No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This article offers an examination of the politics and practice of carbon offsetting. It is argued that inherent to the carbon offset are a set of contradictions that function to normalize consumption as solution, capitalism as saviour. In order to understand how such contradictions are reconciled, this article suggests that offsetting must be understood as a psycho-social device through which the individual's fears and discontents in the face of existential crises such as global warming are ultimately pacified. Additionally, it is argued that carbon offsetting functions to re-stabilize the narrative of capitalism as progress, satisfying the broader needs of a system that risks collapse should the masses reject its necessary illusion. By drawing on the example of Al Gore as carbon warrior, the perils inherent to relying on the false God that has become the carbon offset to remedy the global warming crisis are illuminated.More than anything else, the carbon offset has come to structure the form and content of global warming governance and action today. This is the case both within official governance bodies such as the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol, and at the level of disparate businesses and individuals in the West attempting to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions. Touted for the flexibility they offer polluters in cutting emission levels-indeed, offsets allow polluters to pay distant others, frequently located in the global south, to engage in emission reduction activities as a substitute for reductions at the source-offsets have begun to normalize the idea that only through the development of new markets and profit opportunities will the global community solve the climate crisis. In this sense, the carbon offset offers a lens through which to analyze modern environmentalism's substantive transmogrification-not simply a change by degrees but a change in kind, 1 whereby solutions appear strange and unsettled, embodying "unnatural combinations" that unify the problem as solution, capitalism as saviour.Indeed, while early environmentalism identified the capitalist system of production as responsible in part for emerging environmental crises, demanding a societal shift to more sustainable, non-capitalist social relations, today mainstream environmentalism is organized around the maintenance and expansion of this