Global Warming, Global Market: Science, Economics, and Ethics in the Anthropocene

• In Event: “Won’t you be my neighbor?”: Towards Theory and Ethics in Society

Abstract

The concept of the Anthropocene has come under fire for flattening historical time. Critics argue that it erases the specific human histories of colonialism and capitalism, and installs in their place a universalizing history of the human species that is as void of normative meaning as the natural history of the planet. Proposals for counter-terms abound, including "Capitalocene" and "Plantationocene", to more effectively name the forces that are responsible for today's crises. This talk traces the contours of this discussion to much earlier episodes in which constitutional questions of rights, responsibilities, and citizenship were tabled in debates around climate change that involved the normative status of carbon emissions. In the late 1980s, environmental and economic expertise served to underwrite an imaginary of carbon as ahistorical, the same everywhere no matter where or for what purpose it is emitted, and thus fit for trading on global markets in the post-Bretton Woods world. This flattening of carbon's history set up struggles that continued to play out for the three decades of climate politics that followed. Only with the 2015 Paris Agreement did a settlement emerge that reconnects, partially, the universal time of science with the historical time of human experience. Despite its long history and significant stakes, this struggle has received less scholarly attention than its younger cousin, the debate about the place of humans and their differentiated histories in the Anthropocene. Its reconstruction provides important insights for thinking about contemporary challenges to the recognition of persisting inequalities rooted in human histories of violence and difference.

Author

• Stefan Schäfer, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies