Paper short abstract:

By looking at Canada's Great Bear Rainforest, I follow carbon offsets in its process of reattachemet to places, peoples and histories, and discuss how this process reevalutes land and therefore offset pricing. The paper shows how attachment gradually withdraws the good from laws of global markets.

Paper long abstract:

The invention of emission rights or carbon offsets is often said to be the commodification of the last real global common - the use of the atmosphere; and the sellout of yet another part of nature. Along with it comes a critique of capitalistic practices that seem to even out polluting practices and to flatten environmental specifics. On a political level, it appears to be the only globally acceptable way to face climate change these days. However, offsets were designed to be a universal good for a global market that can be traded for any form of carbon emission (or equivalent) anywhere in the world. Looking at the phenomenon through the lens of carbon saving projects in British Columbia and elsewhere, we can see how carbon saving projects require new ways of commodifying land and therefore closely tie emission rights to specific places, its ecosystems, histories, social contexts and environmental values. In my paper, I want to look at the place based processes that produce emission rights and moreover, how their prices evolve due to their way of being attached to these places. I specifically want to shed light on the processes in which the value of this good is created, morally and monetarily, between abstract global markets and very local contexts of production and consumption. I argue that the more a carbon certificate is attached to a place, the less this certificate can be traded anonymously on global markets and the less it is commensurable with market prices.