Carbon’s Four Fixes: A Relational Typology for Communicating about Carbon and Thinking Elementally

• In Event: Towards a Typology of Relations

Abstract

This paper asks how carbon is relationally schematized within the work of climate change communication. Carbon’s material properties as an element make this an unresolved question in contemporary climate politics. Elements are not like conventional objects of analysis; carbon exists in a large geophysical cycle, as a component of a remarkable array of substances, and so can best be defined by its relational bonds rather than properties intrinsic to itself. Accordingly, climate communication can be seen to consist of the work of constructing legible cuts across the carbon cycle, demarcating which of carbon’s expansive relations are relevant and which can be disregarded. Such schema are neither definitive nor apolitical, but are nevertheless a necessary task. For carbon to be communicable, its relations and meaning must be tactically partial.

This paper argues that climate politics can be productively reframed through the ways in which carbon is strategically ‘fixed’ into different relational schema with diverse aesthetic, affective, and economic affordances. It offers a typology of four carbon fixes – point, elliptical, transversal, and mesh structures of relation – via case studies of climate populism/denial, carbon footprinting, ecological footprinting, and carbon neutral accounting. Carbon’s elemental character helps explain past challenges in climate communication and suggests future directions through which carbon’s capacious relationality might serve as an asset to climate politics rather than a barrier.

Author

• Anne Pasek, Trent University