Speculative Carbon Cultures? Regenerative Finance and Climate Action

In global climate governance, carbon as a metaphor has been made to serve multiple political, economic and social aims. The prevalence of carbon-based molecules in greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, has meant that “carbon” has come to represent greenhouse gases more broadly, often through mechanisms such as “carbon offsets”, “carbon markets”, “carbon taxes” and “carbon footprints”. In this way, “carbon” has taken on a cultural meaning far outstretching the strictly scientific definition of carbon as chemical element. Further, the use of market-based measures within global climate governance has meant that carbon has increasingly become financialised, datafied, and abstracted from its biophysical reality. In many ways, carbon has come to shape the edges of our imaginaries in climate governance, and thus intervening within and transforming global climate governance requires reimagining attachments to and practices around carbon. This thesis draws on energy and carbon cultures literature (Hickey-Moody 2019; Sheller 2014a; Szeman and Boyer 2017) to introduce the concept of “speculative carbon cultures”. Speculative carbon cultures hold a tension between two contradictory forms. On the one hand there is the speculative practice of imagining alternative carbon futures, creating change through new energy imaginaries. These speculative carbon cultures are open and may help to transform prevailing relationships to carbon and wider ecosystems. On the other hand, this framework draws attention to how the carbon cultures of market speculation, financialisation and datafication have dominated climate governance to date. Throughout this thesis I explore this tension through a detailed case study of an emerging climate movement, the Regenerative Finance or “ReFi” movement. As the ecological crisis brought on by climate change deepens, diverse groups are turning to new tools and technologies to support and engage their visions for the future. One such group is the Regenerative Finance or “ReFi” movement, who use blockchain technology towards climate action. Members of these ReFi communities see a need to redefine contemporary understandings of value, finding new possibilities for connecting economic value with ecological value. For ReFi projects this often works through market-based measures, aimed at internalising the costs of environmental damage within economies, by bringing carbon credits or climate data onto the blockchain or using web3 tools towards climate governance. While many ReFi initiatives are focused on improving carbon markets and broader socioeconomic structures, for the participants within these programs they are deeply personal. For these groups, ReFi offers participants the opportunity to reimagine their relationships to energy and climate futures and to support everyday participation in spaces that have typically been the remit of larger businesses and governments. Through my thesis, I demonstrate how ReFi members’ values around adaptation and playfulness are not just about empowering citizenship in the singular, but citizenship as a plural project. Blockchain, serving as an institutional technology, furnishes ReFi participants with the tools to experiment creatively and reshape institutions themselves, constituting a form of institutional play that imparts valuable insights for future social movements. Critics of ReFi, however, see that, instead of pointing towards new, more equitable and participatory futures, by prioritising market-based understandings of value, ReFi further locks ecological systems into capitalist structures of extraction, perpetuating trends towards carbon financialisation. Without a justice-based lens, the political imaginaries of ReFi may perpetuate current imbalances of power in global climate governance. Issues of crypto-colonialism (Howson 2020b), cryptosecessionism (I. Simpson and Sheller 2022), and the dominance of existing power structures within the movement, such as venture capital, are deeply harmful not only to the movement’s overall climate goals, but to the notion of empowered climate citizenship more broadly. Equally, there are significant limitations to the movement’s central goal of transparency (Ananny and Crawford 2016; Goldstein 2022; Hull, Gupta, and Kloppenburg 2021). Drawing on a series of interviews with core members of Regenerative Finance projects globally, I argue that ReFi as a movement epitomises the tension within speculative carbon cultures. Through their commitment to institutional play, ReFi members experiment with new attachments to and practices around carbon. However, through their reliance on carbon markets and cryptocurrencies, they perpetuate trends towards carbon financialisation and market speculation within global climate governance. Thus, ReFi embodies the two sides of speculative carbon cultures, and ultimately, the change-making potential of the movement may depend on which form prevails.