by Dave On Fire

Created on: March 04, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

Much has already been written on the subject of emissions trading, largely falling into two categories: lauding it as proof that capitalism can take care of climate change for us, or else dismissing it as useless greenwash. I like to think that most of us are smart enough to see past these ideological standpoints and recognise emissions trading for what it is: inadequate, but a good start. Wherever emissions can be cheaply and easily reduced, emissions trading will see that they are, but cheap and easy changes will ultimately not be enough.

Still, the idea of making companies financially responsible for the damage they inflict on society and the environment - internalising their external costs - is a good one, and merits further exploration. Creating a truly complete "pollution market" will be difficult, if not impossible, and while we wait for these complex regulatory bodies to emerge, it's worth trying to make pollution unprofitable in other ways.

Unsurprisingly, the initiative doesn't only come from the polluters themselves. Sometimes, it comes from their victims. Global warming is not uniform, and one of the regions that has warmed the most is the Arctic. Over centuries, the Inuit have perfected their economy, society and technology to survive there, and it's a fragile balance. As the region becomes warmer, their techniques become less reliable and their livelihoods - and ultimately, their survival - are put in jeopardy.

Such environmental changes have killed off whole societies in the past, but usually this has been brought on either by that society itself or by natural catastrophe. However, there is an identifiable human culprit for the Inuits' warming woes, and it's not the Inuit. We are all killing the Arctic with our carbon emissions, and none more so than the United States. The Inuit consider this to be a breach of their human rights, and are taking the U.S. to court.

To my knowledge, this will the first time that the damaging effectives of greenhouse emissions have been recognised by a court of law, and is such it is a landmark case worth watching closely. However, it is not the first time that human suffering caused by a pollution has been recognised as a crime. What sentence passed is usually woefully - almost offensively - inadequate to the victims (for heart-rending details, the best example remains the Bhopal disaster), but it does have the advantage of scaring other companies straight.

There are many examples of where a company has been severely

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