Paper short abstract:

"Carbon" in the form of emission permits or credits displays several functions that allow us to compare it to actual currencies. It represents and compares a vast multiplicity of actions, and it both temporalises and territorialises value. Yet what is traded is often criticised for not existing.

Paper long abstract:

By putting into a place a market regime to govern greenhouse gas emissions, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol in practice created a virtual currency representing human impacts on the climate. Carbon credits or permits nominally represent the global warming potential of 1 ton of carbon dioxide equivalent, and they function as a standard of value for covering and comparing a vast multiplicity of different actions and events under one value form. This "currency" – while materialised in various digital formats including blockchain tokens – has thus come to affect how many states and corporations relate to natural resources as well as to each other. Carbon's regime of accounting reaches both back into time (accumulated emissions, climate debt) as much as into the future (goals and targets for emission reductions), and it territorialises the value of carbon in differentiated landscapes as much as it points to the uneven distribution of climate responsibility held by different nation-states across the North-South divide. While potentially putting a value on every human action in relation to its climate impact, it simultaneously faces accusations that its accounting often cannot guarantee in practice the emission reductions it claims to cover. While carbon is thus the "currency" that values everything while putting a price on nothing, it still has an enormous (colonising and disciplining?) impact on global debates of climate value.