Closing in on carbon rationing

Households emerge as new focus for trading

This time it’s personal. The idea, that is, of everyone having a personal carbon quota, with the right to buy and sell emission permits. It would mean people with low-carbon lifestyles could sell their unused allowance to those leading a more polluting life. In many cases, that would have a redistributive element: generally speaking, rich people produce more carbon.

There’s been a groundswell of interest in this for some years, and a small network of community Carbon Rationing Action Groups - CRAGs - has already begun assembling [see GF59, ‘Carbon rationing comes to town ’]. But even when environment secretary David Miliband declared his own enthusiasm last July it was still generally thought to be just blue-sky thinking. Since then, his department has been taking it very seriously indeed, and in December he publicly backed the idea of ‘personal carbon cards’ to implement it.

A recent report commissioned by Defra from the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) presents a five-year timescale for the introduction of personal trading, although it does not specify a start date, and warns that its theoretical simplicity and apparent attractiveness should not be mistaken for technical feasibility or for public and political acceptability.

Concurrently, the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) has launched a three-year research project, ‘CarbonLimited’, to “bring together expertise from the commercial, social and financial sectors to subject ideas about personal carbon trading to rigorous analysis”.

Part of the attraction of tradable carbon allowances is that they would not be vulnerable to the accusation levelled by opponents of green taxes - that they’re simply another revenue stream for the government. But, as the CSE report points out, “almost no one has asked the public in any meaningful way what they think about the idea”. The RSA’s CarbonLimited consultation, praised by Miliband, certainly seems to be a step in this direction.

The CarbonLimited website looks rather like a miniature stock exchange - which might deter those lacking business savvy. Miliband himself, keen to strike a user-friendly note, uses the analogy of the familiar supermarket club card, suggesting that a carbon credit scheme would be “the world’s largest loyalty card”. And the CSE’s report (published by Defra in mid-December) reassures us that we won’t need to whip out our cards at every turn - most people would only need them for around 60 carbon-related transactions a year. - Guy Shrubsole

A Rough Guide to Individual Carbon Trading can be downloaded from www.cse.org.uk/pdf/news1270.pdf

11 January 2007

Guy Shrubsole