HUMAN RIGHTS PRINCIPLES

Economic instruments interfere with human rights insofar as they allow companies and nations to delay or avoid action to prevent pollution or environmental degradation that can cause death, injury, ill health and otherwise interfere with the rights of people to an environment that is conducive to their wellbeing.

Charges on natural resources which aim to motivate people to use them efficiently can prevent the poor accessing resources such as water to which they have a human right. When a user-pays policy was intro­duced in South Africa in 1996 for essential services such as water and electricity, water bills alone came to 30 per cent of average family incomes. According to a South African government study, 'full-cost recovery' for water and electricity services has resulted in more than 10 million people, 25 per cent of the population, having these services dis­connected since 1998. Two million people have been forced out of their homes for not paying their water or electricity bills (Bond 2003; 2004).

Those who were disconnected from the water supply because they couldn't pay the charges were forced to use contaminated sources of water, causing the spread of cholera and gastrointestinal diseases. More than 140000 people have been infected with cholera since 2000, and mil­lions suffer diarrhoea. The government ended up having to spend mil­lions of dollars trying to control South Africa's worst outbreak of cholera, which killed hundreds of people between 2000 and 2002 (Bond 2004; Monbiot 2004; Pauw 2003).

The human right to clean air and water can also be undermined by tradeable pollution rights which give private companies the right to use the air for pollution discharge. For example, the Clean Air Act in the USA was originally established to protect human health from air pollutants by requiring that companies install the best available pollution-control tech­nologies.

Mercury, for instance, is a hazardous substance that is emitted by power plants. It can harm the nervous system, particularly that of the infant and fetus. Mercury from incinerators is controlled by regulation in the USA, and in 2000 the EPA was proposing to control mercury from power plants in the same way, hoping for a 90 per cent reduction on the 48 tons per year they emit by 2008. But in 2003 the Bush Administration decided that the cap and trade system was a better way of controlling mercury from power plants, and waived Clean Air Act regulations requiring power plants to install 'maximum achievable control tech­nology' for mercury emissions. Power plants are now required to either reduce their emissions by 20 per cent by 2010 and 70 per cent by 2018, or buy emissions credits to cover their excess (Krugman 2004; Reuters 2005).

Historically, courts have traditionally favored protection of life and health over protection of property. Clearly the 'right' created under these [tradeable pollution rights] programs must be substantial, because it is conferring [on] polluters a government sanctioned ability to, by definition, injure the property and health of others, whether that is the destruction of children's intelligence, the lives of middle-aged men, or the lung function of joggers.. Now, instead of an American having a right to his life, a polluter has the right to take it. It is no overstatement to say that this proposition is revolutionary. (Moore 2004a: 11)

The large amounts of money saved by emissions trading programmes - for example, $225-$375 million a year from the acid rain programme (Richman 2003: 146) - result directly from firms not having to make pol­lution reductions that they otherwise would have. Those savings have an environmental price, which is paid by those who have to breathe the pol­luted air and drink the polluted water.

Delays

Delays are 'implicit in trading because it requires time for markets to develop' and because polluters are typically given long periods to comply. The US acid rain programme, for example, was proposed in 1980, begun in 1993 and requires compliance by 2010. 'In contrast, Germany cut power plant emissions by 90 per cent in six years, from the first proposal in 1982 to completion in 1988' (Moore 2004a: 9).

Similarly, while the Los Angeles RECLAIM programme was in force in one part of California, a neighbouring air quality control district, Ventura, was implementing emission controls in the traditional way with legislation. Ventura power plants installed pollution controls in 1991 but it was not till 2001 that South Coast power plants were taken out of the RECLAIM trading scheme (see chapter 10) and ordered to install the same pollution control equipment (Moore 2004a: 11).

The problem with the delays associated with emissions trading is that in the meantime people die. The EPA notes that ^,SO2 and NOx con­tribute to the formation of fine particles and NOx contributes to the for­mation of ground-level ozone. Fine particles and ozone are associated with thousands of premature deaths and illnesses each year' (USEPA 2005: 1). In the greater Los Angeles region almost 6000 people died each year during the 1990s as a result of particulate air pollution. Millions more suffered health effects such as,aching lungs, wheezing, coughing, headache and permanent lung tissue scarring' as a result of breathing high levels of ozone (Drury et al. 1999: 243). It can be argued that emis­sions trading, by preventing the implementation of the pollution control legislation that had formerly been in place, was responsible for many of these deaths.

Similarly, lead from petrol can cause heart attacks and strokes in adults and impair the intelligence of children. And while the USA took 23 years to eliminate lead from petrol using a trading programme, most other countries, including the United Kingdom, achieved the same task much more quickly (Moore 2004a: 9-11).

The typical open market trading scheme has no overall government­set cap on pollution levels, which means that air or water quality is decided by the many individual firms in the market making decisions about how to maximise their profits. In this way the driving force is cost reduction for firms, rather than public health, and the outcomes may not always be good for public health.

Hot spots

Tradeable pollution rights or emissions trading allow some firms to exceed environmental standards by buying pollution reduction credits or allowances. This may cause some neighbourhoods to get a lot more pollution than others because the companies in their area are buying up allowances rather than reducing their pollution.

For example, Rule 1610 in Los Angeles allowed a few companies to pay for reductions in emissions from vehicles across four counties in order to increase their own pollution. In this way pollutants distributed over a large region were reduced while pollutants from a number of com­panies concentrated in a few, mainly Latino, neighbourhoods increased.

Some companies bought 'pollution credits to avoid installing pollution control equipment - that captures toxic gases released during oil tanker loading at their marine terminals'. This created high concentrations of pol­lution at four Los Angeles marine terminals, increasing the risk of cancer for local residents. Three of these terminals are in neighbourhoods that are 75-90 per cent people of colour (CPR 2005; Drury et al. 1999: 252-4).

The problem with mercury trading is that mercury is heavy and tends to precipitate near its source. This means that power plants that buy up mercury emission credits put their neighbours at risk of brain damage. In May 2005, eleven US state governments sued the federal gov­ernment over the trading scheme, arguing that it poses serious health risks to people living near plants which continue to emit high levels of mercury (Krugman 2004; O'Donnell 2005).

Open market emissions trading, which allows 'cross-pollutant' trading, allows companies to increase their discharges of dangerous chemicals by buying credits earned from cutting discharges of less dan­gerous or less reactive chemicals. This increases the health dangers for those living near the factories emitting the dangerous chemicals.

Even the trade of a non-hazardous gas like carbon dioxide can cause hot spots of pollution because it can be associated with toxic co-pollu- tants that increase with the increase in CO2 emissions:

Every combustion source also emits dozens of other co-pollutants that pose deadly health risks locally and regionally. These include cancer-causing products of incomplete combustion such as poly­cyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), unburned toxic hydrocar­bons, and fine particulate matter linked to excessive death rates. (Belliveau 1998)

Other pollutants are precursors to more hazardous pollutants because they contribute to the formation of those pollutants. For example, NOx are precursors to ozone smog formation, and SO2 is a precursor to the formation of fine particulate matter.

Similarly, water trading policies such as nutrient bubbles can create hot spots because the point sources they cover, particularly sewage treat­ment plants, discharge more than just nutrients. Treated effluent can include heavy metals, organochlorines and pathogens. Allowing some plants to receive less treatment than others in a bubble system can create hot spots which can threaten the health of those who swim locally as well as those who fish locally.

Perpetuating health threats

Carbon offsets can also perpetuate existing health threats. An example is the way they have extended the operations of a dangerous garbage dump in South Africa. The dump had been used for toxic waste and as a result high levels of cadmium and lead - both carcinogenic - were present in the soil. Locals, who are mainly poor and Indian, blame the dump for the high levels of leukaemia and cancerous tumours in the neighbourhood. It was supposed to have been closed in 1996 and turned into soccer fields and other recreational facilities, but its life has now been extended by a landfill gas extraction project initiated in 2002 to extract methane gas from the decomposing garbage for electricity gener­ation (Bachram et al.

The project is funded by the World Bank's Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF) and will earn almost 4 million emissions reduction credits for the captured methane, credits that can be sold to affluent countries (CDM Watch 2005: 11).

Climate change

The Dutch research institute RIVM calculates that through allowing emissions trading the actual reductions in greenhouse gases by 2012 will be far less than 1 per cent (cited in Bachram 2004: 2). This failure to make significant reductions will have grave consequences for millions of people around the world. A study published in the prestigious science magazine Nature reports that climate change is causing a dramatic increase in deaths because it is causing increased incidences of malaria, malnutrition and diarrhoea in the poorest nations (cited in Sample 2005). The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that in 2000 'more than 150,000 premature deaths were attributed to various climate change impacts' as well as 5 million illnesses. It estimates that this annual toll will double by 2030 (cited in Vidal 2005).

UN scientists have warned that the severe droughts experienced in many countries in 2005 could become a semi-permanent phenomenon as a result of climate change, and that one in six countries is short of food as a result of them (Vidal amp; Radford 2005). The UN has also predicted that as soon as 2010 there could be 50 million environmental 'refugees', that is, people who have been displaced from their homes by environ­mental problems such as drought, deforestation and soil degradation (Scheer 2005). Low-lying island states are also at risk.

The Inuit people are taking the USA to court for human rights viola­tions because of America's contribution to climate change. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference - 'a federation of Native nations representing about 150,000 people in Canada, Greenland, Russia and the US' - is filing a petition in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights because climate change is interfering with:

the Inuit's ability to sustain themselves as they have traditionally done, their ability to be healthy... their ability to maintain their unique culture, which is absolutely dependent on ice and snow; their ability to hunt and fish and harvest plant foods, their ability to have shelter and build their homes. (Gertz 2005)

Displacement of people

Plantations

The measures used to offset greenhouse gas emissions in industrialised nations are also threatening human rights. Their heavy dependence on plantations as carbon sinks interferes with the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination by taking their lands and livelihoods from them. The First International Forum of Indigenous Peoples on Climate Change (quoted in Kill 2001: 15) declared:

Our intrinsic relation with Mother Earth obliges us to oppose the inclusion of sinks in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) because it reduces our sacred land and territories to mere carbon sequestration which is contrary to our cosmovision and philos­ophy of life. Sinks in the CDM would constitute a worldwide strategy for expropriating our lands and territories and violating our fundamental rights that would culminate in a new form of colonialism.

Those creating the plantations look for the cheapest land to do it on, which is usually in poor countries. Often it is land that is not owned by individuals but rather occupied by indigenous people without formal property rights, and it is used 'for large-scale monoculture plantations which act as an occupying force in impoverished rural communities dependent on these lands for survival'. The plantations can suck up the groundwater needed by the local people for their own crops, while the pesticides and fertilisers used on them can pollute the rivers, other water sources and the fish that are often a major source of food and livelihood for the area's people (Bachram 2004: 8).

In Uganda in the late 1990s, 8000 people were evicted from 13 vil­lages as a result of their lands being leased by the government to a Norwegian company for a tree plantation to create carbon offsets (Bachram 2004: 8). The Tupinikim and Guarani peoples of Brazil have been displaced from some 30 villages by Aracruz Celulose, 'the biggest eucalyptus pulp producing company of Brazil and the world', as a result of its 'occupation' of 11 000 hectares of indigenous land. In Minas Gerais in Brazil, at the end of 2004, 250 people reoccupied 8000 hectares of their lands in protest at its being turned into eucalypt plantations. They had lived there for centuries and the land had provided their food, grazing, firewood, water and medicines. This area is just a small part of the 230 000 hectares of lands in the state that have been rented to eucalypt plantation companies by the state government for around 30 cents a hectare per year (AAGDM 2005).

Forests

Existing forests are also being usurped by corporations and foreign coun­tries in the name of carbon offsets:

Projects in countries such as Uganda and Ecuador have already led to thousands of local communities dependant on forest areas being forced off their land as private Northern corporations, backed by their governments, engage in a worldwide land-grab at wholesale prices. (Bachram et al. 2003: 16)

Where local people have been conserving old growth forests for thou­sands of years there is no credit, nor are measures taken that might protect their livelihoods and facilitate their sustainable forest manage­ment activities. But where foreign companies and organisations are offi­cially put in charge of conserving the same areas, or growing trees in other areas, carbon offsets can be claimed.

Hydro-electric dams

Similarly, large hydro-electric dam projects which are displacing people in the name of carbon credits can have a devastating impact on local environments. The Nam Theun II dam in Laos, the first approved for carbon financing by the World Bank, will result in the loss of land and fisheries for tens of thousands of locals (CDM Watch 2005: 20).