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

126 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingcurrent emissions or for their historical emissions as well? 222 Climatologyand economics have no answers to such questions. Different agentswill be held responsible in different accounting systems. 223Look at what’s happened to the EU ETS. The EU decided that privatecompanies burning fossil fuels would be considered, for the purposesof the scheme, the only emitters. These are companies like RWE,Cementa, Scottish Power, Vattenfall, Ineos Fluor and so forth.That sounds reasonable enough. What was the alternative?In choosing to give rights to the world carbon dump away to corporations,European governments decided not to give rights to others,including ordinary citizens. In choosing to give rights to corporate‘downstream’ energy users, it chose not to give them to ‘upstream’producers of oil, gas and coal.Was that a problem?It created a whole nest of them – economic, political and technical.First, the question arose, as in the US, of why assets in what shouldbe a public good are being channelled into private hands. Then therewas the expense involved in distributing rights to thousands or hundredsof thousands of ‘downstream’ energy users rather than a manageablehandful of ‘upstream’ suppliers of fossil fuels. Added to thiswas the question of arbitrariness.How so?For the sake of convenience, only big energy users could be included. 224The domestic, transport and small-business sectors had to be left out.Even so, there are so many industrial users that the costs of attemptingto monitor and administer the scheme are huge. That does createa lot of lucrative work for financial centres like London and Frankfurt– which may have been one of the attractions of the arrangement. Butthe public has to foot the bill. 225Moreover, if the government finds itself too weak to take away theemissions rights it has temporarily granted the big industrial participantsin the market, other sectors – transport, individual home owners,government institutions – will have to bear more of the burden ofmeeting emissions targets.In addition to being inefficient and expensive, the decision to makeenergy users the owners of emissions allowances failed to address theglobal warming problem closer to its root. As emphasised earlier inthis special report, the main current threat to climatic stability is the