CO2: This time it's personal

So you've filled your tank with petrol, wiped the bugs off your windscreen, and you're standing in the queue holding two pieces of plastic which will finalise the purchase. One card carries the logo of your bank; the other, a picture of a burning planet. The first will deduct money from your bank account; the second, credits from your carbon account. If you possess the second card, you are now living in DTQ world.

Domestic Tradable Quotas are in effect personal allowances to pollute. In Europe, about 12,000 big companies and institutions already have such allowances, regulated by the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). Pollution has become a commodity with a price determined by the market, which will ensure that emissions are cut in as cost-effective a manner as possible. DTQs would simply extend this concept to the public.

Richard Starkey's DTQ scheme would entail each citizen receiving - free of charge - an identical personal carbon allowance. If you use less, you can sell your extra allowance onto the open market, while if you want to splurge out on that once-in-a-lifetime flight to Benidorm, you can save it up or buy extra. The more people exceed their allowance, the more expensive it would become to buy extra; and pretty much all goods and services with a "carbon cost" would need some carbon expenditure. But how, exactly, would it reduce emissions? Every year, the national allowance would be reduced towards a long-term target level; that would in turn reduce the personal allowance, and over time, emissions would fall.

None of which means, of course, that carbon cards will be coming to a wallet near you any time soon. Perhaps the biggest obstacle is the length of the vision - it is easy for governments to set long-term targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it is not so easy for governments to establish long-term policy initiatives which will produce the year-on-year decrements needed to meet those targets.

Comments:

"Richard Starkey's DTQ scheme would entail each citizen receiving - free of charge - an identical personal carbon allowance."

Free of charge? Yeah, right. I don't know about the UK where this guy lives, or Singapore, but here in the U.S. the government would AUCTION the carbon allowances.

Posted by Doug on December 03, 2005 at 12:50 AM SGT #

Starkey's plan seems to ignore the usage of carbon by corporate entities.

Does that mean that anyone who forms a personal corporation can use all the carbon they want?

Maybe companies will provide some employees (the ones at the CxO level) with special benefits like free use of the company's carbon card.

Posted by Doug on December 03, 2005 at 12:57 AM SGT #

Is that so? Companies have an allowance as well. According to the news item they're already doing carbon trading on the ETS. But it wasn't so clear from the article how *their* initial allowance is given - by size, revenue, number of employees .. ?

Posted by lowem on December 03, 2005 at 06:58 AM SGT #