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

lessons unlearned 79his place. The subsequent rise of a constitutionalistmovement led by junior armyofficers and disaffected notables provokeda British invasion in 1882 that reassertedEuropean control over both finances andmortgaged property, including the extensivevice regal estates. 25 The private propertysystem was further consolidated witha land survey more comprehensive thananything known at that time in Britain. 26Despite belated attempts to slow down therate at which villagers were losing theirland and their homes to creditors, by the1920s it was estimated that more than onethird of the agricultural population in theNile Delta had become landless. 27For Egyptian villagers, private propertymeshed with and modified existing powerrelations in ways that benefited someand harmed others. The same is true ofthe early ages of enclosure of commonsin Europe’s colonies and in Europe itself.And it remains true today. A World Banksupportedprogramme that issued 8.7 millionland titles in Thailand beginning in1984 paved the way for corrupt acquisitionsof land by speculators, underminingvillagers’ tenure security and causingwidespread rural confl ict. 28 In ThatcheriteBritain, privatisation of social housing ultimatelyturned ‘working class housing estatesinto centres of intense gentrification’while producing ‘homelessness and socialanomie in many urban neighbourhoods.’Privatisation of utilities redistributed assetsin a way that ‘increasingly favoured theupper rather than the lower classes’. Argentinianprivatisation resulted in a ‘hugeinflow of overaccumulated capital and asubstantial boom in asset values, followedby a collapse into massive impoverishment.’29 Not long after the Mexican governmentpassed a reform law in 1991 thatboth permitted and encouraged privatisationof the ejido lands, ‘divesting itself ofits responsibilities to maintain the basis’ forindigenous security, the Zapatista rebellionbroke out. Extending intellectual privateproperty rights over biological assetsto communities whose ‘political re sourcesare not commensurate with their newfoundeconomic resources’ 30 may wind updamaging, not improving, livelihoods.So it is only to be expected that currentmoves to turn the earth’s carbon-cyclingcapacity into a tradable asset are viewedcautiously by many groups, out of concernfor their practical effects. To bringthe world’s carbon-cycling capacity undera new system of property sparks socialchange and shifts the political characterof the atmosphere and the earth’s abilityto regulate its climate. It has alreadytransformed or reinforced a wide range ofpower relations – by, for example, creatingnew institutions to quantify, handle, regulate,distribute and police the new assetsthat are being given away.The new carbon commodity is ghostly only in the sense that it’s up togovernments and governments alone to decide – on whatever groundsthey choose, scientific or not – how scarce it is, and how much canbe distributed, bought, sold and used. Tradable permits to pollute arewhat law professor and pollution trading advocate Richard Stewartcalls ‘hybrid property’ – property conjured up by regulation and thus