowing for comparability and choices to be made.
A key issue in confronting carbon metrics is thus to understand how «choices» are
reduced to the calculus of costs and opportunities. «Climate reasoning» is increasingly merging with the new economic discourse of greening the economy. In order tocount as climate actions, countries’ contributions need to be translated into emission
reductions that can be measured, reported and verified (MRV). Only MRVable actions(under the carbon metrics) are to be entitled to be registered and receive «result-based
payments», as climate finance is currently mainly framed. Under the UN, countries areworking towards a worldwide system of carbon accountancy. To this end, countries
are producing and putting in place comparable data: from emission inventories tosystems of natural capital accounting (which includes carbon) with support from theWorld Bank. As when the GDP was established, carbon metrics rely on a profusion ofdata and statistical production.
Adding a new layer of complexity, data today is no longer regarded as static or stale,whose usefulness is finished once the purpose for which it was collected is achieved.
New technologies made possible that information can be transformed into data. Whatcan be «datafied» is what can be used by computers to process and run algorithms
to analyze information that is indexable and thus searchable (words, locations, interactions, etc.), becoming this way a raw material for business, a vital economic inputof our times, used to create a new form of economic value. With data mining, data

5. Decarbonization?

collecting, processing and storage, Big Data is emerging as a global industry in the
XXIst century and a key engine of the world economy, especially within a financialized global economy.73 Carbon metrics in this sense fits in, and gives breadth, to thislarger picture.

73

Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor and Cukier, Kenneth (2014) Big Data. Marinier Books, NY.
47

In the previous chapters we have analyzed historically and epistemologically the
metrics of specific issues such as economic growth or environmental degradation. In concluding our argument we now briefly address an even more fundamental problematique, which is the imperial logic of metrics themselves irrespective of
the instances and topics to which they are applied. The first important point in thisrespect is the fact that a system of measurement needs to be as universal as possible.
The second point is that the dominant modes of counting are closely connected tocapitalism. These two characteristics have lead to the effect that alternative modes ofaccounting and measuring things have receded – with some of these epistemologies
at the brink of extinction.
Let us take a brief look at the unfolding of the predominant system, which is themetric system of measurement. Today we access reality and think through the metric system from the very basics of our own bodily self-consciousness (our height, ourweight and circumference), to the pricing of the food we buy (1 kilo of meat or 1 literof milk) and to the value for the rent we pay (in square meters) in a determined neighborhood. We don’t ask why or find it odd that we all think in terms of the metric system to make sense, communicate about and attribute value to the world.
However, the invention of the metric system, which shaped the metric mindset
under which we now globally operate, is relatively young. It was invented some 200
years ago in France and then spread all over the world. As one framework for global
abstraction that has been historically created, the metric system (calories and Celsius
degrees included) has been turned into a mindset. In many fundamental respects,
our world runs on global abstractions: take the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), forinstance, to measure the economic performance of a whole country or region. We
seldom remember that those abstractions have a history that profoundly determines
them in many ways.
Though widely adopted worldwide, up to today, the UK and the USA resist thinking under the metric convention, preferring to make sense of the world under theimperial weights and measures: inches, feet, miles, yards, ounces, gallons, pints, etc.74
Although it has officially adopted the metric system, the UK resists in implementing
it. The USA, Burma and Liberia are the only countries in the world which have not yet
officially adopted the metric system.

74

48

http://time.com/3633514/why-wont-america-go-metric/

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide6.			Metric mindset, capitalism			and epistemicide

6. Metric mindset, capitalism and epistemicide

In the case of measuring temperature, Celsius sounds a pretty «reasonable» scale,for it assigns freezing and boiling points to water with round numbers, 0 and 100; inFahrenheit those same tipping points are the counter-intuitive (related to the meter)
and incomprehensible (for those not literate in it) 32 and 212. The scale comes from
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a German scientist and the early inventor of the thermometer as we know it. In 1724 Fahrenheit was inducted into the British Royal Society andhis system caught on in the British Empire. Under British colonial rule in the courseof the 18th and 19th centuries the Fahrenheit became a standard temperature scale
across much of the globe.75 With the adoption of the meter convention, the Celsius
scale became the new global reference.
The UK adopted the Celsius to measure temperature over fifty years ago in 1962,
and Fahrenheit was retained as a secondary unit to aid the transition for a period ofseveral years. In fact, today – half a century latter – British media resists, and many
media outlets in that country still report weather forecasts in Celsius and in Fahrenheit degrees, some reporting only in Fahrenheit.76 Meanwhile in the US, temperatureis also predominantly understood and measured in Fahrenheit degrees.
Although it can be imposed by law, and indeed in many parts it was, wiring ourbrain into a new measurement system doesn’t happen overnight. It is a long-term process. A metric mind requires a metric mentality, a way of thinking of its own, of apprehending the world in terms of figures. It is also a matter of who measures and who ismeasured, how it is being done and what for.
Through history, and the processes that forged the modern world-system weinherited, creating global uniformity through global abstractions cannot be dis-embedded from power relations. Unifying weights and measures under a universal system was key to facilitating international trade. The creation and adoption of the metricsystem was a decisive step in forging a truly globalized world, in the sense that wired
our brains for global measures and mental infrastructures. As we don’t ask why or findit odd that we all think in terms of the metric system to make sense, communicate
about and attribute value to the world, we are also heading the same way with carbon.
New generations, just as they are born «digital natives», will only know a carbon-constrained world.
In its pre-history, the idea of creating a unified system using decimal units tolink length, area, volume and mass can be traced back to the late 16th century, when
nobody used decimals in daily life. The idea gained strength in the late 17th century
and only materialized another century latter. In 1867, the Exposition Universelle (theParis Exhibition) devoted a stand to the metric system; by 1875 – less than a decade
later – an international treaty known as the Convention du Mètre (Metre Convention)
was signed by 17 states. Thereby, two thirds of the European population and close tohalf the world’s population had adopted the metric system. This means that in mostof these countries a law was passed to impose the new system. Official adoption and7576

http://www.vox.com/2015/2/16/8031177/america-farenheit
http://metricviews.org.uk/2012/10/50-years-of-celsius-weather-forecasts-%E2%80%93-timeto-kill-off-fahrenheit-for-good/
49

77
78
79

50

National Industrial Conference Board (1921): The metric versus the English system of weights
and measures. pp. 10–11.
Sombart, Werner (1915): The quintessence of capitalism: a study of the history and psychologyof the modern business man. T. Fisher Unwin, London, p. 125
Appadurai, Arjun (1996): Modernity at Large, p. 115.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

effective use of the metric system did not follow the same pace. By 1920 countries
comprising 22% of the world’s population, mainly English-speaking, used the imperial
system; 25% used mainly the metric system and the remaining 53% used neither.77
This brief look at the history of the metric convention shows that the forging of a
global and unified measurement system, as the one we today take unquestioned andas a given, was a monumental task in scale and scope which is not yet fully completed.
It also shows that the spread of such a system is a process that can hardly toleratealternatives.
Of course accounting and calculating were developed in many ways throughhistory, in different societies and cultures. Quantitative thinking is by no means aEuropean invention. But there is a special characteristic to the now dominant measurement system, which lies in its demand for totality and universality. What expandedfrom Europe was to become a globally unified system of measurement. This expansion
was closely connected to a specific calculatory mindset that is linked to the emergenceof the capitalist world system. In that process quantitative took over qualitative thinking as a widespread social phenomenon. In the «economic rationality» that defines
the spirit of capitalism, calculation and calculatory reason play a defining role. Werner
Sombart, a German sociologist and contemporary of Max Weber, wrote Der Bourgeois(1913), in which he explored the main characteristics of the capitalist Geist (spirit):«(…) calculation forms an important element in the capitalist spirit, and this wasrecognized quite early in the history of capitalism. By calculation I mean the tendency, habit, perhaps more – the capacity to think of the universe in terms of figures
and to transform these figures into a well-knit system of income and expenditure. The
figures, I need hardly add, always express a value, and the whole system is intended
to demonstrate whether a plus or a minus is the resultant, thus showing whether theundertaking is linked to bring profit or loss.»78
Calculation and capitalism have also been understood as intrinsically linked in
critical studies of European imperial expansion. The Indian post-colonial scholar
Arjun Appadurai analyzed the cultural conditions of expanding European notions ofmodernity to a global scale. In this, he explicitly mentioned numbers and argued thatcounting was instrumental. He suggested reassessing the study of colonial governmental practices and to further inquire into «the ways in which they employ quantification in censuses as well as in various other instruments like maps, agrarian survey,
racial studies, and a variety of other productions of the colonial archive.»79 In this context some specific inventions were turned into widely adopted social practices. The
forging of a modern world system played a crucial role. The invention of double
entry book-keeping was a key tool not only to transform the world into «data», but to6. Metric mindset, capitalism and epistemicide

apprehend whether a particular account or an entire venture was profitable or not.80
The new system made it possible to translate the world into profits and losses. As Sombart said:«Double-entry bookkeeping is born of the same spirit as the system of Galileo
and Newton … With the same means as these, it orders the phenomenon into an elegant system, and it may be called the first cosmos built upon the basis of mechanistic
thought. Double-entry bookkeeping discloses to us the cosmos of the economic worldby the same method as, later, the cosmos of the stellar universe was unveiled by thegreat investigation of natural philosophy… One can scarcely conceive of capitalism
without double-entry bookkeeping: they are related as are form and content. It is difficult to decide, however, whether in double-entry bookkeeping capitalism provided
itself with a tool to make it more effective, or whether capitalism derives from the«spirit» of the double-entry bookkeeping.»81
This ultimately lies at the roots of how instrumental rationality and market logic
gained ground, extending from commercial transactions to all realms of social life andsocial relations despite the ethical implications. The rationalization of commerce as
an assumedly natural and universal way of reasoning leads to outcomes such as wehave seen with the Stern Review on the economics of climate change, with its widespread implications for global policy and debate.
As a constitutional part of the emergence of capitalism, the invention of double-entry bookkeeping is part of a larger picture.82 Capitalism can be defined,
modestly, as a social relation, a world-system, but it is also an epistemic project that
includes the broader and multilayered process sometimes described as «the quantification of Western society» (Alfred Crosby). This is a shift that took place in Europe
from the Late Middle Ages to the Renaissance, when a concurrence of socio-culturaland technological factors influenced human perception.83 Supported by innovations
as mechanical clocks and cartography, new thinking habits around the measurementof reality developed and forged a unique mentalité, where the measurement of space
and time, reducing and translating them into a unified metric system, was intertwinedwith the imperial enterprise as a means to explore and control new lands.
So it is important to keep in mind that the spread of the measuring mentality wasan imperial project that could not tolerate other ways of doing things. The failure torecognize the different ways of knowing by which people across the globe run theirlives and provide meaning to their existence is termed «cognitive injustice», or «epistemicide» (Boaventura de Souza Santos).84 The global spread of the quantitative mind
80
81
82
83
84

Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, and Cukier, Kenneth (2014): Big Data. Marinier Books, New York , pp
81.
Sombart, Werner (1928): Der moderne Kapitalismus (French translation 1992), vol II, part I,
pp.118-119.
Chiapello, Eve (2007): Accounting and the birth of the notion of capitalism. Critical perspectives
on accounting 18, 263-296.
Crosby, Alfred W. (1997): The Measure of Reality. Quantification and Western Society, 12501600. Cambridge University Press.
Santos, Boaventura de Souza (2014): Epistemologies of the South. Justice Against Epistemicide.
Paradigm Publishers, Boulder.
51

was in this sense an integral part of «modernity» as an ideology, shaping the world as
we know it. In the course of history, this process entailed, all over the globe, profoundchanges in the language through which we measure and value the material world
around us, not only in terms of a mental switch in the abstract units we use – as converting from pounds to kilos – but a much more complex process of internalizing new
and foreign parameters to replace culturally established and pre-existent references
and the many diverse and traditional ways of measuring which have for ages beenpart of every local value system. «Epistemicide» is high price to be paid when one
aims at pricing everything under the sun.

Source: Axel Hartmann – Flickr

Lignite-pit of the RWE near Inden/Eschweiler.

52

Concluding remarks

Concluding remarks

Over the years, carbon metrics emerged from the scientific realm in a process that
integrated economic discourse and thinking in a dangerous way. We can ponder that«carbon» was, from the outset, a false or limited way to frame a much bigger problem. But is it possible today to reassess this basic assumption? And why should we dothis? Today, counting carbon emissions and fusing this mode of accountancy into thelarger System of National Accounts is presented as a revolutionary way of simplifying
things in order to take action. We oppose this optimistic proposition because – as amatter of fact – quantification makes things much more complicated and raises manyquestions.
One could (and should) equally ask: Is it possible to talk about the success of certain political decisions without measuring them in terms of GDP growth? It is evident
that many policies today would look different if they truly aimed to fulfill the interests
and needs of real people and not the profit interest of shareholders. But what seems so
obviously right would be so hard to change in practice.
In terms of the profound and transformative change we need, what does «decarbonization» translate into and what does it mean in the real world? Is the carbon-redux scheme really a key engine – as it is depicted – to respond to the magnitude of
the crisis ahead? Or should it be challenged? Can we really expect to maintain environmental and social integrity under carbon accountancy? To what extent is transformative climate action actually hindered under a carbon-centric logic and what are
the implications? Does such a thing as «carbon neutrality» make ecological and ethical sense? Can «carbon concerns» really encompass the social-justice and politicaldimension at the root cause of many of these ecological problems? These questions
are all implied in the metric approach – but rarely posed.
To control and regulate «carbon» is also to control energy (and, in a way, theresource from which the energy is produced) and energy prices. If the common goal
were to achieve a transition of the global economy out of fossil fuel dependency, amajor issue would be who will control this transition, how and what for. Will we beable, on the basis of this epistemology, to really «choose» and plan for the post-oilsociety we want to live in and the transformative changes we want to bring about?
Or will science rely on carbon metrics to model scenarios and pre-set mitigation«options» grounded in cost-benefit analyses? How can we debunk the myth that we
can have «zero-net emissions» accountancy (an urgent matter in light of the Paris
Agreement.)?85
85

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/climate-change-alternative-approaches-by-camila-moreno-et-al-2016-03
53

86

54

Bolier, David, and Silke Helfrich (2012): The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market
and State. Levellers Press, Amherst.

Carbon Metrics Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide

Currently, the commons are resurging as a transformative vision and generative
paradigm to confront the global challenges we face, from managing shared natural
resources to creating innovative forms to organize the economy, to ensure welfare,to produce knowledge, etc.86 Yet the commodification of carbon and the creation ofprivate carbon rights in the name of «green growth» lead us in the opposite direction.
Current political debates are very much stuck in the carbon metric thinking andmindset, and it would take a long time and huge effort to change that. We would liketo offer at least some perspectives. For one thing, global social justice is not possible
without global cognitive justice. To recover and valorize the epistemological diversityof the world is an imperative. Reclaiming the «epistemologies of the South» is also partof reinventing social emancipation. A fundamental issue to be brought to the publicdebate is that under the pretended objectivity of the carbon metrics there is a great
deal of violence: trying to make reality and its contradictions fungible into carbon
units entails cultural, symbolic and epistemic violence.
We believe it is very necessary to preserve those spaces and communities where
this logic is not dominant yet. From indigenous communities in the Amazon forest
to agroecology and community-supported agriculture groups in Europe, Japan or the
USA – alternative practices, lifestyles, economies and societies are possible and real.
Often small, marginalized and precarious, alternatives practices should not be valued,
judged acceptable or validated under the strict carbon metric. We need to ensure thatpolicies protect these spaces and people, their rights and their cultures. Most importantly, we need to become much more innovative in how we can foster new initiatives
and scale up and diffuse good experiences.
This is a key issue in our current political debate as mainstream thinking and policies regarding climate action are heading towards an overarching logic driven by «mitigation outcomes». In that logic, cost-opportunity valuation reduces environmental
complexities to «transferable mitigation units», paving the way to worldwide offsetting
schemes. We need to communicate strongly and loudly the false solutions and equally
loudly point to alternative choices that our (elected) decision makers could take.
What would a radical decarbonization of our economy and lifestyle really look
like if we were serious about phasing out all fossil fuels? How can we relocalize our
economies? How can we dismantle the growth mantra? How can we regulate thoseindustries that destroy and pollute and how can we prevent their lobbyists from simply buying political decisions in their favor?
Carbon or GDP alone will not point us the way. We need to challenge our mental infrastructures, how we acquire the established foundations for our thinking. As
we have argued here, the all-powerful carbon paradigm can entail profound injustices. Beyond carbon, we need a multi-dimensional perspective, one which is awareof the metabolic, life-maintaining processes of the planet, taking into account its natural limits, as well as the fundamental rights and needs of all human beings and theground rules of participation and inclusion as we move on.

ECOLOGYVOLUME 42

Carbon Metrics
Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide
The environmental crisis is real, urgent, and of global reach andsignificance. Climate change is framed as the largest threat.
But this threat is seen almost exclusively as a problem of too
much CO2 emissions. Is climate change more important and moreurgent than the loss of biodiversity, the degradation of arable
soils, or the depletion of fresh water? Can any of these phenomena even be considered in isolation from each other?
This paper argues that the way we describe and frame a problem
very much predetermines the kinds of solutions and answers weseek, e.g. carbon-centric mode creates and even destroys knowledge at the same time. The authors of this essay invite thereaders to take a step back and brush climate policy against thenap.
ISBN 978-3-86928-145-2

Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung
Schumannstraße 8, 10177 Berlin
The Green Political Foundation 030 28  53  40 info@boell.de www.boell.de 