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

lessons unlearned 77It’s not so simple. Just because something is temporary doesn’t meanit’s not a property right.Property rights come in many shapes and sizes (see box: ‘Sir HenryMaine and the Right to Pollute’, opposite). A lot of property rightsare temporary. Think of monthly or yearly leases. Think of mining,logging or grazing concessions that governments give out to corporationsfor 30 years or 75 years. Think of copyrights, trademarks, andlicenses. Think of fishing quotas or seed, gene or drug patents, all ofwhich expire after a certain length of time.All of these temporary property rights have been used to privatise orenclose various goods. All have been used to make billions for privatecompanies. And all have been used to transfer wealth and power tothe rich, sometimes igniting bitter confl ict over democracy and howhuman beings’ environments are to be treated.Emissions allowances are no different. Industry, economists, governmentsand legal scholars all agree that, in giving away these allowances,emissions trading schemes do give away something quite substantial.As the International Accounting Standards Board notes with regardto the EU ETS, allowances are ‘assets…owned by the company concerned…andas such represent a significant and immediate creationof value to companies’. They should be seen as a ‘government grant,and accounted for as such, i.e. treated as deferred income in the balancesheet and recognised as income on a systematic basis’. 20 Temporaryor not, emissions permits constitute a ‘major input factor toproduction.’ 21Allowances aren’t valuable just because they enable polluters to avoidhaving to spend money on pollution control. They also enable corporationsto borrow money more easily and give them a better shareprice. And they set a precedent for granting them further entitlements.They can also be bought and sold for clear profit. They havemarket value. It matters who they are given to.I still don’t understand. How can you have rights over something as intangibleas the earth’s carbon-cycling capacity?Companies have legal rights over all sorts of intangible things. Drugcompanies own genes. The Disney Company owns the Winnie-the-Pooh story. General Electric and Rupert Murdoch hold temporaryrights over parts of the broadcast spectrum – rights that they are nowtrying to make permanent. 22 Other companies own new ideas fortheir production lines.