Global Warming - The Solution (Part 1).

Firstly apologies for the long gap since my least blog. Unfortunately the real world occasionally intervenes and drags me away. There have been so many things to blog about too, what with Bristol City Council's capitulation to 'business-as-usual-only-more-so-and-stuff-the-environment' with their decision to pursue the football World Cup bid. That I will hopefully come back to anon, but with Copenhagen fast approaching it seems timely to launch my own modestly titled 'Solution to Global Warming'.

Obligatory smoking chimney pic

Let me say at the outset that I'm not the only person proposing this kind of approach and I'm not claiming it as some great leap in thinking. It is merely the simple application of free market principles (no, that's not an oxymoron) to the problem, an application of the 'polluter pays' principle and an example of an ecotax. It's simple in essence so easily understood by the consumer but would allow for the evolution of sophistication, entreprise and diversity in it's implementation (which I'll describe in Part 2). What's most important, in contrast to Cap-and-Trade, it would actually work.

The essence of the system is that the consumer of goods or services should pay for the environmental costs arising from the supply of those goods or services, including of course the cost of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. In the case of carbon dioxide the cost would be what it actually costs to neutralise or fully mitigate the environmental impact. So far so familiar. But then the final element is where it gets interesting. The environmental costs paid by the consumer must be used to pay for (and will be determined by) the environmental neutralisation or mitigation so that the impact really is neutralised/mitigated.

I'll describe the mechanism for doing this in some detail in Part 2 in due course but let's first consider how such a system would work in principle. Say Mr Consumer wants to travel to exotic climes. He looks at air fares, but finds that the incorporation of the environmental costs makes air travel much more expensive. He then has three choices.

1. Pay the higher air fare and fly (in which case his environmental impact will be neutralised/mitigated so no problem).
2. Travel by some other means and/or a shorter distance with a lower environmental impact and pay the lower environmental costs (in which case no problem)
3. Not travel (in which case no problem).

Freedom of choice but with responsibility. The same would apply to every single item of consumption because every good or service would incorporate its environmental costs. Even a cup of coffee or a hamburger would be more expensive precisely in proportion to its total environmental impact. So we would all inevitably adjust our spending to favour options with low environmental impacts and eschew options with high environmental impacts. We would find all energy costs much higher so we would need to travel less and invest in much better home insulation, meat and dairy products would be more expensive and vegetarian options less so and so on through the whole gamut of modern consumption.

Nobody would be denied the theoretical choice of flying, or driving an inefficient car, or whatever, but since such options would become so much more expensive only the relatively wealthy will have the practical means to choose (which is already true for most of the world's population anyway). The consequence would be a big shift in consumption patterns and the demise of many contemporary business models, notably those predicated on cheap air travel like, er, the World Cup (good choice Bristol City Council). Businesses would have to adapt and quickly to survive and prosper.

So problem solved? All the world's nations have to do in Copenhagen is agree to adopt such a system in good time and we can all forget about the worst of the Global Warming scenarios (unless it's already too late, in which case we can worry about our future survival instead on how to avoid Climate Change)? But of course they won't for the very simple reason that it would actually work. That is the last thing that powerful business interests want. Better for them to carry on with failing policies like Cap-and-Trade than adopt a policy that will actually work.

Carbon Bullshitters

This one's already been covered by other bloggers but it's a classic so here goes. It comes from an Evening Post story posted last Friday which reported that an Easyjet passenger flying from Bristol to Inverness had inadvertently carried some shotgun cartridges onto the plane in his coat pocket and that this had not been picked up by the security screening at Bristol Airport, although they managed to detect and confiscate his toothpaste and aftershave.



But the really interesting bit of the story, apparently unnoticed by the Post reporter or editor, is that the passenger was one of a group of four from the 'green consultancy' Carbon Managers, of Beckington near Bath, who were on a business trip to plant trees in the Highlands of Scotland. I need hardly spell out the contradictions in this. According to the Carbon Neutral flight calculator the four of them together will have generated no less than 1,200 kilograms of Carbon Dioxide by flying the 750 kms between Bristol and Inverness, plus of course that generated by driving at either end, hotel accommodation, etc.


It would of course have been much less damaging if they'd travelled by train, even taking account of the longer distance by rail (900 kms instead of 750 kms). According to CO2 balance their CO2 emissions if travelling by train would have been around 440 kgs, although if the four had shared a small car this would have brought the figure down to 330 kgs of CO2. But even these levels of CO2 emissions are nothing to be complacent about since they're still more than the emissions of one person making the return flight.

The strangest thing about the story is that it didn't appear to occur to these so-called 'green consultants' that publicising their flight to Inverness to plant trees might not make terribly good publicity. I guess they are so out of touch with the green debate that they thought it was the most natural thing in the world to do.