Coming soon - Personal Emissions Quotas
There’s an article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald headlined “Sell me your carbon dioxide” outlining a British plan to impose personal CO2 emissions caps.
From the article:
British scientists and researchers are working on a scheme that would issue all citizens with a carbon allowance and an electronic energy ration card, and enable them to trade their own carbon emissions.
The personal carbon allowances scheme has been debated in Parliament and presented to Treasury officials.
The Environment Minister, Elliot Morley said that “personal carbon allowances are a very attractive intellectual idea”. He thinks the plan would be expensive and might need 10 years’ work.
It is a “virtually guaranteed” way of helping Britain to meet its stated goal of a 60 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to the Blair Government’s independent environmental adviser, the Sustainable Development Commission.
The proposal - developed by the environmentalists Mayer Hillman and Tina Fawcett in their 2004 book How We Can Save the Planet - does not rely on technological breakthroughs, new carbon taxes or unlikely changes in human behaviour. Instead, it first identifies how much carbon dioxide the nation can emit per year to meet its targets, then allocates a carbon share to each person. Everyone would then be responsible for meeting the national goal. A separate, but probably similar, scheme would be needed for business and government emissions.
Fawcett, a researcher at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and the Government-funded United Kingdom Energy Research Centre, explains how the scheme would control carbon emissions from household energy use and personal travel - half the British total.
All citizens would be issued with an electronic card that measured their free annual carbon allowance. Every time they bought petrol, paid a gas or electricity bill or boarded a plane, they would swipe the card and lose some of their allowance, or they would buy some credits. The allowance - perhaps distributed monthly so people would not use it all at once - would be the same for each adult, from an East Ender to the Queen. Fawcett says the core principle is that when it comes to emitting carbon dioxide, everyone has the same rights and responsibilities.
Critics say the scheme would create an “Orwellian nightmare” of bureaucracy and micro-regulation. Fawcett doesn’t agree. She points out that during World War II the government introduced a food rationing system for tens of thousands of retailers within months. With computers and a limited number of petrol, transport and home energy suppliers, such a system could be more painlessly introduced today.
So what do we think? - Well it’s a great idea in theory but 10 years is a very long time to wait for the government to do something. Carbon Planet retails carbon credits now, allowing individuals to voluntarily offset their own CO2 emissions on a month by month subscription basis. Waiting for the government to step in and save us all is a sure-fire way to damn us all.
- DS
