In the fight against global warming, Europe looks to be leading the pack. They’re marshaling individual consumers in an effort to cut down on carbon emissions, and doing so in a manner that may cause real change.
The newest plan takes a novel approach to convince individuals to control their personal carbon footprint. While other efforts have tried — and often failed — to appeal to the morality of “conscious” consumers, this plan promises to change behaviors through the classic economic theory of incentives and penalties.
The idea is to give people pollution credits. If consumers use less than their allotted pollution credits, they are encouraged to sell them for cash; use more and they’ll be penalized by having to buy extra credits. It sets up a tangible reason to curb energy use, and it might actually work.
England’s Royal Society of Arts is exploring the idea. They’ve created an organization called Carbon Limited and undertaken a three-year study to examine the feasibility of what they call “personal carbon trading.” Prominent universities and research centers, like Oxford and the Tyndall Centre among others, are also examining the idea. It’s based on writer and thinker David Fleming’s 1996 idea of personal energy quotas and it’s even got politicians jumping on board, proposing policies and measures in the highest forms of government.
It’s essentially a personal cap-and-trade system much like the corporate system currently being used in the European Union. Take the annual pollution released by a country, divide it by the population, and then assign that number of carbon credits to each person. It would work much like a diet or a budget does; individuals or households would be assigned a total amount of carbon units — dollars to spend or calories to consume, if you will — that they could use each year.
British environmental advocate Julia Hailes recently used just such an analogy in a conversation with green-guru Joel Makower:
If you start having carbon quotas for people, one of the real benefits of that is people are going to start evaluating the value of what they’re buying versus the carbon credits they’re expending, in the same way that somebody on a diet is asking, ‘Is that chocolate cake good enough for me to break my diet?’ Or someone on a budget asks, ‘Do I really want to spend my money on that?
Most likely the credits will go for gasoline and electricity, and consumers will have a credit card that will automatically deduct the credits that correspond to a tank of gas each time they fill-up.
If consumers use more than their allotment, they’d have to buy more credits, and could do so from people using less than their fair share who, in turn, could also sell their excess credits back to a central bank for actual dollars and cents.
The system would assign a concrete value to the use of fossil fuels. If people can save themselves, say, $500 a year, by cutting back on energy consumption and selling their excess credits, I bet they would. Or at least they’d try.
And since each citizen would be assigned the same number of annual credits, regardless of prior energy use or financial standing, everybody would be united in pursuit of the same goal. According to a newspaper article last year in the Guardian newspaper, households in the United Kingdom account for roughly 40% of carbon emissions.
By empowering households, the plan works at the most basic level. With many other programs that have been proposed, like carbon offset programs, pollution mitigation is far, far from the consumer. The practicality of giving an extra $5 a month to preserve some trees in a far away land is lost. But with the personal carbon trading system now proposed in the UK, you’d get tangible rewards — real money in your pocket — for cutting back.
The proposed program is not without potential conflicts. Consumers are sure to cry foul over concerns of “Big Brother” watching over them, and problems will undoubtedly arise in the administration of the complex logistics or in issuing government-sponsored credit cards to each citizen. Even more worrisome is the fact that it is often impossible to predict the ways in which humans will respond to such an incentive-based system, inevitably leading to unintended consequences. And of course, the potential for people to work around the system is large.
But it would be a government program, with government oversight, much like water or highway systems, and all citizens would be required to participate. And it could be fun, too. We could compare balances, track our use or compare it our friends’ energy use, or micromanage it like it was a daily budget. If done right, it could even become a point of national pride.
To be fair, the program is still several years, and many feasibility studies, away from becoming a reality. And other competing models are sure to arise. But for my money, er, carbon credits, the RSA model of personal carbon trading is the best of the lot.
Dakin Campbell is a contributing writer at ScribeMedia.org. He can be reached at cleantech [dot] energy [at] gmail [dot] com.
