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

lessons unlearned 195atmospheric carbon stabilisation could be neglected, or at least delayed.’455But surely the Kyoto Protocol has focussed public attention on overall emissionstargets. That’s what Kyoto means for most people – a set of targets – even ifeverybody agrees they’re inadequate.That’s true. But Kyoto’s success in making emissions reduction targetsa matter for political debate isn’t due to the market that the treaty setsup. Emissions targets were going to be a public issue whether or notcarbon trading was involved.I’m still a bit confused by this discussion. Politicians and economics professorsare always telling us that markets reduce centralised decision-making andbureaucracy, and allow people to think and act for themselves. Are you sayingthat isn’t always true?The charitable response would be that politicians’ press conferencesand economics classrooms are perhaps not the best places to learnabout these issues.After 60 years, Karl Polanyi’s perspective is still the more balancedone: that trading schemes are ‘opened and kept open by an enormousincrease in continuous, centrally-organised and controlled interventionism’.The Kyoto Protocol’s market has set up one of the most centralised,opaque, complicated and jargon-ridden international processesever seen, while the EU ETS is perhaps the most complex, impenetrablepiece of environmental legislation Europe has ever known.True, the Kyoto market does not dictate to anybody the technologiesthey must adopt to reduce emissions. And it has opened up all sortsof discussions about the means by which countries might meet theirminimal emissions reductions obligations. But at the same time, it hascreated large bureaucracies remote from ordinary people at both globaland national levels in order to try to create a market commodity– to inventory emissions; divide up emissions rights; register trades;protect property rights; approve, validate and verify projects; establishexchanges; enforce compliance; ensure reporting and so on.Not even the US’s sulphur dioxide scheme actually decentralises decision-makingto firms. Since power generation is highly regulated, itmerely pushes certain decisions back onto state public utility commissions.At no point was the price of pollution rights ever determinedby anything describable as a ‘market’ separable from ‘government’.Are you saying that the carbon market isn’t, after all, increasing transparencyand giving ordinary people more choices?