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

196 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingWell, look around you. Few members of the general public have anyinkling of what is going on in the bureaucracies that govern either theUN’s or the EU’s climate market, or what evasions, abuses and conflicts are afoot. Few are even aware how far the attempt to set up a giantglobal carbon market has gone. Few, too, can make sense of the swarmof acronyms and technical terms Kyoto has spawned and continues tospawn, including AAUs, CERs, ERUs, DNAs, DOEs, NAPs, PDDs,AIEs, SBIs, COPs, MOPs, SBSTAs, LULUCF, additionality, modelrules, meth panels, supplementarity, leakage, and so on. Not even manyjournalists covering climate know what’s going on.No wonder I haven’t heard about all this stuff before.Yes. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been a lot of debate about theshortcomings of pollution trading. But it rages largely among affectedcommunities and an expert elite with its own interests. The publicat large, whether in the US or worldwide, has tended to be fooled bythe complexity of trading systems into believing that they are reducingpollution more than they are. On the whole, public debate has notbeen enhanced, but rather blocked, by the schemes. And, as will bedetailed in the coming chapter, the carbon market has not expanded,but rather contracted, ordinary people’s choices, in case after case.Nor is the discussion helped when NGO trading proponents insistthat emissions markets have nothing to do with assets and property.‘The Kyoto Protocol and the EU ETS do NOT create propertyrights,’ one large Washington environmental NGO staff memberproclaimed indignantly in late 2005. ‘The EU ETS created the “allowance”specifically to make clear that is constitutes a discrete permitunder a regulation, not a property right.’ 456 Kyoto units are merely‘unitised and divisible embodiments of promises,’ insists another environmentalist.457 To warn the public that assets are being given awayto the rich, fumes still another, is ‘ideological claptrap’.Such dismissive views block intelligent public debate about what kindof property rights emissions trading schemes involve; whether thoserights are defensible; how they might be distributed or transferredand to whom and for whose benefit; and so on. Such a debate is crucial.Whose atmosphere is it, and whose earth? This is a question foreverybody, not just for government ministries, lobbyists, experts andlarge environmental NGOs.Indeed, one of the reasons the EU ETS has run into such difficultiesis that there has been no open debate on allocation of allowances.No newspaper or television programme appears to have covered the‘choices involved in setting up the system during the period in which