Financializing climate and climatizing finance - I

Abstract

This session seeks contributions that use STS and related concepts and frameworks to study the range of efforts to align financial flows with the composition of the atmosphere and its effects on climate. This involves developing climate metrics, translating them to financial terms, and bringing them to bear on investment calculations.
We expect the many mediations between the realms of finance and climate to be sites of contention and uncertainty, providing openings for a range of STS research traditions: the study of metrics, standards, and commensuration; the construction of calculating agents through devices and calculative practices; assetization and commodification of the natural world; risk.
Here’s a partial listing of possible questions:
• What is left outside the frame when the climate problem is translated to terms of a homogeneous medium of exchange?
• To what extent are financial practices part of a socio-technical regime that resists change?
• What processes and actors shape the mediations between the atmosphere’s chemistry and the language of finance?
And an equally partial listing of empirical objects that could fit comfortably within the session:
• Renewable energy finance – techniques for mobilizing investment in renewable energy.
• Climate risk measurement and disclosure – efforts to require firms to measure their exposure to climate risk and to disclose that risk.
• Devaluation of fossil reserves – how fossil fuel producers devalue the volume and value of their reserves.
• Climate finance technologies and devices – “Climate fintech” – analytic products and platforms and how they make a financial world that reflects climate impacts
• Development, rating, verification, and valuation of carbon-free and ESG financial products.

Discussant

• Rebecca Elliott, London School of Economics

Individual Presentations

• Ecological Justice and the Creative Economy: Shifts in the Nascent Cryptoart Market - Michelle Kasprzak, Willem de Kooning Academy

• From Environmental Crisis to Economic Opportunity: Climate Change and the Clean Energy Manufacturing Analysis Center’s Benchmarks - James Spencer Tompkins, The New School

• Green Business Sense and the Sociotechnics of Environmental Care - Matthew N. Eisler, University of Strathclyde

Session Organizer

• Daniel Breslau, Virginia Tech