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

200 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon trading1 Ruth Greenspan Bell, ‘Market Failure’,Environmental Forum, March/April 2006, pp. 28–33,http://www.weathervane.rff.org/, p. 28.2 Whether trading is an efficient way of reaching agoal depends on what the goal is, and how societyand technology are organised in any particular timeor place. Trading in land would not have been anefficient way of maximising returns to scale fromgrazing during the era of open-field agriculture inEurope (Carl Dahlman, The Open Field System andBeyond: A Property Rights Analysis of an EconomicInstitution, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,1980, pp. 115–21). Trading in agricultural seed varietiesis not the most efficient way of making the greatestdiversity available to the most people over the longterm. Trading in bandwidth is not an efficient way ofensuring the free exchange of information over radio.Trading in human rights would not be an efficient wayof maximising respect for human rights, nor tradingin medical malpractice an efficient way of ensuringthe best health care. Privatised electricity, water andmedicine typically result in higher prices for smallconsumers. Raising the price of energy can be a lessefficient way of reducing energy use than regulatingcertain kinds of investment (Gar Lipow, No HairShirts: Money and Politics in the Fight against GlobalWarming, draft manuscript).3 Larry Lohmann, ‘Pulp, Paper and Power: Howan Industry Reshapes Its Social Environment’,1995, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/item.shtml?x=52196.4 Nicholas Stern, ‘What is the Economics of ClimateChange?’, Stern Review on the Economics ofClimate Change, 31 January 2006, London. Seealso Anne Hambleton, ‘An Annotated Glossary ofCommonly-Used Climate Change Terms’, The Centrefor Sustainable Development in the Americas,http://www.csdanet.org/glossary.html; Nathan E.Hultman and Daniel M. Kammen, ‘Equitable RevenueDistribution under an International Emissions TradingRegime’, Political Economy Research Institute,University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Centrefor Science and the Environment, InternationalConference on Natural Assets, Tagtaytay City, thePhilippines, 3 January 2003.5 Gerald Torres, ‘Who Owns the Sky?’, PaceEnvironmental Law Review 19, 2001, pp. 515-574.6 Richard L. Sandor et al., ‘An Overview of aFree-Market Approach to Climate Change andConservation’, in I. R. Swingland, ed., CapturingCarbon and Conserving Biodiversity: The MarketApproach, Earthscan, London, 2002, p. 56.7 Carbon Market Europe, 24 June 2005, http://www.pointcarbon.com.8 UNFCCC, ‘Principles, nature and scope of themechanisms pursuant to Articles 6, 12 and 17 of theKyoto Protocol’, Decision 15/CP.7, http://unfccc.int/documentation/decisions.9 US Environmental Protection Agency, Clean Air ActAmendments, 1990, Section 403 (f), Title IV, http://www.epa.gov/air/caa/title4.html.10 ‘S. 139, the Climate Stewardship Act’, Sec. 331, http://democrats.senate.gov/~dpc/pubs/108-1-379.html.11 Carol M. Rose, ‘The Several Futures of Property:Of Cyberspace and Folk tales, Emission Trades andEcosystems’, Minnesota Law Review 83, 1998, p. 129.12 Jeanne M. Dennis, ‘Smoke for Sale: Paradoxes andProblems of the Emissions Trading Program of theClean Air Amendments of 1990’, UCLA Law Review40, 1993, pp. 1101–1125.13 Ibid., p. 1118.14 The Kyoto Protocol differs sharply from mostsystems of tradable fishing or hunting quotas, inwhich the total number of quotas given out issupposed to represent only a small part of theavailable stock, or a ‘sustainable yield’. Under Kyoto,the total number of emissions quotas given out isseveral times the ‘available’ stock or resource. Ofcourse, the number of these permits is supposed tobe reduced over time.15 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, BeaconPress, Boston, 2002 [1944].16 Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: TheEvolution of Institutions for Collective Action,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990.17 C. B. Macpherson, ed., Property: Mainstream and<strong>Critical</strong> Positions, University of Toronto Press,Toronto, 1978.18 Ibid.19 As Daniel H. Cole remarks in Pollution and Property:Comparing Ownership Institutions for EnvironmentalProtection, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,2002, a utility can’t stop the government fromconfiscating the allowances it is given, but ‘it certainlycan exclude all others from interfering with it’ (p. 54).20 Quoted in J. P. Morgan, client report, Global UtilitiesPartner, London, 10 November 2003, p. 38. TheBoard says that participating companies should‘account for allocations of emission allowances orrights to emit as intangible assets’ whose ‘fair value’should be ‘determined by the appropriate marketprices at the time of allocation’.21 W. Fichtner et al., ‘The impact of private investors’transaction costs on the cost effectiveness ofproject-based Kyoto mechanisms’, Climate Policy 3,3, pp. 249–59, p. 257.22 Friends of the Commons, The State of the Commons2003–04, http://www.friendsofthecommons.org.