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

128 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradinggovernment regulations or having received government subsidiesprompted protests and even legal action. 227 As metals manufacturersthreatened to stomp out of Germany over having to pay for the EUpollution allowances German utilities got from their government forfree, 228 the tiny Saxon village of Heuersdorf challenged the award offree rights to the energy and coal-mining firm Vattenfall, whose operationshave troubled local residents. The only reason Vattenfall hasbeen able to gain access to this largesse, Heuersdorf claims, is that itwas also the beneficiary of government subsidies for brown coal miningin the 1990s that later made it possible for it to take ‘early action’on carbon emissions. 229Then the European Commission started making plans to bring aviationinto the EU ETS, arguing that state-owned airlines ought to be‘responsible for emissions…rather than alternatives such as airports andfuel suppliers’. 230 Yet the Commission was uncomfortably aware thatgiving out emissions rights to state-owned airlines ‘could fall foul ofstate aid rules’. 231 One banker fretted that the continuing debate overthe ownership of emissions was becoming ‘increasingly sterile’. 232With the Kyoto Protocol, the problems are even more intractable.How so?Early on, parties to the UNFCCC and their technical advisers singledout national territories (what University of Wisconsin historianThongchai Winichakul calls ‘geo-bodies’) 235 as the relevant emitters,global warming agents and owners of pollution permits. Anythingemitted on Mexico’s territory, say, would be considered to be emitted‘by Mexico’. But this seemingly ‘neutral’ unit of analysis was immediatelyentangled in disputes over responsibility, history, politicsand exploitation. People pointed out that some of the dump spaceearmarked for emissions originating on one country’s territory wouldin effect be used by other nations. One country would wind up usingdump space that should belong to another.What do you mean?Southern negotiators and others argued that ‘inventories should focuson the location of economic demand’ for carbon-intensive practices‘rather than on the site of production’. 236 Why, for example, shouldMexico be held solely responsible for emissions involved in producinggoods for the US?Economists asked why a country should be held responsible for theemissions of (for example) trucks crossing its territory, if it neither producesnor uses the goods that they carry. In extreme cases a country