Outsourcing Emissions: Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as Ecological Modernisation - Implementing Environmental and Resource Management - page 277

21.3.3 Emphasis on Production and Related Issues
The climate change regime in general, and its instruments like CDM as a whole,
emphasizes intervention in practices that mostly encompass production. The re-
gime, set according to the understanding of EM, overtly presupposes that the
sphere of intervention for ecological sustainability is logically centralised around
the production practices. The discussion on consumption in EM revolves around
the agency of the citizen-consumers for greening of consumption (eg. Spaargaren
and Mol 2008) which tends to delink the structural processes in which the con-
sumption is embedded. EM mostly renders the different aspects around consump-
tion, access to products, equity in resource allocation etc to lesser significance.
Consequently, this perpetuates the existing hierarchies in political and economic
arrangements of resource utilisation and sets aside the complex processes of pro-
duction and exchange.
It also presumes that the action performed at a specific point of the process en-
tail direct correlation to sustainable practices and detaches the network of proc-
esses in which this specific action could be embedded. As York and Rosa (2003)
argue, EM does not ensure that the industries or the firms, that are reducing their
direct impact on the environment, are not facilitating the expansion of negative
impacts by other industries or firms. Furthermore, the emphasis on production
processes focuses on the achievement of a high degree of end-use efficiency that,
as suggested by Kulkarni (2003) by citing the experience of the developed coun-
tries, need not necessarily mitigate the emissions. Rather, these processes intensify
the demand and dependence on the prevailing systems of production. Similarly,
the transfer of technologies to developing countries can induce overall increase in
emissions as the technologies could engender life style changes that demand in-
creased resources or energy consumption (Kulkarni 2003). Thus, a CDM project
can potentially be detrimental to its own objectives within the current parameters
of operation.
21.3.4 Commodification of Atmosphere
The operational aspects of the climate change regime commodify atmosphere
through technically mediated standards, which give rise to two immediate issues
of analysis. Firstly, commodification embeds the atmosphere in new economic re-
lations and opens a domain for the market to operate within parameters that are
rooted in the 'politics of market design' (MacKenzie 2008). It is argued that by
creating economic and emission-reduction accreditation schemes, the Kyoto
mechanisms have sought to create market tools for trading the commodity of GHG
emissions, which points to the capitalistic identification of new resources and the
commodification of the atmospheric commons (Glover 1999).
Secondly, commodification of the atmosphere is symbiotically connected to
technification of politics in the climate change regime, where representation of
collective interests is entrusted to experts or large organizations alongside the
states (which in turn rely on experts). The carbon market tends to marginalize the