HEAT, How to Stop the Planet from Burning There are obvious problems, most prominently that of corruption and misallocation, but this definitely is by far the fairest plan for carbon reduction that I have seen...DS HEAT How to Stop the Planet From Burning Excerpt From Heat, Chapter 3, A Ration of Freedom, pp 43-46. By George Monbiot If we attempted to suppress climate change entirely by means of energy taxes, two things would happen. The poor would be hit much harder than the rich, as the costs took up a higher proportion of their income. And the rich would be able to carry on burning as much fuel as they could afford. In theory, you could design a tax and rebate system which ensured that money was transferred from the rich to the poor and which was constantly adjusted to maintain a steady cap on the amount of carbon the country produced. But while it would be no harder to implement than a rationing system, it would, because of the complex system of fees and rebates, be more difficult to explain. Complex ideas seldom do well in politics... An alternative approach is to draft laws governing every move we make.... We could have regulations governing when we could turn the lights on or how far we were allowed to travel. I don't believe that many people would see that as an attractive option either. As the Allied powers' economic planners found in the Second World War, there is a less coercive system, whose fairness is immediately apparent. It is rationing. Rationing begins with a decision about the amount of carbon the world can emit every year. If, for example, it is correct to say that our 7 billion tonnes of current carbon emissions must be reduced to 2.7 by 2030, and if we want to make the biggest cuts sooner rather than later, we might decide that in 2012, the world should be producing no more than 5.5 billion tonnes. We divide that figure by the number of people we will expect to find on earth in 2012, and discover how much carbon everyone would be entitled to emit: it would be around 0.8 tonnes.... This means that some countries, generally the poorest ones, would be allowed to raise their emissions: even in 2030, Ethiopia, if its population remained stable, could emit five and a half times as much carbon as it does today. But the overall effect would be an annual contraction of global carbon emissions.... Once a country has its allocation, it can then decide how its emissions should be parcelled out. IN theory, you could simply hand everyone his or her global share.... But this...would create an incredibly complex system. Everything you bought would need both a cash price and a carbon price. If, for example, you stopped...to buy a punnet of strawberries, you would need to pay, say #1 for it, plus 0.01588 per cent of your carbon entitlement.... A much simpler system was devised by Mayer Hillman and refined by ... David Fleming. Both companies and people would need to use their carbon accounts when buying just two commodities: fuel and electricity. If, for example, the fuel and electricity that people consumed directly added up to 40 per cent of a country's carbon emissions, then the citizens of that country would be given 40% of its carbon budget. Everyone would get the same amount and no one would have to pay. We would need to use our carbon allowance only when paying our electricity or gas bills or filling up our cars. (Fleming's scheme could be extended a little to cover aeroplane and train journeys as well).... The remaining 60 percent of the country's carbon budget would belong to the government. It keeps some for itself and auctions the rest either directly to companies wanting to buy fuel or electricity, or to carbon brokers who would then sell the entitlements to other corporations or to people who cannot stay within their budgets. The price, like that of any other commodity, would depend on the competition for the resource, which in turn would depend on its scarcity. So by the time you stop to by the punnet of strawberries, the carbon required to produce it would already have been incorporated into its price, and you need to pay only in Pounds. The more carbon-intensive a product is, the more expensive it will be. But creating a carbon rationing system, you are in effect creating a new currency. The entitlement to pollute will be accounted, saved, spent and exchanged much as money is today. As far as i can discover, no one has yet given it a name, except the rather dull 'carbon units.' So for want of a better term, i will call the new currency 'icecaps,' in the hope that the name will remind people what the system is for: it enables us to cap our carbon emissions to keep the planet cool. The icecaps you are given can be traded with other people. If you reach the end of the year and find you haven't used all your allocation, you can sell the remainder to someone else. Or if you've used too much, you can buy the extra icecaps you need. You can buy or sell the unused rations in your local post office or bank... Of course, if everyone is trying to do the same thing, the price becomes very high indeed. What this means is that the lady in the Rolls-Royce car might still be driving around, but only after she has transferred a good deal of money whor are poorer or more abstemious than she is. Economic justice is built into the system.... Monbiot continues, at length, to explain the pros and cons of the proposal in Heat: How to stop the planet from burning. ###