“Créditos de carbono” e a noção de fórmula: funcionamento no discurso corporativo sobre sustentabilidade

Abstract

Emissions offsetting in carbon markets has become a central strategy in how large corporations construct their image of sustainability, and the phrase “carbon credits”, recurrent in their reports, shows signs of functioning as a discursive formula in the sense proposed by Krieg-Planque. We investigate how this phrase operates in corporate discourse on sustainability across its four constitutive dimensions, articulating the notion of formula with Maingueneau's scenes of enunciation and discursive ethos and also drawing on Orlandi's work on silencing and Paveau's on discursive virtue. The material brings together the 44 Sustainability Reports and Integrated Reports for the 2023 fiscal year, from Brazilian companies listed simultaneously on the ISE B3 and ICO2 indexes, together with media and social-movement materials; the reports follow the GRI standard, which regulates the generic scene and delimits the sayable about corporate sustainability. The analysis shows a morphosyntactically stable signifier, anchored in an economic-financial memory that, within the neoliberal discursive formation, captures “sustainability” and forecloses the meanings associated with climate justice, reparation, and degrowth; shifting from a technical-legal term in the Kyoto Protocol (1997) to an operator of corporate virtue in the ESG era, the phrase attains sectoral hegemony without becoming universal and has its controversy managed within the reports, through certifications and hierarchizations, while it erupts in the media sphere, where it is contested as “accounting fiction” and “carbon colonialism”. Within corporate discourse, the phrase reconfigures the climate crisis as a technical-managerial issue and naturalizes the continuation of the very pollution it claims to combat. It is the persistence of the form beneath the variation of scenes, from the report to media contestation, that sustains the central thesis of this work, namely that crystallization is a necessary though not sufficient condition, and that what converts “carbon credits” into a full formula is its potential for transit across heterogeneous scenes, by which the same signifier is reinscribed in antagonistic discourses without dissolving.