The impossible taxonomy

If we created an objectively correct and exhaustive categorization of carbon credits, would it solve everything? Would it solve anything?

“One and Three Chairs” by Joseph Kosuth, 1965. Which is the chair? And does the answer mean as much as we presume? Is it actually the most important question of all? Courtesy of MoMA.

“For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can you give the boundary? No. You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn. (But that never troubled you before when you used the word 'game'.)"

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §68

One of the most bewildering parts of language is how something can be so obvious and yet elude strict categorization.

If you are a carbon dioxide removal professional, and I describe an investor as someone who invests in “legacy carbon credits,” you likely know I mean someone fluent in transacting REDD+ credits on Verra. You’ll probably also infer their comfort with credits originating from Isometric’s Improved Forest Management (IFM) and Afforestation and Reforestation (ARR) protocols, even though neither Isometric nor the assets that pass through its registry are generally categorized as “legacy.”

We can say this individual invests in “nature-based solutions,” but the moment we do, we have to carve out an exemption for their support of clean cookstoves. Or figure out what even is biochar?

We could say that they only support high-quality projects of all kinds, but essentially everyone alleges to be an above-average driver, and there isn’t universal convergence on quality. Some carbon dioxide removal partisans insist that avoidance is universally garbage, and if they went to college for too long they may chide that “once you have paid the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.”¹ Avoidance advocates can justifiably retort that nature will be destroyed if not properly financed while we await CDR’s minuscule climate contribution becoming atmospherically relevant.

Even in saying “avoidances,” I am omitting that many classical carbon assets and nature-based solutions aren’t strictly avoidances but likely a combination of removals and avoidances. Before I’ve finished speaking what I believe to be a simple term, I’ve already ensnared myself in a language profoundly contested by science, political economy, and power.²

There are many valid ways to try to categorize asset classes and role archetypes, but I suspect you intuitively understand the kind of projects that would interest this person. I bet if we invented several test cases we would agree with one another on the suitability of the proposed project to this investor. That may hold even if we cannot agree on a simple word or phrase to describe this person, let alone what to contrast them against.³

But are words important?

Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered tea set, 1936. I saw this at MoMA in like 2011 and I’ve never stopped thinking about it.

“The beginning of knowledge is to call things by their true names.”

— Confucius/Socrates/Abraham Lincoln

Do not let this task feel hopeless, because you know what I mean, right? Accept the deficiency of the categories of avoidance, removals, offsets, legacy registries, and so on, because my intention is understood by us both. Even though you can think of counterexamples where the categories of carbon assets break, they hold well enough to make useful communication possible.⁴

There is an oft-unstated belief underlying so much of the taxonomical churn in carbon market discourse: that “if only we could categorize and name everything correctly, so much else would fall into place.” And here I stand asking—would it?

I believe words are incredibly powerful. I spend so much of my time studying them, playing with them, loving them, and yet the problems of climate change are not that we lack the right way of understanding carbon credits, or the right carbon accounting scheme. If man could give names to all of the carbon credits, we’d stay in Eden just a bit longer. If only that were the unlock.

I suspect the problem of climate change is word-based, but it isn’t taxonomical. It isn’t about categorization. It’s that there are very powerful and dangerous stories some humans tell other humans about who we are and why we are here on Earth, and those stories are deeply flawed.

Hardly are those words out that I realize I’ve committed my own category error. The failure I point to is itself a miscategorization. It just misfiles a different thing. Not carbon, but us humans. Those flawed stories sort us as sectarian and small. They misunderstand our nestedness in a web of natural systems and beings, when what we most desire is to look into the eyes of our fellow creatures and see both ourselves and God in them—to be forgiven all our shortcomings, to forgive all of theirs, and to celebrate, with something like celestial joy, the improbability of this moment and that anything is anything at all.

These paradoxically humble and grand sentiments point to divine truth that can only be harmed by the attempt to contain them in words. But, you know what I mean, right?

I didn’t say it perfectly. I barely said anything at all. I didn’t create the fully exhaustive system for carbon crediting we might have hoped for. I didn’t rebel against the impossibility of words ever exactly corresponding to the transcendent subjects to which they refer.

But I suspect we understand each other better now.

---

1. The “cobra effect” is also a fun one to point to here.

2. Things get weird real quick if you run with this idea. I read Plato’s The Cratylus years ago and got obsessed with what it might mean to think a thought outside of language and just how much language orders reality rather than merely describing what is. This is beyond the scope of this brief essay, but it is useful to take your mind here from time to time. Otherwise it’s easy to take the dominant semiotics as natural or inevitable.

3. Michael Polanyi’s work on tacit knowledge keeps coming to mind here. His famous phrase is, “We [can] know more than we can tell.” You literally cannot explain to someone how to ride a bicycle. There are countless tiny acts of balance and the management of momentum that are inarticulable. Even if you are aware of them, you couldn’t teach it to someone viva voce, let alone put it into words for your own benefit. It is knowledge which lives within us but is only articulable in crude forms. The way to learn to ride a bike is to ride a bike. This can excuse poor excuses for communication, but for something like the funky overlaps within carbon markets, let Polanyi and Wittgenstein stand in for now.

4. If any way you categorize phenomena produces legitimate objection, then you have three options:

1. Strive to create a perfectly objective and incontestable taxonomy.

2. Reject taxonomy as a fundamentally unsound project.

3. Note that somehow, even in a world in which our words and the things they attempt to describe do not meet in flush and are prone to endless signifier vs. signified combat, we are able to make our thoughts generally known to our peers. And isn’t that incredible?