Legibility, Resistance, and the Politics of Carbon Removal
What anthropologist James C. Scott’s ideas about state power and complexity can teach us about designing—and resisting—the rules for carbon markets.
This is a summary of episode 363 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
🔹 Quick Takeaways
Legibility as power: James C. Scott described states as “legibility-producing machines,” simplifying complex realities into standardized forms for taxation, control, and administration.
Relevance to carbon removal: The push to make carbon removal credits fungible (“a ton is a ton”) mirrors the state’s drive for legibility and runs into similar tensions with local complexity.
Benefits of legibility: Simple, standardized metrics make it easier for buyers to compare projects and grow markets.
Risks of over-simplification: Compressing heterogeneous projects into one “magic number” can obscure crucial differences and lead to misleading claims.
Weapons of the weak: Scott’s idea that less-powerful actors subtly resist dominant systems applies to project developers navigating burdensome registry requirements.
Class (or faction) dynamics: Registries balance demands from buyers (who want maximum clarity) with those from suppliers (who may resist costly or restrictive rules).
The additionality debate: Financial, regulatory, and common practice additionality are flashpoints, with developers often seeing requirements as burdensome or illogical.
Complexity vs. standardization: In early stages, diversity of approaches may be healthy; at scale, some convergence is inevitable. The challenge is knowing when to pivot.
📝 What James C. Scott Can Teach Carbon Removal
James C. Scott, the late Yale anthropologist, studied how states render complex societies “legible” in order to govern them, from census-taking to land records to standardized cropping practices. While legibility can improve efficiency and enable coordination, it often flattens rich, local complexity into oversimplified categories that serve central authority.
🌱 Carbon Removal as a Legibility Project
In conversation with Grant Faber, Ross Kenyon applies Scott’s ideas to the carbon removal industry.
Goal: Make carbon removal credits fungible and tradable on global markets (“a ton is a ton”).
Challenge: Each project has unique environmental, social, and technical contexts, from biochar feedstocks to direct air capture siting, that resist neat standardization.
This mirrors the tension Scott documented between central authorities seeking uniformity and local actors whose realities are more complex.
📊 The Allure and Danger of the “Magic Number”
Buyers often want a single, comparable metric (e.g. dollars per ton) without wading through heterogeneous project data. Standardization can enable scaling, compliance markets, and liquidity. But, as in other policy domains, chasing a single number risks obscuring meaningful differences and enabling greenwashing.
🛠️ Resistance and Negotiation
Scott’s “weapons of the weak”—foot-dragging, feigned ignorance, quiet non-compliance—appear in the carbon removal world when project developers face burdensome registry updates or methodologies that disrupt business plans.
Developers may comply minimally, switch registries, or lobby for changes.
Registries juggle buyer demands for more transparency with supplier demands for stability and lower compliance costs.
⚖️ Class/Faction Tensions
Ross reframes “class” here as positional alignment:
Buyers want clarity, certainty, and comparability.
Suppliers want flexibility, stability, and to avoid costly retrofits.
Registries mediate between the two, aiming to maintain credibility while keeping both sides engaged.
🔥 The Additionality Flashpoint
Financial additionality, proving a project wouldn’t happen without carbon credit revenue, draws the most grumbling from developers. Critics see it as impractical or ideologically biased; supporters argue it ensures climate impact. Regulatory and common practice additionality face less outright opposition but remain part of the balancing act.
🧩 Complexity Now, Convergence Later?
Early in a sector’s life, complexity and diversity may be virtues, fostering innovation and experimentation. At scale, convergence on shared standards is often necessary for efficiency. The risk is moving to standardization too quickly and locking in flawed assumptions, a lesson from the forestry offset market’s credibility problems.
📌 The Core Lesson
Scott’s work warns against assuming that what’s easiest to measure is most worth measuring. Carbon removal’s future hinges on balancing:
Legibility for scaling with
Respect for complexity that keeps projects grounded in reality.