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lessons unlearned 129could even end up being held responsible for high emissions used toproduce and transport goods none of which its citizens enjoyed. Yetsingling out final consumers as the real emitters might not providedirect incentives for cleaner production. 237At the same time, environmentalists questioned whether entitiescalled ‘Russia’, ‘Ukraine’ and ‘the UK’ should be credited with post-1990 emissions reductions that are in fact due to post-Soviet economiccollapse or the aggressive anti-unionism of Margaret Thatcher, theresulting collapse of the coal industry and the rise of less-pollutingnatural gas as a fuel.Indigenous movements, meanwhile, argued that it is they, not nationalgovernments, that have reduced emissions by opposing oil drillingon their territories. 238Other activists insisted that colonial history and patterns of imposeddevelopment were also relevant to negotiating who the agents wereto be in the new carbon emissions market. For example, oil imperialismshaped Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern nations as oildependentsocieties, while colonialism shaped Uruguay as a beef producer.Should today’s Saudis or Uruguayans be held responsible forcarbon dioxide emissions from gas fl ares or methane emissions fromcattle?I see. But in the end didn’t everyone sweep aside all these arguments and agreethat nation-states were responsible for emissions within their borders and wouldbe the designated owners of emissions permits?The Kyoto Protocol did try to sweep these arguments under the rug,yes. But they’ve never gone away. In fact, controversies over who theowners of rights to the earth’s carbon dump should be – and howmany rights they should have – have only increased.How’s that?Well, take, for example, the UK component of the EU ETS. As shownin Table 2 (on page 89), UK industry, mainly heavy industry, is beinggranted monetisable access to between approximately two and a halfto five per cent of what might be called the ‘available’ world carbondump (the figure for the EU corporate sector as a whole comes tobetween 23–45 per cent). UK population, by contrast, comes to onlyone per cent of the world total.The dump space granted to the UK, moreover, does not fall, geographicallyor otherwise, under UK legal jurisdiction as conventionallyunderstood, but is used by all of the earth’s inhabitants. The UK