PRIVATE PROPERTY: THE SOLUTION OR THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM?

Climate change is a private property problem. Some may react strongly to such a bold claim—after all, private property, we are told, is a solution to the crisis, as the current fascination with the ‘commodification’1 and ‘propertisation’2 of carbon through ‘cap-and-trade’ schemes suggests.3 In this article, however, I will explain why this saviour may in fact be the source of the problem and why we need to take individual, personal action rather than waiting for government to act for us.


Introduction
Climate change is a private property problem.Some may react strongly to such a bold claim-after all, private property, we are told, is a solution to the crisis, as the current fascination with the 'commodification' 1 and 'propertisation' 2 of carbon through 'cap-and-trade' schemes suggests. 3In this article, however, I will explain why this saviour may in fact be the source of the problem and why we need to take individual, personal action rather than waiting for government to act for us.

I. What Private Property Is
I begin with an explanation of liberal theory, from which the dominant contemporary concept of private property emerges.Liberalism concerns itself with the establishment and maintenance of a political and legal order which, among other things, secures individual freedom in choosing a 'life project' -the values and ends of a preferred way of life. 4In order for life to have meaning, some control over the use of goods and resources is necessary; private property is liberalism's means of ensuring that individuals enjoy choice over goods and resources so as to allow them to fulfil their life project. 5e liberal conception of private property is, then, in simple terms, a 'bundle' of legal relations (or rights) created, conferred and enforced by the state (law), between people in relation to the control of goods and resources. 6At a minimum, these rights typically include use, exclusivity, and disposition.For example, one can use one's car (or generally any other tangible or intangible good, resource, or item of social wealth), to the exclusion of all others, and may dispose of it.The holder may exercise these rights in any way they see fit, to suit personal preferences and desires.Or, to use the language of liberal theory, rights are the shorthand way of saying that individuals enjoy choice about the control and use of goods and resources in accordance with, and to give meaning to, a chosen life project.
Notice, however, that in my definition such rights exist only as a product of relationship between individuals.This is significant, for it focuses our attention on the fact that where there is a right (choice) to do something, there is a corresponding duty (a lack of choice) to refrain from interfering with the interest protected by the right. 7Rights would clearly be meaningless if this were not so.As concerns a particular good or resource, then, the liberal individual holds choice while all others (the community, society) are burdened with a lack of it.C Edwin Baker summarised the idea of rights and relationship this way: … [private] property [i]s a claim that other people ought to accede to the will of the owner, which can be a person, a group, or some other entity.A specific property right amounts to the decisionmaking authority of the holder of that right. 8he actual effect of any decision upon the other person are incompatible with this view of right.... 10 Identifying the importance of relationship reveals the fact that private property and non-property rights overlap; choices made by those with the former have the potential to create negative outcomes-consequences, or what economists call 'externalities' -for those with the latter.At the highest level of generality, Unger's 'gunman' is vested with absolute discretion to "...an absolute claim to a divisible portion of social capital" and that '[i]n this zone the rightholder [can] avoid any tangle of claims to mutual responsibility.'11 The individual revels in '...a zone of unchecked discretionary action that others, whether private citizens or governmental officials, may not invade.'12 Every legal system acknowledges this problem and, in doing so, seems to accept that with rights come obligations towards others.13 The state, through law, creates private property just as through that same law (what is more commonly known as regulation), it is said to mediate the socially contingent boundary between private property and non-property holders. This the essence of private property -state conferral of self-serving rights that come with obligations towards others.14 Yet there is something much more disturbing lurking just below the surface of what appears to be state control aimed at preventing harmful outcomes like those of climate change.What is really being conferred by private property is what Duncan Kennedy calls "the legal ground rules giving permissions to injure others, to cause legalised injury."15 This is insidious, for '...we don't think of [them] as ground rules at all, by contrast with ground rules of prohibition.This is Wesley Hohfeld's insight: the legal order permits as well as prohibits, in the simple-minded sense that it could prohibit, but judges and legislators reject demands from those injured that the injurers be restrained.'16 And those ground rules are invisible, in the sense '...that when lawmakers do nothing, they appear to have nothing to do with the outcome.But when one thinks that many other forms of injury are prohibited, it becomes clear that inaction is a policy, and that law is responsible for the outcome, at least in the abstract sense that the law "could have made it otherwise."17Indeed, "[i]t is clear that lawmakers could require almost anything.When they require nothing, it looks as though the law is uninvolved in the situation, though the legal decision not to impose a duty is in another sense the cause of the outcome when one person is allowed to ignore another's plight."18 This brings us full circle to the broader liberal theory with which we began, for the importance of relationship in understanding private property reveals an important, yet paradoxical, dimension of choice.It is simply this: the freedom that liberalism secures to the individual to choose a life project means that in the course of doing so, the individual also chooses the laws, relationships, communities, and so forth that constitute the political and legal order.In other words, in the province of politics people choose their contexts (through electing representatives, who enact laws and appoint judges who interpret those laws), which in turn defines the scope of one's rights (choice or decisionmaking authority) and the institutions that confer, protect and enforce it (bearing in mind the ground rules of permission as well as the ground rules of prohibition).Individuals choose the regulation of property as much as they do the control and use of goods and resources.19

II. How Private Property Facilitates the Externalities of Climate Change
When we focus on relationship as being central to private property and the political-regulatory contexts we choose, we begin to see something that was always there, yet hidden from our view.The externalities of private property create many other types of relationship in which the lives of many are controlled by the choices of a few.Anthropogenic climate change is a stark example.
While the science is complex, it is clear enough that humans, through their choices, produce the gasses that enhance the natural greenhouse effect which heats the earth's surface.Among other effects, anthropogenic climate change results in drought and desertification, increased extreme weather events, and the melting of polar ice (especially in the north) and so rising seas levels.We might call this the 'climate change relationship.'And private property facilitates choice (both human and corporate) about the use of goods and resources in such a way that emits greenhouse gasses.
Our choices about goods and resources cover the gamut of our chosen life projects: where we live, what we do there, how we travel from place to place, and so forth.Corporate choices are equally important, for they structure the range of choice available to individuals in setting their own agendas, thus giving corporations the power to broaden or restrict the meaning of private property in the hands of individuals.Green energy (solar or wind power), for instance, remains unavailable to the individual consumer if no corporate energy provider is willing to produce it.
Externalities do not end at the borders, physical or legal, of a good or resource; choices occur within a web of relationships, not only legal and social, but also physical and spatial.Who is affected?Everyone, the world over, with the poor and disadvantaged of the developing world disproportionately bearing the brunt of the human consequences of climate change 20 -decreasing security, shortages of food, increased health problems, and greater stress on available water supplies.Indeed, as Jedediah Purdy argues, [c]limate change threatens to become, fairly literally, the externality that ate the world.The last two hundred years of economic growth have been not just a preference-satisfaction machine but an externality machine, churning out greenhouse gases that cost polluters nothing and disperse through the atmosphere to affect the whole globe. 21nsider human security.This will decrease both within countries affected directly by climate change, and in those indirectly affected through the movement of large numbers of people displaced by the direct effects of climate change in their own countries.In the case of rising sea levels, for instance, sixty percent of the human population lives within 100km of the ocean, with the majority in small-and medium-sized settlements on land no more than 5m above sea level.Even the modest sea level rises predicted for these places will result in a massive displacement of 'climate' or 'environmental refugees'.And private property, through securing choice about the use of goods and resources to those in the developed world, makes all of this possible.Private property and the commodification it depends upon seem to be in vogue at the moment as a solution to anthropogenic climate change.It is claimed, and we tend to believe, that creating a proprietary interest in carbon that can be bought and sold is the answer to the climate crisis.But is it really?We could just as easily say that the concept of private property is the primary culprit.Is it wise to entrust the solution to the concept that put us here?Or might it be more appropriate, as Mike Hulme suggests, to "…see how we can use the idea of climate change -the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and material flows that climate change reveals -to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come." 22fore we pin our hopes on it as a cure-all, we might first ask whether the liberal concept of private property is ripe for just such a reappraisal.We can choose, but we must do so with our eyes open to the reality: that private property and the contexts in which we live are in fact our choice, not that of governments.We can no longer wait for government to act, with cap-andtrade schemes or any other form of regulation.At the very least it is not enough, and at worst, it will take too long.Now is the time to act, and only we can take that action.In exercising choice about our context and about goods and resources, we must take responsibility for ourselves, rather than waiting for our governments to act for us. 23he Amsterdam Law Forum is an open access initiative supported by the VU University Library -

Conclusion
: Is it the Solution?Jedediah Purdy, A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2009, p. 187.See also Jedediah Purdy, 'Climate Change and the Limits of the Possible', Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum (18) 2008: p. 289. 21