‘Risks from climate change, by reason for concern — 2001 compared with updated data’ (Smith et al., 2009: 4134) What is clear from most analyses of global carbon budgets is that there is not a great deal of atmospheric carbon space left. Rich countries through the G8 have said that to prevent dangerous climate change we need to keep global average temperature increases below 2 degrees compared to the pre-industrial level. By dangerous climate change they mean unacceptable impacts to people and economies as well as too high a risk of positive feedbacks. Positive feedbacks are where increased temperatures create changes on the planet that themselves create further warming, for example warming leading to the release of vast quantities of methane (a powerful greenhouse gas) due to the melting of Siberian permafrost. The choice of 2 degrees was largely informed by scientific research that led to the production of an influential ‘burning embers’ diagram (see diagram 1). Photo Credit: Tamra Gilbertson, Carbon Trade Watch, Durban, South Africa, 3 December 2011 Another problem, in the wake of Durban, is that many credits issued by middle-income countries are destined to become ‘junk assets’ with national governments writing them off by 2013. After assessing UN Data, Bloomberg (2011) news noted both the glut in the market as well as the consequences for ‘phased’ out stocks: ‘A UN program that encourages reductions in greenhouse gases awarded almost twice as many credits this year as in 2010 for projects that destroy industrial gases known as HFC-23 and nitrous oxide...With Europe set to stop recognizing some credits in little more than a year, investors are ‘racing to beat’ the ban’. As a result, no investor believes there is any money to be made by utilizing carbon markets to direct climate-conscious investments. A month after Durban’s denouement, it was evident to the French bank Societe Generale that ‘European carbon permits may fall close to zero should regulators fail to set tight enough limits in the market after 2020’ — and without much prospect of that, the bank lowered its 2012 forecasts by 28 percent (Airlie and Carr, 2012). The 54 percent crash for December 2012 carbon futures sent the price to a record low, just over €6.3/tonne. Worse, an additional oversupply of 879 million tons was anticipated for the period 2008-2020, partly as a result of a huge inflow of UN offsets: an estimated 1.75 billion tonnes. This glutting problem is not only due to the demand deficit thanks to the COP17 negotiators’ failure to mandate smissions cuts, but is also in part due to the lax system the UN appears to have adopted. All manner of inappropriate projects appear to be gaining approval, especially in Africa, and even in a site —- Durban’s Bisasar Road — where there was such intense eco-social contestation that even the World Bank dropped its support. Photo Credit: Tamra Gilbertson, Carbon Trade Watch, Durban, South Africa, 3 December 2011 Photo Credit: Tamra Gilbertson, Carbon Trade Watch, Durban, South Africa, 3 December 2011 At the same time, millions of poor people are regularly disconnected or denied access to the grid due to extreme poverty, affecting nearly half the country’s families. Warfare is underway against municipalities and Eskom in the form of ubiquitous ‘service delivery protests’ whose recent root causes in high-priced electricity can be traced to climate change via the bill for Medupi/Kusile construction, controversially financed by the World Bank’s largest-ever loan. The Bank claims Medupi will help the poor, once again standing reality on its head. Moreover, because of backsliding from clean electricity to dirty household energy like coal, wood or paraffin, the passage from HIV-positive to full-blown AIDS status is rapid via respiratory-related opportunistic infections, including the raging TB epidemic, especially affecting women exposed to particulates when cooking over biomass. Photo Credit: Tamra Gilbertson, Carbon Trade Watch, Durban, South Africa, 3 December 2011 indictment of our ruling class as an agent of global capital and its economic policies which were deepening inequality and increasing poverty. Sadly, no matter how hard South Durban Community Environmental Alliance leaders tried to organize in the weeks preceding the COP17 in the city’s most radical anti- corporate protest site (where I too am a lay-member and resident), Africa’s industrial armpit could not consistently deliver more than a few hundred protesters from the 300,000 victims residing in the vicinity. Figure 1: Using amount of electricity billed for to speak for environmental effects Figure 2: Establishing the Class of a Package of Paper Key to understanding this email is first of all recognising the means which Elise and I draw on: accounts. ESDR can be understood as an effect of an accounting culture. Within this, ‘environment’ was managed through an accounting system which associates each consumption data set to an account. Such an account was characterised through an ‘explanation’, drawing out, i.e. defining, the class (see lower part of Artefact 3.3). Elise, interpreting the definition, thus, specified that water received by means of a system of pipes, rather than by means of transportable cans, had to be filed in the account ‘drinking water’. Water received through cans was to be excluded. Yet, after I informed Nick at 15:50 about Elise’s filing prescription, he decided to collect the data on bottled water anyway. Thus, this underlines that any definition needs to be actually translated into the intended practice to produce the targeted effect. Furthermore, an account was specified by logical and quantitative criteria, including its carbon conversion factors. Let us briefly focus upon this fragment of the network. The respective factor stored in ESDR for the drinking water account was 0.3747kg of so- called scope-3-emissions for each consumed cubic metre. This refers to indirect emissions caused in the life cycle of a product. GFQ sourced this number from the
