Tracing Carbon Footprints

The carbon footprint metaphor has achieved a ubiquitous presence in Anglo-North American public contexts since the turn of the millennium, yet this metaphor remains under-examined as a crucial mediator of political responses to climate change. While the assumption is that this metaphor orients people toward mitigation efforts that address this urgent crisis, close attention to its many figurations suggests a complex range of possible orientations. Using a discursive analysis of instances of this metaphor in popular and public texts, and mobilizing an interdisciplinary array of literatures including theories of metaphor, political theories of affect, and cultural politics of climate change, this dissertation asks: "what are the promises and risks of the carbon footprint metaphor?" Given the histories that have shaped the appearance of climate change as a public matter of concern to be governed, the carbon footprint metaphor in many instances risks marketized approaches, such as offsets which allow business-as-usual trajectories of worsening carbon emissions. Yet, certain other instances of this metaphor promise to disturb such approaches.