On 30 November, Johannes Fehrle will present a paper at the conference “Green Capitalism – A New Regime of Accumulation?” in Berlin.
Abstract of the paper:
In recent decades the multiple ecological crises of capitalism have become so apparent that even bourgeois states and capitalist shareholders have accepted that something needs to be done to stop catastrophes such as climate change. At the same time calls for radical socio-ecological transformations, such as Kohei Saito’s “degrowth communism” (2022), remain relatively marginal. Instead, the dominant factions of society have resorted, once again, to a reliance on technofixes in the hopes that technology can “infinitely expand commodity production and capital accumulation”, willfully overlooking both that many of these future technologies are at best marginally developed, as well as the “immense, unforeseen repercussions” such technologies and the continuation of the current mode of production bring with them (Foster and Clark 2020: 284). My talk will examine one such technofix: carbon offsetting, particularly offsetting from agriculture (‘carbon farming’). Employing Elmar Altvater and Birgit Mahnkopf’s model of ‘valorization’ [Inwertsetzung] (Altvater 1987; Altvater & Mahnkopf 2007), I will shed light on the political economy of this new process of extracting value from a previously unvalorized aspect of nature. Drawing on literature about the scientific promises as well as the many uncertainties surrounding the measurement, verification, and long-term benefits of carbon farming, all of which are still controversially discussed in the literature, I understand carbon farming as a new green capitalist business venture. Far from fretting over the supposed accumulation crisis of a “second contradiction” of capitalism (O’Connor 1988), capital understands ecological crises as a source for new business ventures and new forms of extraction. I will term these “‘non-extractive’ extractivism”, since they extract value precisely through the non-extraction of the commodity they supposedly sell: soil organic carbon. What is more, carbon farming does not replace the extraction of commodities from farmland, but adds the ‘production’ of symbolic claims for carbon dioxide removal to the economic portfolio of agro-food businesses. As such it stands as an example of how capitalism tries to adapt to and reap profits from the ecological problems it has been instrumental in creating.