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

94 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradinghave to think about stepping in to prevent the EU ETS from handingout enormous windfalls to the worst polluters. Even the investmentbank UBS Warburg – not normally noted for its environmentalist enthusiasms– has questioned the wisdom of providing a multi- billiondollarwindfall to EU energy utilities, asking ‘whatever happened tothe principle of “polluter pays”?’ 102 In May 2006, Tony Ward, energydirector at Ernst and Young, stated fl atly that the EU ETS ‘has notencouraged meaningful investment in carbon-reducing technologies’.103Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of the contradictions thatresult from the attempt to traffic in property rights to carbon dumps.Uh-oh. What else is there?A question of quantificationOne of the most difficult problems is measurement. Property rightsrequire quantification. Land titles require that territory be demarcated,mapped and surveyed. Fishing quotas require that catches bemonitored and populations checked. Broadcast spectrum rights presupposethe ability to quantify frequencies, and permits to dump hazardouschemicals won’t work unless the authorities are strict aboutamounts.That’s why, as Yale University property specialist Carol Rose pointsout, it is only recent ‘[g]overnmental advances in measurement,record-keeping, and legal enforcement’ that have made possible the‘dramatic turn in the “propertisation” of what might seem to be “unownable”diffuse resources or res communes in the tangible world’.And it is this ‘propertisation’ that has enabled the rise of tradable pollutionpermit systems. 104For instance, the US sulphur dioxide trading scheme on which theKyoto Protocol is based, as Daniel Cole of Indiana University haspointed out, would never have been possible before particular bits ofhigh-tech measuring equipment called continuous emissions monitoringsystems came into existence in the 1980s and 1990s.The problem is that the fad for tradable permit systems has now faroutstripped measurement ability, at least as far as greenhouse gases go.The level of quantification technology that made the sulphur dioxideprogramme in the US possible isn’t available for greenhouse gases.Here again, the US model should have provided more discouragementthan encouragement to the project to frame a market-orientedKyoto Protocol.