On April 10th, 2025, Steffen Dalsgaard, Professor at the IT-University of Copenhagen and Principal Investigator for the Decoupling IT project, spoke on the subject of Carbon, Its Economic, Environmental, and Social Impacts at Columbia University in New York City.
Abstract
“Carbon” is arguably one of the most ambiguous commodities of late neoliberal capitalism. The creation of a commodity form focused on carbon is meant to avert climate change by calculating and putting a value on the climate impact of human actions. Yet, this creation both assigns carbon a transformative role in changing individual and collective practices of production and consumption, and at the same time a conservative role by being part of market designs that try to preserve and protect the contemporary capitalist system from itself. This book argues that the ambiguity stems from carbon’s sociomaterial “being” as much more than a commodity. Carbon is a chemical element of nature, and as such it is both material and constant, yet fluid in its movement through a diversity of states and bodies – social as much as material. Most importantly, carbon thus figures in a long range of relationships to other bodies: natural and environmental, economic and political, social and cultural. Yet, even as a commodity carbon is often regarded as intangible and ephemeral – most importantly as data and information within markets and practices of offsetting, where the credits that are traded have often been accused of being “hot air”. The book, in this way, argues that carbon – as discourse, standard, or sociocultural norm – values “everything”, but when priced as a commodity it has to deal with the claim that it refers to “nothing”. In this capacity carbon provides an interesting anthropological and sociological lens for discussing how late neoliberal capitalism deals not only with the contemporary climate crisis, but with value more generally.
