ABSTRACT
Voluntary carbon markets (VCMs) emerged in the late 1990s as exchanges where carbon credits are bought and sold to offset one’s carbon footprint. This chapter aims to demonstrate how cultural discourse studies (CDS) can expose what on the surface might seem like a programme for accomplishing intercultural progress, prosperity and harmony is in fact a reintensification of Western cultural-political priorities that sustain global inequality and discord. Accordingly, the chapter proposes that a social semiotic approach can be allied to the ethical and political goals of CDS by highlighting how cultural formations are enacted discursively in five VCM websites. Of particular concern is the way in which the sites represent offsetting as a form of ‘enlightened consumption’ and make carbon offsets tangible as experiential commodities. Attending to the semiotic resources of document design and photography, the chapter analyses how these sites address visitors as conscientious and informed while representing nature as abstract and separated from human activity. Superficially, VCMs might seem a corrective to the relationship between those advantaged and disadvantaged by global capitalism, when examined more closely, they reveal yet another exercise in seeking self-satisfaction through consumer choice while discounting the consequences of enjoying that advantage.
