“One of the greatest challenges relating to global warming is that greenhouse gases result—directly or indirectly—from almost every major human industry and activity.” – Tim Herzog, WRI.
In fact, understanding how mitigating emissions will affect human practices will require a theory of the margin. In other words, if this is the challenge, it can be phrased as ‘how do we produce a marginal decrease in carbon emissions for each of these discrete technical practices that constitute human life in the contemporary?”
Accounting for Atmosphere 
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July 31, 2009 at 18:27
Caroline McLoughlin
Oops. I ought to have posted the following comment here. Reposting.
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Hi, Jerome.
As I remarked in another context, I think this question of the margin here is a good one and possibly quite generative. You responded, expecting me to point to Guyer (2004.) This is another good guess—her concerns with price and hoped-for profits resonate well here—though it’s not what I was thinking initially. Still, p 25: “In microeconomic theory the margin refers to the ‘next transaction,’ to which the rational calculus is decisively applied. Profit is maximized where marginal costs (the cost of producingin the next unit) equal marginal returns (the income from the next sale). By using margin here, I am endorsing reasoning, purposive behavior, and strategic means-end thinking as appropriate subject matter for anthropology.” She then goes on to discuss ”rational behavior in uncertain times” and the question of margin and periphery as a structural position vis-à-vis Africa, both of which I think are relevant to your project, alongside this question of calculation and future orientation. With her discussions of price especially, one also thinks, of course, of Roitman.
Initally I was thinking in a kind of broadly philosophical mode, of Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, especially “Tympan” and “Ousia and Grammē” (an old favorite and exemplar of the slogan “impenetrability has its rewards,”) though the concept perhaps comes up more usefully in other essays. Patience, as I try to dig back into my early 90s brain. In one respect the margin here is about limits—first and foremost the limits of philosophy as it has been known and practised to that date, but more broadly, the limit of a text and the limit of a sign or mark: he plays on the relation between mark and margin in French, of his term gramme (or gram) and the Greek grammē. Why not, too, the limit of a kind of calculus of knowability? And consider, too, the edges of “atmosphere,” and its definability. Limit and metaphysics seem, and what he describes as the trembling of limits, might well be at the heart of what you want to explore, it doesn’t all seem too obscurantist.
Further, “The Ends of Man” might provoke some thinking on the limits of the human, of human existence as center. At a later date you might consider the rumination on time and enumeration in the section “Gramme and Number.”
I don’t know whether this is something to consider at this stage. These texts may well be a ponderous red herring at the moment.
October 19, 2009 at 13:28
This Post is a Time Capsule: Anti-quants, quants and margins « Accounting for Atmosphere
[…] this takes me back to my earlier posts on marginal practices. If what we have here is a clear logic for keeping fossil fuels in the ground, then we can […]
May 14, 2010 at 17:15
jeromewhitington
Michael Wara in Nature: But fixing the carbon market is unlikely to be enough to put major developing nations on a path to low-carbon energy. Because the CDM awards credits for the difference between baseline and actual emissions from a project, its impact will always be marginal. Ultimately, it is the baseline emissions path that must be altered if the problem of global warming is to be resolved.