The Climate Leadership Council’s Carbon Dividends Plan: Polanyi’s Market Embeddedness, Fictitious Commodities, and Double Movement

In 2017, large oil and gas companies formed the Climate Leadership Council (CLC) in response to increased social pressure to reduce their emissions to combat climate change. The CLC developed the Carbon Dividends Plan (CDP), which proposes a carbon emissions market mechanism to solve the climate change crisis. The CLC’s lobbying arm, the Americans for Carbon Dividends (AFCD), is currently working to educate US congressional leaders on the importance of a carbon tax, like the one proposed in the CDP. In the paper, I address the following question: what can Polanyi’s theoretical insights tell us about the CDP and its social implications? I first discuss the CDP within the context of the current climate change crisis. Then, I apply Polanyi’s market embeddedness, fictitious commodities, and double movement concepts to the discussion. I illustrate four main points in this paper. First, the CDP is part of an ongoing societal double movement. Second, despite the CLC’s neoliberal “free” market ideals, the self-regulated market proposed in the CDP is a social construction, embedded in social relations, itself. Third, the CDP, and carbon markets in general, comprise one specific type of unconscious countermovement that extends the self-regulated market to combat the destructive forces of the market itself. Fourth, the CDP’s proposal for a carbon emissions market mechanism is an unsatisfactory solution to address the climate change crisis, as it will not address the inherent contradictions in the overall system as a whole.