'Invisible, mostly useless gas': Making a market to save the planet

This paper investigates whether - and under what conditions - market-based innovation can address challenges such as climate change. While research on environmental entrepreneurship is built on cases where profit motivations and environmental protection align, it struggles to explain how firms can valorize “invisible, mostly useless” CO₂. Nor can we assume that states will always intervene to price externalities and drive industrial policy. To investigate possibilities for climate innovation, I conduct an extended computational case study of a US$1 billion advance market commitment (AMC) designed to jump-start carbon removal technologies. The AMC explicitly uses demand guarantees to accelerate scale and lower costs- but it does so only as a bridging mechanism, anticipating that true market viability depends on subsequent, state-imposed carbon prices. Taken together, this case underscores the possibilities and limitations of voluntary carbon markets. Building on the sociology of markets in order to understand climate innovation, this paper also engages debates in environmental sociology around the relationship between capitalism and environmental degradation. The model elaborated here aligns with neither side of this systems-level debate, instead theorizing the actors and circumstances that can engender different environmental outcomes: we cannot assume innovation will work to address climate change - but the assumption that it will not is equally teleological.