A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

122 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingbe exchanged for another, or become the ‘equivalent’ of a certainamount of money, and thus easier to accumulate in large quantitiesin the hands of whoever had power, regardless of the land needs ofothers. Suppose any land could be bought and accumulated in anyamount by anybody with the money to do so and then used for anypurpose. Suppose it could be exchanged for anything with anybody inany amount.In theory, it would then become possible for one person to own allland and everybody else to own none. It would be possible for anypiece of land to be destroyed if whatever it was exchanged for weretemporarily a source of greater profit. It would be possible for mostland to be treated as a speculative instrument without even beingused, while people went hungry. It would be possible, in short, forpeople who owned the land never to see it or know anything aboutit. It would be possible for them to do anything with their land regardlessof the consequences to their neighbours. Framing land as acommodity in such a thoroughgoing way would require suppressingmany of the things that makes a piece of land in location A differentfrom a piece of land in location B. If carried too far, this would havefatal results. 210But no one would ever carry things that far.Obviously not. ‘To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director’of how land is used, Polanyi wrote, ‘would result in the demolitionof society.’ That’s why, in the real world, all communities andstates possess rules or customs limiting how far land can be exchanged,commodified, or accumulated, what it can be used for, and who canacquire how much of it. 211Equally obviously, there are social limits to how far you can go withpollution trading. If there were no limits, ‘averaging’ pollution overa large geographical area through a market would mean you couldpollute a few places severely while cleaning up everywhere else, andstill say you were ‘improving’ society’s well-being. In the words ofNational Resources Defence Council attorney David Doniger, ‘If allyou had was emissions trading, you could pile up all the pollution inone place.’ 212This is one thing that critics of pollution trading schemes have alwaysworried about: that if a market makes it easier for companies to puttheir pollution anywhere they want, it will wind up on the doorstepsof the poor and less powerful. In fact, in the US, as across the world,pollution is already concentrated disproportionately in poor communitiesor communities of colour. Many people fear that trading will