Teorie del denaro e carbon trading. Il frame dell’azione sociale per fronteggiare il riscaldamento globale

Among the strategies to cope with global warming, carbon trading had many attempts and implementations in recent years, but also many criticisms. The debate is mainly between two opposing positions: those who believe in the benefits that market and competition can bring against global warming and those who believe that these effects will be negative and opt for a more strictly political form of regulation for the reduction of emissions. The paper uses a sociological approach to show how carbon trading is related to a specific frame of social action. The carbon trading market is considered a specific socio-technical device capable of defining specific forms of social action, distributing roles and activating action chains. Thanks to the recent developments of the sociological theory of money, emission certificates are presented as a form of money with specific characteristics able to defining economic and moral values, creating or preventing social networks, orienting or disorienting collective action to face global warming. The local scale is the most appropriate level to experiment different action models for the current phase of policy development against global warming. A new definition of the action chain of global warming policies could already include future generations.