The UK should embrace a system of personal carbon trading instead of the current practice of cap-and-trade system for business and industry, according to the House of Commons' Environmental Audit Committee. The Committee admitted that initially such a system may be tricky to put in place, but was resolute that this type of scheme would reduce carbon emissions far more effectively than carbon taxes.
The committee suggests that taxes would affect the poorest most severely, whilst the most affluent would be able to afford to continue making non-environmentally friendly decisions. By creating a carbon market, where credits can be traded by those who do not require them, low-carbon choices would be financially remunerated. The personal impacts of CO2 'binges', such as plane travel, would also be made obvious to each individual, as credits would have to be budgeted or purchased to allow for such activities.
The UK is already part of the EU's Emission Trading Scheme, a scheme which is designed to tackle the carbon footprints of businesses and industry. The Climate Change Bill which is currently working its way through the parquet floors of Parliament requires significant nationwide cuts in emissions - around 60% by 2050. Without a personal trading system it is feared that businesses and industry alone would not be able to reach such ambitious figures.
The scheme would give each person an ID card, similar to a driving license or store reward card scheme, and each individual would start the year with an identical number of credits, although exceptions would be made for larger families, older individuals or people with disabilities. The scheme would require a rather thickset bureaucracy to monitor and administer the system.
The Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs has already examined the possibility of such a scheme and dismissed it due to the cost of this bureaucracy. DEFRA estimated that a system of personal carbon credits would cost between 700 million and 2 billion pounds to implement and a further 1 or 2 billion pounds per year that it operated. The defense budget for 2007/2008 is 32.9 billion, and that is expected to rise to 36.9 billion by 2010/2011, a rise that would cover implementing and running the scheme for one year.
There are some concerns that by combating climate change through a system of personal accountability people in rural areas would be unfairly disadvantaged, as urban citizens tend to have far lower carbon footprints than their rural friends, partly due to the discrepancy in access to public transport.
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This post was written by Matthew Gammie on June 7, 2008