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

lessons unlearned 87trading, including the World Bank and the EU, acknowledges thatboth the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and various programmescreated by the parties to the UNFCCC under the Kyoto Protocolhave in fact created rights and assets worth billions of dollars. 67 Price-WaterhouseCoopers, in an analysis of the tax implications of the EUETS, has observed that ‘trade in CO 2 [carbon dioxide] emissions isequated with the transfer of similar rights such as copyrights, patents,licensing rights and commercial and industrial trademarks’. 68 In 2005,a Dutch banker involved in carbon trading noted his satisfaction thatEuropean Union emissions allowances had become ‘real property’ inthat governments had to compensate corporations in case of default.Both the EU ETS and various trading-related institutions brought intobeing by the Kyoto Protocol are therefore arguably in breach of theMarrakech Accords, although no court case has yet been brought.So carbon dioxide emissions trading schemes are putting more and more rights– and more and more power over climate – in private polluters’ hands.‘The allocation of marketable pollution permits constitutes a form oflimited privatisation’, Indiana University law professor Daniel Coleobserves, ‘as the government conveys to private parties limited entitlementsto use the public’s atmosphere.’ 69The politics is playing out exactly as it did in US pollution tradingschemes. The Kyoto Protocol’s effectiveness, for instance, has longbeen acknowledged to have been undermined by the granting oflarge amounts of excess allowances to countries like Russia for politicalreasons. 137 Giving huge amounts of rights to industrialised countriesas a whole has meanwhile entrenched their expectations for furtherprivileges – expectations that Southern countries are bound toupset if they ever agree to similar emissions limitations under a tradingscheme. 70The EU Emissions Trading Scheme is plagued by similar problems.In April 2006, it became clear that corporate participants in the EUETS had been granted around 10 per cent more allowances than theyneeded to cover their 2005 emissions. That translated to between44 and 150 million tonnes of surplus carbon permits, 71 or, at €13 pertonne, up to ‘€1.8bn of free money’. 72In the UK, when environment secretary Margaret Beckett publishedher draft EU ETS allocations for British industry in May 2004, theyadded up to a total of 736 million tonnes of carbon dioxide for the nextthree years. The plan called for no emissions cuts whatsoever: industryhad won tradable rights to emit yearly at least as much carbon dioxideas it had annually emitted de facto between 1998 and 2003.