Punishing an illicit activity, or the activity that facilitates it?
16 Aug 2023
I was reading Hot Money, by Naomi Klein. There, the author advocates for stopping (or greatly reducing) pollution, which she (rightly, I believe) considers to be illicit. As part of the condemnation of pollution, she argues that fossil-fuel corporations warrant punitive measures commensurate with their contribution to climate risk. This, I believe, is a mistake, as whereas polluting is illicit activity, the business of these companies is not.
Fossil-fuel companies principally extract raw hydrocarbons, refine them into marketable products such as gasoline, and sell these commodities to downstream users. The extraction and refining process generates measurable direct emissions1. Nevertheless, the overwhelming share of climate-warming pollution occurs when consumers combust the fuel2. The buyers are therefore the immediate emitters of carbon and, on Klein's “polluter-pays” account, the parties liable for sanction. By contrast, producers do not themselves release these downstream emissions3 and thus are not, strictly speaking, the agents committing the illicit act.
The same reasoning applies to manufacturers of internal-combustion vehicles. While the vehicles emit pollutants during operation, the manufacturing and sale of the automobile itself constitute licit commercial activities; it is the driver who activates the engine and releases exhaust gases.
If policymakers extend liability to fossil-fuel producers merely because they facilitate pollution, they must confront a regress of complicity. The engineering firm supplying specialised drilling rigs, the steelmaker producing the rig's structural components, and even financial institutions providing capital could be deemed accessories, thereby diluting accountability4.
Rigorous, single-entry carbon accounting is essential for transparent climate governance. Yet current practice often double- or triple-counts the same tonne of CO₂ across multiple ledgers, allocating emissions to the producer, the transporter, and the consumer simultaneously.
Consider an avocado grown in California and consumed in the United Kingdom. Life-cycle assessments allocate aviation and shipping emissions to several actors: the farmer, the logistics provider, the retailer, and the purchaser. Assigning identical molecules of CO₂ to four distinct agents violates elementary bookkeeping principles and inflates aggregate inventories.
The correct procedure is straightforward: each tonne of CO₂ should appear once, in the ledger of the physical emitter. I emit nothing when simply purchasing the avocado; the trans-Atlantic carrier does. If pollution is illicit, moral culpability attaches to the emitter alone; entities that enable but do not themselves emit are not, in this narrow sense, acting unjustly.
Notes
1 This is called Scope 1 in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
2 Called Scope 3.
3 Beyond Scope 1.
4 C. Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (Cambridge University Press, 2000).