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.

Want not, waste not

It's not my area of expertise, but waste seems to be one of the big issues relating to Bristol's alleged greenness, so a few thoughts. We are producing unprecedented levels of material waste, much of it packaging of sometimes dubious utility. The costs of disposing of this waste is rising as attitudes towards what is environmentally acceptable change. It all reflects our growing levels of disposable (aptly named) wealth, so the wealthier dispose of a lot more than the less wealthy, yet what we each pay towards the cost through Council Tax only varies slightly with our wealth and bears little relationship to the amount of waste produced on an individual basis.

The old Friends of the Earth mantra was reduce, reuse, recycle (in that order!). We seem to have completely ignored the first two and focused instead on the last, where the benefits are often marginal. It is so typical of government to ignore the difficult fundamentals and focus on peripheral issues where token gestures can be made. We are endlessly told how much more of our waste is being recycled but rarely told how much more waste we are producing overall, and certainly not how relatively little the amount of non-recycled waste has reduced.

So let's consider a fundamentally different approach, one based on the polluter pays principle. The person generating the waste should pay for its disposal according to the amount and type of waste produced. We all then have a financial incentive to minimise our waste and to reuse and recycle. OK in principle but by what practical means can it be applied? Attempting to charge people at the point of waste collection is fraught with problems and the unscrupulous can easily evade such charges by dumping their waste elsewhere (e.g. in someone else's bin).

But there is another way of charging for waste, at the point of purchase. Yes, all waste is originally purchased with a cash transaction so how simple to add to the price a sum to reflect the likely cost of disposal, not only of any packaging but of the item itself. In the modern world few items purchased are not thrown away within a decade or two, even items of furniture which would once have been handed down through generations are now regarded as disposable.

The beauty of such an approach is that it could deal with the ultimate safe disposal of hazardous waste. Products that contain environmentally harmful materials could attract a larger initial disposal charge at the point of purchase to provide for a suitably large "deposit" to be refunded when the hazardous waste is finally disposed of in an approved manner. Refundable deposits could also boost reuse and recycling rates, as in the old days of deposits on soft drinks bottles. Well, that's my tuppence worth (or twenty pence worth with Advanced Disposal Tax included).