Carbon Ration Cards

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Colin Phillips

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I realise Mr. Milliband floated this idea back in the summer but no-one seems to have picked up on it.

Does the panel think they would work?

This is taken from the Fair Investment Company site :

Carbon credit card to ration energy use
15/12/2006
Environment secretary David Miliband has a vision for Britain – a credit card consumers use when paying for products that leave a 'carbon footprint' such as petrol, energy bills or air tickets.

The 'carbon credit card', which would give every Briton a rationed carbon allowance, could be operational within five years, Miliband told the Guardian this week.

"It is a way of pricing carbon emissions into individual behaviour and it would recognise carbon thrift, as well as economic thrift," Mr Miliband said.

He stressed that the card is in line with developing spending habits: "Twenty years ago, if I had said eight million people would have a Tesco loyalty card, no one would have believed me."

As he presented a new study from Defra's Centre for Sustainable Energy, Mr Miliband said: "Bold thinking is required because the world is a dangerous place."

The card would regularly remind consumers of their impact on the environment, keeping environmental concerns at the forefront of public consciousness.

It emerged today that 2006 was the warmest year on record in the UK since 1659 – a statistic many analysts link to global warming.
 
its an intertesting idea & something I do take into account when I buy food, I've never got my head around why its cheaper to import things like apples from the other side of the world when the uk can easily produce them :huh: when given the choice I will pick up local apples over Granny smiths from SA any day, that goes for meat aswell I never buy meat that is not produced in the UK but that does come down to an animal welfare interest not just "Air miles"
 
I feel guilty enough at the moment about every flght I take, so I suppose having to deal with it through the card system would help assuage my conscience.
 
Without doubting the validity of the argument, the cynical part of me can't help but think that this will be used by airline and governments etc to push up prices(inordinately)/taxes etc. Blah blah blah.
 
A friend of mine is well into this carbon footprint thing - although this will annoy many I'm sure, the way I see is is that if I don't get on this flight back to the UK tonight it doesn't mean the flight is going to be cancelled - it's going to fly nonetheless. Therefore no, I don't feel guilty about flying - it's a necessity for me.
 
If its needed for your work & there is no viable alternative than there is no reason why you should feel guilty, however there are people who would use it as a poor excuse, take my mum for example, she always buys battery farm eggs even though there are free range eggs next to them at the supermarket, her reasoning behind this is that they are cheaper & it wouldn't stop the battery farming if she stopped buying them :huh: quality of life & people power mean nothing to her :angry:
 
I think that this would unfairly penalise energy consumers in the UK. Transnational corporations will continue to locate in areas of the world with the least environmental regulation so that they can make a profit.
Also, why should the experience of travel be reserved for the rich?

While I totally agree with the need for consumer responsibility surely international regulation that incorporates environmental externalities into the cost of a product is whats needed? Especially when you see adverts for useless plastic tat like plug-in air fresheners etc every five minutes on tv, if the environmental costs of making and running them was added on consumers might think again.
 
I wonder how a system of rationing would work, presumably it would be rather like food rationing during the last war.

Let's suppose that every citizen would be given x carbon credits a year, which they could use, or trade.

Sounds great, but it would be potentially the greatest redistribution of wealth any country has ever seen.

I can't see the rich and powerful putting up with it for one moment.

Brian?
 
It's a cop out, as most of these populist bits of tosh are. No mention of rationing white goods, such as energy-gobblers like refrigerators, freezers, dishwashers, or televisions, computers and the five million kitchen gadgets which people are increasingly urged to become reliant upon. I read a stat today which says that the 'average' British household contains 4.7 television sets (too bad if you drew the .7 one), which strikes me as consumerism gone bonkers. It's all very well looking at the most screamingly obvious carbon emitters, but what about the billions of energy-hungry gizmos which the great British public 'must' have?
 
With no children and no prospects of a partner I could give a damn about my carbon footprint, it is the latest scaremongering tactic IMO. It was bird flu and SARS the last 2 winters, it is climate change and carbon footprint now. Don't honestly care as i think it is all a bunch of hooey
 
I give a shit for those members of the family who are alive. To forego certain things for future generations to thrive is not for me.

I don't believe in global warming though, and I have read many articles and books on the subject.
 
Originally posted by PDJ@Dec 22 2006, 09:06 PM
I don't believe in global warming though
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You and the 43rd President of the United States.

So why are the polar ice-caps melting at such a rate of knots?

gwtippingpoint0326.jpg

The photograph taken in 1928, above, shows how the Upsala Glacier, part of the South American Andes in Argentina, used to look. The ice on the Upsala Glacier today, shown in 2004 below, is retreating at least 180 ft. per year
 
Originally posted by BrianH@Dec 22 2006, 09:03 PM
So, it's a well known fact that the Jones family don't give a shit for the human race
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I care about myself but why should I care what the world will be like in 100 years
 
What I want to know is, when there are so many scrubbers and cleaners attached to large industrial plants, when we've been running on unleaded for many years now, we are 'warming' the world, when centuries of burning coal, peat and firewood didn't? If you dig down a few feet, you come to a thick layer of black carbon from around the Victorian era of the Industrial Revolution, while all of Africa has burned firewood since Kingdom come, as did the American Indians, all of the European and Asian continents, and so on.

So now we have much cleaner fuels, we're warming the planet, but when everyone was burning sometimes two grates per house (and a lot more in the big ones), stoking up vast furnaces to drive the Western world's industries, chugging coal into the air from thousands of trains - the air was spotlessly clean? :brows: Carbon emissions in those days, let alone the methane from the MILLIONS of horses in work back then, must've been horrendous.

Maybe global warming has just taken a few years, as Nature usually does, to catch up with our forebears' over-exuberant use of carboniferous fuel?

(I've got to say I'm genuinely astounded by Los Dos Jones's attitudes! Didn't put you two down for such careless disregard, really.)
 
Over the last 70 years (since 1930), the temperature in Macgill, Guthrie, Death Valley, Boulder, Truman, An Arbor, Syracuse and Albany had dropped. It has increased in New York and Pasadena (source - USHCN) This is more than likely because there are more people there, not because of global warming.

Since 1880, NASA have recorded a change in temperature in the USA of under a third of a degree. The hottest year in that period? 1934. Is the planet really warming up that fast? I am not convinced.

The planet is going through one of its periodical warmings but these have happend before mankind was here and will happen after we have ceased to be.

NASA
 
(1) Who do you think pays NASA's wages if it's not the same guy who tore up the Kyoto agreement?

(2) I've searched your posting and can't actually find your response to what has happened in the Upsala Glacier. (Which is just one area typical of what is happening in polar regions.)
 
Originally posted by PDJ@Dec 22 2006, 09:32 PM
The planet is going through one of its periodical warmings but these have happend before mankind was here and will happen after we have ceased to be.
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I have to say I agree with that theory. Our planet has constantly changed, with or without humans being present on it and will continue to do so, such is the natural scheme of things.
 
Brian, glaciers advance and retreat with regularity. This is more than likely one of these periodic warmings. Explain how in the past 100 years temperatures have risen by so little despite the "fact" that we are now polluting the planet so fast it will be uninhabitable soon because of temperature rises.
 
Originally posted by PDJ@Dec 23 2006, 09:45 AM
Brian, glaciers advance and retreat with regularity. This is more than likely one of these periodic warmings. Explain how in the past 100 years temperatures have risen by so little despite the "fact" that we are now polluting the planet so fast it will be uninhabitable soon because of temperature rises.
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How many books and papers by men far more learned on the subject than I do you want me to point out to you?

Never mind the last hundred years, they are irrelevant when you think of the internal combustion engine, international travel and global industrialisation. Take a look at the last ten or fifteen years - and view with a jaundiced and sceptical eye those "global warming deniers" who are either sponsored by the oil industry or employed by the US government.
 
The last 10 or 15 years are still not the warmest years of the past 100 or so, although they do indicate an upward trend. As we all know, surveys will inevitably produce the results that the sponsors want and I am sure I could produce just as many debunking sources, not all of which are US Government or Big Oil sponsored.
 
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