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

lessons unlearned 135Or the World Resources Institute:Politically, the issue is not necessarily economic efficiency but howany allocation mechanism will affect the specific interests of a particularparticipant or stakeholder. Auctions that make regulatedsources pay for all allowances are presumably more difficult to implement,due to political resistance. Furthermore, potential newsources that would prefer an auction may not be sufficiently organised(or even exist) to lobby for it. Free historical allocations, orgrandfathering, became the norm for the [US] Ozone TransportCommission NO x Budget presumably because of political resistanceto auctioning. 253Social regressiveness and a form of bribery are commonly built intotrading schemes, both within and across nations.A quick fix?But maybe regressiveness, inequality and bribery are necessary evils. After all,surely fi ghting global warming requires working with the economic system thatwe have, not solving all the world’s problems. Our children can’t aff ord for usto wait for a regime of global equality, the overthrow of global capitalism or evenjust a more cooperative economic system before we move to rein in greenhousegas emissions. And if that means we have to accept both unfairness and relativeineffi ciency, then so be it. Surely to deny this is to play into the hands ofUS President George W. Bush and others who are trying to obstruct genuineclimate action.There are several non sequiturs here that need a quick reply.First, pointing out the obstacles to the economic novelty called emissionstrading is not the same as calling for a global revolution againstcapitalism. Up to now, global capitalism – whatever is meant by theterm – has got along quite well without emissions trading.The fact that emissions trading is about ‘creating a new market’, while(say) commons, conventional regulation, and removal of subsidies areconventionally classified as ‘outside the market’ doesn’t necessarilymake emissions trading any more ‘capitalism-friendly’ than, say, conventionalregulation or the redirection of subsidies. Most observerswould argue that the type of enterprise associated with ‘global capitalism’since the 19th century has actually been dependent for its survivalon such types of state action. 254 Some would go even further,urging that no firm boundaries can be drawn between ‘market’ and‘non-market’, ‘inside the economy’ and ‘outside the economy’, and‘capitalism’ and a whole raft of supposedly ‘noncapitalistic’ types of