The importance of metrological infrastructures to the establishment of a global market-based greenhouse gas emissions trading system for aviation

Much of the initial interest in the study of the emergence of global financial infrastructures has been a) around the way these infrastructures have been assembled in a generally piecemeal way from existing national infrastructures that make possible various types of financial transactions involving different types of assets, and b) how these infrastructures deal with the temporal and spatial claims and property rights generated by the transactions they enable (Panourgias, 2015, Brandl and Dieterich, 2021, Krarup, 2019, Krarup, 2021, Millo et al., 2005).
Infrastructures tend to depend on other infrastructures for their functioning (Star, 1999, Star and Ruhleder, 1996), so it is of interest to understand better, in the context of financial infrastructures, the relationship of the types of transactional infrastructures studied so far with other types of infrastructures, and in particular the calculative infrastructures involved in financial actors’ decisions to transact.

Such calculative infrastructures that support cognition and decision-making have been theorised as ‘thinking infrastructure’ and can include elements relating to measurement and sensing (Kornberger et al., 2019). Before something can be traded it has to be made tradeable (McFall, 2014, Callon et al., 2002, Callon et al., 2007, Muniesa et al., 2007, Cooper, 2015, Lohmann, 2005, Lohmann, 2009). One of the qualities that make something tradeable is commensurability. For trading to take place, some commensurability between two goods has to be established, which leads to a price (an equivalence between quantities of the two goods) being agreed to by the transacting parties (Cooper, 2015, MacKenzie, 2009a). Numerous calculative infrastructures, both cognitive and material, are involved in the trading of financial assets and are also important in establishment of both local and global financial infrastructures (Millo et al., 2005, MacKenzie and Millo, 2003, Millo, 2007, Norman, 2007, Norman, 2011).

For well-established assets, this commensurability has been achieved over many years – even centuries – through local, national, and international marketplaces with their calculative devices and practices (Millo et al., 2005, Pardo-Guerra, 2010, Wells, 2000, Michie, 1999, Moser, 1999, Kynaston, 1983, Lee, 1998, Lees, 2011, Muniesa, 2011, Muniesa, 2004, Moser, 1998). The subsequent ‘black boxing’ that results once an infrastructure becomes subsumed in daily use obscures the workings and origins of many of the calculative processes that enable this commensurability to be achieved in order for the assets concerned to be traded (MacKenzie, 2009b, MacKenzie, 2005).

For goods to be tradeable, therefore, complex social, legal, and scientific processes need to in place through which agreements about the measurement and comparability of the goods being exchanged can be arrived at in such a way that the exchange of one for the other can take place in an efficient and uncontested way (Cooper, 2015, Millo et al., 2005, Panourgias, 2015, MacKenzie and Millo, 2003, Millo, 2007, MacKenzie, 2009a, Norman, 2007, Norman, 2011, Callon and Muniesa, 2005). A crucial part of the establishment of any formalised market, therefore, also involves the establishment of an accompanying metrological infrastructures that can enable the commensurability necessary for an exchange to take place. This is particularly visible in the present in initiatives to establish market-based mechanisms for the control of greenhouse gas emissions (Cooper, 2015, MacKenzie, 2009a, Lohmann, 2005, Lohmann, 2009).

An initiative to establish a platform for the trading of greenhouse gas emissions associated with aviation provides the empirical setting for the observation and study of such processes of metrological infrastructure-making, before they are subsumed and ‘black-boxed’ into wider market structures and lost from view (Latour, 1987, MacKenzie, 2009b, MacKenzie, 2005). It is also important to understand not only how commensurability relates to measurement, but also how both are part of a wider cognitive infrastructure.

The aim of the proposed article and the research-in-progress it presents are to describe the socio-technical assembling of a metrological infrastructure associated with the trading of aircraft green-house gas (GHG) emissions and to analyse its development as an example of a ‘thinking infrastructure’ (Kornberger et al., 2019); that is, an infrastructure that enables not only trading but also planning, strategizing, decision-making, sense-making and other forms of cognition necessary to the understanding of the phenomenon of greenhouse gasses emissions more generally.

The forecasting aspects of the metrological infrastructure are studied in particular detail. This is done in order to gain a better understanding of the complex spatial and temporal calculations market participants must undertake in relation to the claims the emissions permits and credits traded over the platform studied relate to. This, in turn, is of interest in terms of gauging the importance of cognitive as well as transactional elements in the establishment of an emergent global financial infrastructure.

More specifically, the study follows the development of a ‘forecasting engine’ and its integration into a platform for the measurement, using real time aircraft flight data, of aircraft GHG emissions for the planning of aircraft fleet use and deployment in terms of GHG emissions, including the buying and selling of emission permits and offsetting credits. The research employs participant observations, interviews, and documentation analysis in order to account for the way technology, regulations, metrological systems, and financial and other calculations are brought together in order to make aircraft emissions manageable and tradeable. Furthermore, it places the issue of the metrology associated with emissions trading into the broader assembling of a ‘thinking infrastructure’ that enables not only trading but also the planning, strategizing, decision-making, sense-making, and other forms of cognition associated with the management of aircraft emissions and the assembling of a financial infrastructure for their trading.

These apparently esoteric technical issues will influence which will be the commercial and state entities best-placed to shape and interact with these calculative and transactional infrastructures and hence benefit from the emerging global financial infrastructure for emissions allocation and trading, with possibilities for new exclusions, inequalities, and colonial power relations.