Let's not bother with personal carbon trading
Posted by Christie Malry on July 20, 2010 at 11:43 am
Tim Worstall is unhappy with Tim Yeo:
Facepalm. He’s just reintroduced ID cards through the back door, hasn’t he? Can you prove who you are before you buy petrol sir?
The reason is because Yeo thinks personal carbon cards are a good idea. And of course they're not.
The broad idea is that everyone is given a personal carbon allowance and then they use it up whenever they do anything - buy food, petrol, gas & leccy, train tickets, etc. People can sell excess allowance to other people and must buy allowance if they want to exceed it for any reason.
The point is, we already have a method for rationing carbon use. It's called our currency. No money? Can't use up carbon. Got money? Well, I guess you can use up carbon, except you're probably limited by your own ability to burn through the stuff. We can't all be deep frying diamonds in bitumen.
Only then politicians come along and mess things up. They say that it's a terrible shame that poor people can't eat or heat their houses, or buy a winter coat for their children. And they take money forcibly from those that have it and give it to those who don't. (Who promptly spend it on food, heating, winter coats, cigarettes, satellite tv, White Lightning, bingo or drugs).
The personal carbon market is also prone to political meddling. Can we imagine politicians looking the other way while tens of thousands of people who had blown their annual carbon allowance on flights were now shivering in November because the winter was a little bit colder than they had anticipated? No, they will announce a special carbon redistribution levy and nick carbon credits from people who have them and give them to those that haven't. It will be yet another appalling transfer from the responsible to the feckless.
So let's just not bother. Let's accept that they're a stupid idea that won't work because politicians can't keep their hands out of other people's pockets.
(Oh, and does anyone think politicians themselves will be covered by a personal carbon allowance?)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Carbon, Christie Malry. Christie Malry said: New blog post: Let's not bother with personal carbon trading http://bit.ly/aRbqhy [...]
This blog is a good larf. It's like watching re-runs of Harry Enfield. Your typecast benefits recipient is Wayne and Waynetta Slob, the carbon privileged money burner is LoadsaMoney and you sir are Tory Boy. I love stereotypes, it reduces opinion to a comic strip.
However, I do agree that money is directly related to emission. The polluted earth is rather like a beer-belly, one can point at it, smile and say ''well its all paid for''.
Maybe I was over-colourful, but even the most ardent supporter of the welfare state would have to admit that benefit recipients don't always spend their benefits on the sorts of things that are used to justify the welfare state in the first place. That's the point I perhaps failed to make clearly enough.
That also does in personal carbon trading. if we want to restrict people's carbon intake, then just do it. But we know that politicians won't be able to stop interfering when the hard luck cases, however caused, start bleating.