Nature as Accumulation Strategy? Finance, Nature, and Value in Carbon Markets

This article examines the contradictions and possibilities of “nature as accumulation strategy” in light of the breakdown of accumulation in emissions trading and carbon offsetting schemes established by the European Union and United Nations. The first section revisits accounts of carbon markets as a state-driven accumulation strategy by drawing on work by geographers and other political economists who understand capitalist value relations as being actively constituted by nature and finance. The second section provides an overview of how carbon is traded and presents data to document the growth and decline of financial activity in the main global carbon markets, focusing on the impact of weak carbon prices. The third section analyzes accumulation dynamics in carbon markets in terms of the extent to which carbon has or could become an emergent form of capital. It argues that states have failed to support the carbon market accumulation strategy due to tensions between socioecological relations of appropriation and capitalization that are internal to the carbon commodity. It also argues, however, that the commodification of carbon, as “metanature,” contains the potential to sustain accumulation by comparing and enforcing the profitability of different forms of pollution. The conclusion discusses implications for critical political–economic research on finance, nature, and value in contemporary capitalism and the efficacy of market-based climate policy.