The Politics and Practice of Carbon Offsetting: Silencing Dissent
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article offers an examination of the politics and practice of carbon offsetting. It is argued that inherent to the carbon offset are a set of contradictions that function to normalize consumption as solution, capitalism as saviour. In order to understand how such contradictions are reconciled, this article suggests that offsetting must be understood as a psycho-social device through which the individual’s fears and discontents in the face of existential crises such as global warming are ultimately pacified. Additionally, it is argued that carbon offsetting functions to re-stabilize the narrative of capitalism as progress, satisfying the broader needs of a system that risks collapse should the masses reject its necessary illusion. By drawing on the example of Al Gore as carbon warrior, the perils inherent to relying on the false God that has become the carbon offset to remedy the global warming crisis are illuminated.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it