Carbon as Commodity
The perils and promises of carbon markets
I earn my living (indirectly) through the sale of meat. The animals I raise come from the land I Iove; they are made of it. Their lives, like mine, are built from the stories of that land. Their flesh contains within it the sunlight which has fallen on our meadows, the taste of oak leaves in the dry season, of fresh dew on grass blades in the spring.
And then, at some point, they are taken away, and eventually killed.
They are divided into their component parts, and wrapped in plastic and to the untrained eye, they are more or less identical to any other steak. The stories don’t translate through the packaging. And so, as creatures who choose what to eat with our eyes, and not our other senses, we assume that they are equivalent, even identical, to steaks from cattle raised in very different contexts. They become a commodity, and as such their cost, their value, and hence their essence, is equal to that of any other steak. They no longer represent an individual animal, or an individual landscape.
This is the problem with our culture's relationship to money.
As a placeholder for value, a facilitator for complex networks of exchange, currency is undeniably useful. It has emerged independently in some form in most cultures around the world. What is unique about money in contemporary capitalist western culture isn’t its existence but its supremacy as the sole signifier of value and medium of exchange. In its supremacy it becomes an agent of commodification , which is to say homogenization. It turns the specific to the general, and in doing so robs things of their uniqueness, their spirit, and their grounding in place.
But, that is not what I want to talk about. Not exactly. Rather, I want to draw a parallel.
I am as excited as the next hard working agriculturalist about the idea of being fairly compensated, as we try our best to feed people without destroying the land we call home. If the market will not value the extra work it takes to produce food in a manner that cares for and tends to our ecosystem --in economic parlance, if the positive externalities of our production can’t be included in the price of our products-- then we must figure out some other way to articulate that value and be compensated for it. Similarly, if through the production of goods and services, other businesses create negative externalities (pollution, ecological degradation, and the like), shouldn’t they be the ones to compensate us for the good work we do to stem the tide of their greed? Maybe. But in order to do so, we need to create an equivalency between the two acts, one of healing, the other of destruction. We need a common unit of measurement to balance the checkbook of damages and repairs. Enter carbon.
It is the essential building block of all organic life on earth, which happens in a cruel twist of fate to be the very thing threatening the proliferation of that life. As we are well aware our problem is an imbalance, an excess of carbon in our atmosphere and oceans, extracted from fossil fuels (ancient life forms), dug from a grave never meant to disturbed. A lesser known, but equally dire and compelling problem, is the dearth of carbon in our soils, eroded and oxidized from thousands of years of tillage, deforestation, and (more recently) herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic nitrogen. What if we could take that excess carbon and return it to our soils, solving both the problem of climate change, and the paucity of fertility in our land. This idea is what set me out onto the path of regenerative agriculture, and for good reason- it is an enormously hopeful vision.
What worries me is this: Our problem is so much bigger than carbon. From a scientific perspective there is much more to global warming than carbon. There are enormous disruptions to both local and global water cycles, caused by dams, deforestation, and urban sprawl. There is desertification on an unprecedented scale, caused by a disruption of the symbiotic relationship between grazing animals, predators, and grasslands. There is the current rate of biodiversity loss, which is to say the massive extinction event we are living through and creating.
Soil carbon may be correlated with ecological health, but they are not equivalent.
Moreover, carbon pricing is inherently reductive. When we reduce an ecosystem to how much carbon it can sequester, or how much carbon will be emitted in its destruction, we turn a place into a number, we obscure its stories, and its soul. If we allow corporations to turn virgin forests into open pit mines, which they then atone for that sin by buying the absolutions of carbon credits stored in the crop land of a farmer practicing no-till in Iowa, we do a great disservice to both places. You can never make up for the destruction of a specific place by taking better care of another specific place, they can never be made equivalent, because they are unique. It may sound utopian in a culture defined by commodities, but the only true motivation for protecting, and for healing a piece of land, is love.
My thinking on this subject has been heavily influenced by several Indigenous leaders who I respect deeply. Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network is ardently opposed to putting a price on carbon, as articulated by him and other Indigenous leaders in an Open Letter from the Indigenous Peoples of the World
“You cannot commodify the Sacred — we reject these market based climate change solutions and projects such as the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program (REDD+), because they are false solutions that further destroy our rights, our ability to live in our forests, and our sovereignty and self-determination. False solutions to climate change and climate disruption destroy both our material and spiritual relationship to the Earth…. There is an intrinsic interrelationship between our forests and our peoples of the North and the South. All of Creation is alive and interrelated. The air we breathe has life and gives life to all and cannot be bought, sold or traded.”
This sentiment is echoed by Vandana Shiva, renowned Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, and anti-globalization author.
“Carbon trading uses the resources of poorer people and poorer regions as "offsets" for richer countries: it is between 50 and 200 times cheaper to plant trees in poor countries to absorb CO2 than it is to reduce emissions at source. In other words, the burden of "clean-up" falls on the poor. From a market perspective, this might appear efficient, but in terms of energy justice, it is perverse to burden the poor twice - first with the impact of CO2 pollution in the form of climate disasters and then with offsetting the pollution of the rich.”
And yet, I hesitate to stand behind a wholesale rejection of the basic idea of valuing the non-monetary outcomes of good land stewardship. The critiques I have levied up to this point have been specifically targeted at cap and trade carbon markets. There are many other permutations of carbon markets, some of which, in tandem with stringent regulation like a carbon tax, and moratoriums on certain destructive practices, may well be able to spur the adoption of regenerative agricultural practices.
There is an increasing effort by organizations like Regen Network to expand the notion of valuing working lands ecosystems beyond carbon to include things like biodiversity, attempting to include the story of the land and its stewards in the carbon price. Regen’s grassland 2.0 project engages with voluntary carbon markets as opposed to compulsory ones, the motivation for the latter being legislation and regulation while the motive for the former being marketing, and if given the benefit of the doubt, altruism. Voluntary markets decouple emissions from sequestration, giving them the potential to provide a higher price per ton for carbon without providing tacit approval for continued emissions.
I firmly believe that regenerative farmers and ranchers should be able to support ourselves and our loved ones doing the work we believe in so deeply. So the intent of my critique is not to close the door on the subject, but rather to interrogate its portrayal as a panacea. Neither carbon markets nor regenerative agricultural practices will fix the problem of a sick culture based upon stolen land and lives. If solutions do not fundamentally challenge the power structure that created the problems they purport to address, then they are not deep solutions, but at best marginal improvements, and at worst distractions.
I Appreciate the thought you put into this!