ABSTRACT
Carbon offsetting, and related modes of environmental fixing, depend fundamentally on something so commonplace that we rarely give it a second thought: money. In modern culture money is both our blessing and our curse. Money makes a world of qualitatively incomparable objects and services quantitatively comparable. It gives everything an exchange value or a price. Exchange value makes modern standards of living possible, and so money is a blessing. It is in this exact same sense that money is a curse. Far-f lung suburbs are connected by superhighways full of cars, and cities are connected by f light paths full of jumbo jets, supplied by supermarkets stocked with products of industrial farms and luxuries from all over the world. Such arrangements depend on exchange value, which is therefore implicated in our current carbon predicament. To quote geographer Neil Smith (1984, 77-78):
With the development of capitalism at a world scale . . . the relation with nature is before anything else an exchange value relation . . . Capitalist production is accomplished not for the fulfillment of needs in general, but for the fulfillment of one particular need: profit. In search of profit, capital stalks the whole earth. It attaches a price tag to everything that it sees and from then on it is this price tag, which determines the fate of nature.
