Imagine carbon allowances as a playground commodity, like the marbles and baseball cards of earlier generations.
That’s a subset of an idea from Ian Gough, a researcher at the London School of Economics. Citing the failure of international climate change policy to achieve results, he proposed a different approach in a recent article, arguing that the distribution and trade of personal carbon allowances — along with shorter working hours and higher taxes — should be embraced to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly and equitably.
His proposal arises from the observation that, despite setting some of the world’s most ambitious goals, Britain’s current policy framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions falls short of legally
binding targets and will disproportionately affect the poor.
Britain has pledged to reduce its emissions to an amount that is 34 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The country’s absolute emissions
have declined almost steadily since 1990, according to national measures.
But Dr. Gough emphasizes the fuzziness of such figures, which account only for greenhouse gases emitted within the country. The calculation is far higher – 50 percent higher for 2006 – when emissions generated elsewhere to enable British consumption are factored in. In other words, the nation is conveniently outsourcing many of its emissions.
He also reports that standard climate-change mitigation tools – efficiency measures, renewable energy standards and carbon markets – are likely to drive up costs for those with the fewest resources. “Any increase in the price of carbon will bear most heavily on low-income” households, Dr. Gough writes, reflecting a “contradiction between environmental sustainability and social justice goals.”
He recommends personal carbon allowances as a first step toward addressing the problem. As unusual as the idea sounds, the British government considered the policy quite seriously in 2006. David Milliband, then environment secretary, led the initiative, announcing the need for “cumulative consistent radicalism” in the face of climate change. Two years later, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs scrapped the plan as “an idea ahead of its time.”
Dr. Gough suggests that the intervening years may well have brought about an economy-wide recognition that “carbon rights” should be allocated equally among all British citizens.
A reduction in working hours, also an unorthodox environmental policy, has been linked to improvements in environmental health. A survey of industrialized countries by Juliet Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College, found that between 1970 and 2007, those with fewer working hours per year had significantly lower carbon footprints. Time-stressed families indulge in more carbon-intensive activities, like eating out, she wrote.
Working hours “is one of the most powerful levers for transformational change in a system, and also one of the most underappreciated,” Dr. Schor said at a recent conference on the issue of work hours.
Dr. Gough said he hoped that his paper would serve as a “rallying call” acquainting people with the notion that emission cuts should neither be outsourced to other countries nor shouldered by the poorest households.