Crime and the commodification of carbon

Carbon will be the world’s biggest market. Barclays was the first UK bank to set up a dedicated carbon trading desk to help clients, and Barclays Capital is the most active player in the emissions trading market having traded 300 million tonnes as at February 2007. (Barclays, 2007: 1)

As European and American countries experience economic recession, the global emission of carbon dioxide has reached an all-time high. During a period of reduced productivity, carbon emissions have reached an unprecedented level of 34 billion tonnes (37.5 billion tons) per annum (Olivier et al., 2012). Such figures are likely to be substantially higher, with what Halsey refers to as ‘the dark figure of carbon emissions’ (Halsey, 2012: 169). The future picture is predicted to worsen. In March 2012, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) warned that carbon emissions were expected to rise by 70 per cent in the next four decades, increasing global temperatures by up to 6 degrees (Higgins, Short and South, 2012). This acceleration of greenhouse gas emissions is devastating news for the world’s poorest peoples, where an estimated 375 million people are likely to be affected by climate-change driven humanitarian disasters in the next five years (La Chimia, 2012).