Accounting for Atmosphere

Accounting for Atmosphere is a research project led by anthropologist Jerome Whitington which investigates the role of carbon accounting, carbon markets and greenhouse gas management for changing global political orders. Working from a perspective of science studies and anthropology of quantitative practices, Whitington shows how climate policy infrastructures 'map' human interchanges with the atmosphere by creating a new, global metric of human practices, carbon emissions. Reciprocally, the atmosphere becomes a historically novel object of management and becomes a medium of global interaction. He investigates these processes at three administrative levels, national carbon budgets and the determination of right, carbon markets and the determination of property, and enterprise carbon accounting and the determination of ontology. Carbon accounting practices, taken broadly, constitute imaginative or cognitive media for the emergence of a new nomos of the earth.