Colonizing With Carbon Credits

How tree growth links carbon emissions to imperial capitalism

Photo by Ben Lockwood

Last week I was looking at tree rings under a microscope and thinking about carbon. It's not an unusual thing to be thinking about; one, because the current study I'm analyzing data for is to examine how forest management impacts carbon storage, and two, because trees are essentially big columns of carbon. That's what the growth rings are (largely) made of.

More specifically, while looking at the rings I was wondering where the carbon came from. In some ways this is an impossible question to answer. We have tools like isotope analysis that might be able to give us some clues, but those would likely have large spatial and temporal uncertainties, making it difficult pinpoint exactly. In other ways, though, it's not difficult at all to guess. A large portion of the carbon in the atmosphere originated right here, in the United States, and in the other wealthy nations of the Global North. These three concepts-tree growth, carbon emissions, and economics-are what I want to link together in this piece.

I recently read two very interesting books. The first was Pollution Is Colonialism by geographer, Max Liboiron. This book challenged me to think about pollution, particularly plastics, in entirely new ways. There's no way I could do the book justice with a summary, so I recommend reading it yourself, but what stuck with me most is Liboiron's argument that pollution is a form of colonial land relations by constituting land as a resource in which to deposit the waste material from economic production. Industrialized, global capitalism allows wealthy nations to make imperialist claims on Indigenous lands via pollution.

Liboiron also discusses how colonialist pollution produces and maintains unevenness, or inequality. Pollution is outsourced to different places in different forms, different magnitudes, and at different times. Not only that, but spatial inequalities of wealth and power make some land more profitable as a resource for depositing pollution than others. This reinforces and perpetuates existing those same inequalities.

Perhaps Liboiron's most powerful assertion is the idea that the very efforts to track and reduce pollution can contribute to its proliferation. Something called "assimilation theory" underpins modern pollution regulations, which is founded on the idea that there is a critical threshold at which pollution becomes harmful (either to people or ecosystems), and that pollution should stay under that threshold. Assimilation theory holds two assumptions. The first is that these critical thresholds are universally applicable across bodies, spaces, and times. The second is that some pollution is acceptable. While I don't have the space here to fully examine how Liboiron addresses these assumptions, it's important to note that both contribute to ongoing pollution and environmental contamination.

Taken together, the ideas in Pollution Is Colonialism aim to radically reshape how we define and understand pollution. Which leads to the second book I recently read: Carbon Colonialism by another fellow geographer, Laurie Parsons. While the similarity in titles conveys a broad similarity in the topics they address, these are very different books. Where Loboiron focuses on place-based definitions and frameworks of pollution, Parsons links individual places together via a globalized capitalist supply chain.

Photo by Ben Lockwood

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Carbon Colonialism is, appropriately, more focused specifically on carbon. Parsons reveals how carbon accounting at the national level does not account for a globalized economic supply chain that exceeds national boundaries. Production of most goods now occurs at multiple locations by multiple businesses and factories in multiple nations on multiple contents, all with different protocols, regulations and emissions reporting. That's if emissions get tracked at all. Many points along the global supply chain occur in remote, difficult to access locations in the Global South where workers are easy to exploit, and production-related emissions are nearly impossible to account for. This, Parsons shows, is how CO2 concentrations continue to rise even though many wealthy nations report a decrease in domestic emissions. If the products consumed are imported (and produced) elsewhere, then they simply don't count those emissions.

Parsons also highlights Loboiron's point, that climate change, via atmospheric pollution, causes and maintains economic precarity. Those with the least wealth are least able to withstand climate change hazards. In the Global South, many small farmland owners lose crop yields to droughts and rising temperatures. They take on debt to buy fertilizers, which in the long run further deplete the soil. Eventually they have to sell their land to pay debts, and many move to urban areas to take on brutal factory jobs making clothing or other commercial goods bound for the Global North. The constant influx of workers to the city keeps labor costs low and thus commodity prices cheap for consumers in the U.S., U.K., and Europe.

Brands and corporations are often aware of these issues, but also have every financial incentive to remain as ignorant as possible. It's much, much easier to imply that your product is "green" rather than tracking its production along every stop of the supply chain to control for human and environmental harms. The version of "sustainability" that dominates corporate culture is one of consumption, that claims we can consume our way out of climate change while ignoring the hidden emissions of a global economy.

Carbon colonialism, then, is a form of outsourcing environmental degradation. Importing commodities and exporting the damage from their production in the form of greenhouse gas emissions.

So, how does any of this relate to tree growth? How are land relations and supply chains tied up in forest growth dynamics? From the title of this essay you can probably guess: Through forest-based carbon credits. Carbon credits are, essentially, representations of carbon stored in trees somewhere. At least, that's what they are supposed to represent in theory. If you've followed my writing, then you know I have a lot of issues with how carbon credits actually work in practice. But let's assume carbon credit markets work as advertised. What about them reinforces colonial relations?

It's quite simple. If carbon pollution produced by wealthy nations in the Global North are deposited into forests in the Global South, that is a land claim. It's, literally, using land as a resource to deposit pollution. Now, I know what you're thinking. How is growing a forest a form of pollution? The trees naturally store the carbon. It's what they do. And that's true, but the question becomes who controls that forest? Who has access to it? Who benefits from it?

Carbon credit programs, like REDD+, are routinely controlled by NGOs and other groups from wealthy nations, giving local Indigenous populations little to no say in over how their land is governed, and to what extent they benefit from it. In fact, Indigenous groups in Peru recently came together to write the Chachibay Declaration, wherein they explicitly demand for conservation efforts and carbon trading programs to halt. These programs often restrict how local communities can engage with their own land, ultimately eliminating vital sources of economic livelihood.

Furthermore, these programs often make financial promises to Indigenous communities that don’t materialize. The organizations in charge of carbon credit programs get funding to initiate and then sell carbon credits generated from the forest as financial products to companies looking to boos their "green" reputation through claims of carbon neutrality. Of course as we've already seen, carbon accounting itself is extremely fraught. And none of this even accounts for the fact that carbon credit programs themselves rarely sequester as much carbon as they sell credits for. Nowhere in this picture is income generated for Indigenous groups, nor control granted to the people who live on the land.

Carbon credits, therefore, represent a form of capitalist colonialism. They perpetuate imperialist goals and extend the inequalities created by the carbon produced in global supply chains. Of course, one might reasonably ask how this applies to carbon credit programs appearing in the United States and other Global North nations. Is it still colonialism if the land itself already reflects colonialist legacies, if the landowners are orders of magnitude more wealthy than those in the Global South? I don't have the answers to that, but one thing worth pointing out is that carbon credit programs appear to be more difficult to make work, and perhaps less profitable, in the U.S. compared to less wealthy places.

In any case, all of these issues are fundamentally spatial. They foreground where pollution occurs, where it ends up, and what spatial patterns that dynamic creates. It's easy to never consider any of this when looking at an individual growth ring under the microscope, from an individual tree, at a single location. But places are unique and individual. They’re also linked and inseparable from the rest of the world. And science never occurs in a vacuum.