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

132 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingSounds great!It does, doesn’t it? But the assumption that equity will be furthered inthe current economic and political environment by commodificationand systems of private property – and that states will be conscientiousguardians of the public welfare – looks risky to many observers withexperience of similar schemes. (See box: ‘Little’ People and ‘Big’ Resources.)To what extent would Southern governments come under pressureto use their surplus citizens’ allowances to attract dirty industries? 244Would an equal per capita carbon allowance economy be any moresuccessful in fostering equity than Nigeria’s oil economy, Mali’s cottoneconomy or the uranium economy of northern Canada or Australia?What scale of reform of local power structures would be necessary toprevent abuses in a system that granted lucrative assets to every localvillager? Whose hands would the pollution rights eventually wind upin? A nominally equal-per-capita scheme that encouraged a state tosubsidise the development of a high-carbon industrial structure wouldalso pose new problems for citizens fighting fossil-fuel developmentsin their local areas. Contraction and Convergence’s initial grant of adisproportionate chunk of lucrative assets to the rich, in addition, runsinto the same difficulties as the Kyoto Protocol and the EU ETS. Undera Contraction and Convergence trading scheme, too, as under everyother carbon trading programme, rules aimed at improving integrityand preventing fraud would continuously be threatened by the emergenceof new and more ambitious liberalisation initiatives. 245Maybe we just have to abandon the idea that greenhouse gas emissions tradingcan be made fair.Emissions trading’s most powerful proponents probably never hadthat idea in the first place. Equality is not what emissions markets areabout. Even the ‘total product rule’ that Ronald Coase relied on inhis justification of pollution markets ‘serves primarily as a mechanismfor redistributing wealth’ from poor to rich, 247 and from future generationsto the present. 248You can go further and say that one of emissions trading schemes’ politicalselling points is that they preserve inequality. And many mainstreamenvironmentalist backers of trading schemes are perfectly willingto sacrifice some ‘efficiency’ to make them even more unequal.How can that be? Isn’t the main raison d’etre of trading to cut the costs ofenvironmental action?