| Summary: | Climate change represents a new era in the development of capitalism, whereby humanity has become such a force of nature so as to destabilize its own environment and ultimately threaten its survival — neo-modernity. This article explores the creation of markets to control greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon markets are an important infrastructure to enable humanity to integrate nature into its sociopolitical and economic organization. The carbon markets are the embodiment of a process designed to reorganize human activities but also to organize and assimilate the natural environment. As with other eras, the key to success in neo-modernity is organizing complex and divergent human activities across space and time. Using an institutional approach, built on case studies and close dialogue with market participants and policymakers in the United States and Europe, this article analyzes the construction of carbon market infrastructure including how the markets organize environmental impacts in space and time. Particular attention is paid to the compressions of the spacetime of carbon commodities through the establishment of platforms, exchanges, and verifiers. The article concludes that markets are coordinating networks — the epitome of neo-modernity infrastructure and the beginning of a process through which the natural environment will become valued only in the context of further capitalist expansion. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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