“Carbon Leviathan:” Thinking Sovereignty in the Anthropocene

As evidenced by the recent boom of pledges to reach ‘net zero CO2 emissions’, there is a fast-growing consensus on how to mitigate climate change. These targets invariably revolve around CO2 as their paramount indicator. Specifically, political parties, corporations, NGOs and IOs have in recent years proceeded to grasp CO2 in the marked-compatible form of localisable, priceable and tradable units. In comparison to natural scientific understandings of CO2, this rapidly expanding economic perspective is unique in its ontological and epistemological assumptions. It presumes an equivalence between emitted and removed units of CO2 irrespective of time and space, an ability to assign every unit of anthropogenic CO2 emissions and removals to a (human or non-human) source, and, finally, the possibility of integrating priced units of CO2 into an international market framework with appropriate supervision. Granted that the hegemonic approach to mitigate climate change aims for ‘net zero CO2 emissions’, which sovereign can legitimately enforce it at a planetary scale? Philosophical debates have so far included planetary sovereigns such as Bruno Latour’s (2017) ‘Gaia’, Donna Haraway’s (2016) ‘Chthulu’ and Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann’s (2018) ‘Climate Leviathan’, each governing human as well as more-than-human domains. This paper makes a more mundane proposition. It argues that ‘net zero CO2 emissions’ targets invoke a new planetary regime of carbon—a “Carbon Leviathan”—to govern both human and climatic processes. It theorizes sovereignty no longer in the modern sense of an actor or an institutional body, but rather as diffusing among production systems, politics, and atmospheric processes. In line with the Anthropocene thesis, Carbon Leviathan neither sets human-centred goals nor acts as an external manipulator. Its sovereignty emanates from the amalgam of human and more-than-human spheres and is, counter-intuitively, identical with that which it governs: CO2. Its legitimacy derives from its simultaneous acknowledgment of the Earth System Sciences and its minor deviation from commodity-oriented capitalism. In short, Carbon Leviathan is a sovereign that is being invoked worldwide to govern the entanglements between humans and the carbon cycle. Investigating its epistemological and ontological premises of governance, I find that Carbon Leviathan governs through an aggregate rule of substitutability whereby different entities are equalized according to their carbon composition. Carbon Leviathan thus performs a dangerous reductio ad unum that disavows the multidimensionality and multicomplexity of climate change and further ecological crises. It dismisses the inquiry into the root causes of CO2 emissions, content with adding removal units to residual emissions. This paper closes with the call for a new approach to carbon that acknowledges the carbon cycle.