Bound by Chains of Carbon: Ecological–Economic Geographies of Globalization

In an era of globalization, how are we to associate carbon emissions with particular places or peoples? Contemporary environmental science and policy often debate between assigning emissions to the territories where they are emitted and assigning emissions to the consumers they ultimately benefit. In this article, I employ a postpositivist, relational approach to construct a broader set of quantitative perspectives, each of which takes a different standpoint within global circuits of capital to narrate how regions could be connected with seemingly distant carbon emissions. By constructing, analyzing, and mapping tens of millions of global connections in empirical portraits of interrelations between regions, economies, and carbon emissions in 2004, I demonstrate that our understandings of carbon and its geographies are extremely sensitive to which standpoint we adopt. For example, I estimate that most emissions in the world supported capital accumulation in countries other than where those emissions occurred. Emissions from emerging economies such as China might also be regarded as far more implicated in the supply chains that satisfy the demands of European and American consumers than has been recognized. Many such approaches—past and proposed herein—to narrating the more-than-human geographies of carbon emissions under globalization are necessarily local epistemologies, providing partial perspectives whose findings that have a degree of mutual incommensurability. This article thus explores challenges of engaging productively with pluralism not only in qualitative approaches but in quantitative research as well. An understanding of the geography of carbon emissions that is adequate to an era of globalization will require theoretical subtlety as much as additional empirical research.