The Making of Low Carbon Economies (Paperback or Softback)

The Making of Low Carbon Economies looks at how more than two decades of sustained effort at climate change mitigation has resulted in a variety of new practices, rules and ways of doing things: a period of active construction of low carbon economies. From outer space observations of the carbon in tropical forests, to carbon financial reporting, and insulating solid masonry walls, these diverse things, activities and objects are integral to how climate change has been brought into being as a problem. The book takes a fresh look at society’s response to climate change by examining a diverse array of empirical sites where climate change is being made real through its incorporation into everyday lives – a process of stitching climate concerns into the discourse and practices of already existing economies, as well as creating new economies. The Making of Low Carbon Economies adds fresh insights to economic sociology and science and technology studies scholarship on the multiple origins and heterogeneous operation of markets, demonstrating the constraints and opportunities of an economic framing of the problem of climate change. It covers the obvious (and now well-researched) topic of carbon markets, as well as new more unusual material on the low carbon reframing of already existing markets and economies.

Dr Heather Lovell is a Reader in the Human Dimensions of Environmental Change in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She has a first degree and PhD in Human Geography (both from the University of Cambridge, UK) and has researched and taught social science aspects of climate change and energy for the past ten years. Her research has led to new understandings of sociotechnical change across two empirical sites: low-energy housing, and the commodification of carbon. She has held research positions at Oxford University, Durham University, the University of Technology (Sydney), and in UK Parliament. Dr Lovell’s research has been widely cited (eg in Google Scholar she has 325 citations; h-index 11). She has been funded by the UK Research Councils (ESRC, EPSRC), the UK Tyndall Centre, and the Nuffield Foundation