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It's okay folks I've only gone and solved the biggest crisis the world has ever faced.
So the plan is this - Everyone gets an allotted amount of energy to use per year, and for everything anyone does the energy costs are calculated and debited from your energy account.
Want to run a 4.0l Audi SUv to take your kids to school - no problem, but you better be walking everywhere else.
Want to have the AC on in Summer (in Britain!!!) then fine, but you better have a decent stock of pullovers and cardi's for Winter.
Want to fly to Dubai for Holidays and Canada for Skiing? Okay but you won't be eating hot food for 10 years
Want to chow down on Steaks every night ? Okay but you're eating them in the dark
Etc etc.
Done and done, no need for thanks, I'll just take the Lake district in payment.
Sounds similar to Hitchhikers Guide.
For years, the fabulously beautiful planet of Bethselamin increased its booming tourist industry without any worries at all. Alas, as is often the case, this was an act of utter stupidity, as it led to a colossal cumulative erosion problem. Of course, what else could one expect with ten billion tourists per annum? Thus today the net balance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave; so every time you go to the lavatory there, it is vitally important to get a receipt.
An Energy ration card eh? sounds awfully like socialism much like ww2 rationing, even though it was beneficial to the least fortunate it impinged on the middle and upper class's "liberties" so had to go.
an energy budget with a ramp up in prices as consumption rises is an obvious solution. No one will vote for it tho.
Nice simple idea. Good luck with the implementation and all the data from all the various sources of measurement.
No one will vote for it tho.
This is an important consideration if you live in a democracy.
Also, wealthy people will buy energy credits from poor people. If you try and prohibit that, people will find ways to get around it. It will be impossible to enforce. It's better to just build renewable energy generation and sell it at commercial rates.
I wonder if more people would vote for it if you could sell your excess to others? Set a minimum price and allow those who use less to be paid by those who use more. Money from the rich directly to the poor?
Surely it should be based on how much good you do to the environment/society? Therefore as I work in renewables so I should get a bigger energy budget than my neighbour who works in fast fashion.
Also, wealthy people will buy energy credits from poor people. If you try and prohibit that, people will find ways to get around it. It will be impossible to enforce. It’s better to just build renewable energy generation and sell it at commercial rates.
Doesn't solve the Isuzu pickup, 4.2 billion flights and food production issue though.
Unless you replace energy in the scheme with carbon credits. The trouble with that is most people still haven't grasped the scale of the problem. At current levels we on average emit a sustainable amount of CO2 per year by doing any 1 of the following.
Heating your home
Driving a car
Taking a long haul holiday
Consumption of everything non/food/fuel related (i.e. bikes, clothes, furniture, electronics, etc)
Eating meat
Telling people to pick 1 of 5 doesn't go down well.
Surely it should be based on how much good you do to the environment/society? Therefore as I work in renewables so I should get a bigger energy budget than my neighbour who works in fast fashion.
The trouble with this is you wear clothes and he has a green energy tariff so you end up double accounting.
Who's credits do your holidays come out of, yours or the pilot?
I wonder if more people would vote for it if you could sell your excess to others? Set a minimum price and allow those who use less to be paid by those who use more. Money from the rich directly to the poor?
The trouble is unless we solve the actual problem rather than buy our way out of it. 1 person would need to buy up so many other lifetimes of credits it would be impossible.
Would you ethically want to take a holiday, if it meant some pensioner elsewhere had to sell you their whole winter heating to carbon-credit it?
that brasilian PSG player who just flew to SaudiArabia on a private 747 is in for a bleak year..
Doesn’t solve the Isuzu pickup, 4.2 billion flights and food production issue though.
What definitely won't solve any problem is a policy that nobody will vote for and which will be impossible to enforce. What will help a lot is building non-carbon generation. Isuzu can build electrically powered pickups, aircraft can be powered by biofuels, etc. People will vote for those things, that makes them preferable to something that people won't vote for.
Love this thread.
Early polls indicate not much uptake from Brexit voters, Neoliberals and anyone rubbing their hands together whilst watching interest rates rise...
Can I buy an early adopter ticket to your Lake District please?
Good luck with the implementation and all the data from all the various sources of measurement.
Hey don't ask me I'm just the ideas guy.
The biggest problem I forsee is you'd suddenly discover we've priced the lowest paid out of living anywhere near where they work, either because the housing in city centres is too expensive or the manufacturing space is a tenth of the price 14 miles up a motorway.
So no manufacturing, no food sales, no transport of goods etc.
Pffft my giant desert algae farms scheme beats your crappy carbon tax plan any day
I liked the 'shoot more pheasants' approach from the other thread
I’d agree if it was carbon not energy. It would need to decrease every year. It would be an real incentive to offer lower carbon products
Almost the same answer as mine - give everyone a carbon budget.
Buy a T shirt from a smokey Indian factory? Well that bit of CO2 comes from your budget, as does the fraction of CO2 generated through shipping.
Drive a big, thirsty car ? Only a few miles won't cost you much CO2
Buy a new car? Well that's a big chunk of CO2 you've got to find.
Travelling on a plane? The CO2 will come from your budget.
People who don't use their full allowance will be allowed to sell it to those that "need" more.
If that's not acceptable, at least make all CO2 emissions accountable to the end user (along the lines above) - that would really change the balance of how carbon intensive certain countries are.
I’d agree if it was carbon not energy.
What he said. By all means use all the energy you want from your solar panels on your roof if you have them... it is in no way equivalent to burning fossil fuels in your pickup.
Now the real problem... for most of our energy use "we" don't get to choose how it is generated. Fix that.
the real answer is of course we need all possible measures and then more or billions willdie
thols2 - biofuels for aeroplanes - really? Rather than food for hungry people?
personal energy budgets could be wortkable. Just fuels and personal energy consumption. It would be possible to use some form of personal energy budgets to do this. say 1/2 average UK usage at lowish prices, up to twice average at higher prices, over that at really high prices. set the thresholds so that the average user pays around the same. Basic principle - make the pollutter pay.
Energy is still much too cheap in general which is why we see so much wasted
Basic principle – make the polluter pay.
Be careful with that one, as it is ambiguous. Is the 'polluter' the the one who actually releases the CO2, or the one whose activity requires the end result?
The slogan has mostly been used in the first sense - "Chinese manufacturing generates XXX CO2 - they should pay"
I think we need to switch this 180 degrees so that it is the end user who is responsible:
"You bought a thing from a Chinese factory emitting XXX CO2" so YOU are causing that pollution. If "you" are living in the UK, than that CO2 should count against the UK, rather than China.
It makes a mockery of the whole 'net zero' thing if I am able to reduce the UK's carbon emissions by buying stuff manufactured overseas, rather than in a UK factory.
I like it in principle. It will of course have numerous holes poked in it...
You could argue we almost have it now as every kWh we consume is billed already, but that is of course skewed toward those with the means to pay:
An Energy ration card eh? sounds awfully like socialism much like ww2 rationing, even though it was beneficial to the least fortunate it impinged on the middle and upper class’s “liberties” so had to go.
Indeed the problem isn't so much the concept as the society you try to apply it to.
Politicians shit the bed when there's the vaguest perception of a public push back against ULEZ, I think most of them would sooner hold a gun to their own temple, than attempt to promote an energy rationing policy...
Its doesn't matter if you are looking worldwide. Tax 'em at manufacture or consumption - the net effect is that more polluting things become more expensive, less polluting cheaper. so ayreshire spuds in Scotland - eat all you want. out of season veg from peru - very expensive
thols2 – biofuels for aeroplanes – really? Rather than food for hungry people?
Point is that aircraft aren't strictly limited to fossil fuels. Biofuels is one way to power them. Another is to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and use renewable electricity to produce methane from the CO2.
Get British Airways involved. They can eliminate the carbon footprint of a UK - San Francisco return flight for £50.
So I should be able to drive the car I want, have gas CH, and buy loads of Chinese crap for a couple of hundred quid or so.
Is the ‘polluter’ the the one who actually releases the CO2, or the one whose activity requires the end result?
Any policy of making the user pay will ultimately mean the end user of the goods will pay more. As energy is a major component of pretty much everything we consume, a limit on energy use will mean extreme inflation. You're basically going to constrain the supply of things that people want to buy so prices will rise until supply and demand are balanced.
Ironically, the out of season veg, flown in from Peru, Africa, or wherever contributes less to UK CO2 emissions than some bloke with a tractor in Scotland - that's the way that the current system is accounting for things, and the framework within which UK targets are set.
Its doesn’t matter if you are looking worldwide. Tax ’em at manufacture or consumption
The goal has to be worldwide control and eventual reduction, however there's no 'worldwide' government or law making body. We're currently in the 'control at manufacture' (whether by taxes or CO2 budgets), but each country makes up its own rules.
...and it's not really working.
IMHO, we won't get anywhere without a radical change aimed at highlighting and then reducing the root causes of CO2 emissions. This *has* to include tracking CO2 emissions back to the actions of individuals (even if the results are aggregated by country, rather than each individual).
We need to move people towards using / buying less "stuff", but this doesn't fit with consumer society / those that get rich off the back of it.
Anyway... as you were 🙂
Any policy of making the user pay will ultimately mean the end user of the goods will pay more. As energy is a major component of pretty much everything we consume, a limit on energy use will mean extreme inflation. You’re basically going to constrain the supply of things that people want to buy so prices will rise until supply and demand are balanced.
If you chose the thresholds wisely then some stuff becomes cheaper
But yes - the only real solution is to consume less partticularly of energy intensive stuff
We need to move people towards using / buying less “stuff”
That's easy to achieve, you just to create very high inflation. People will be forced to buy less because everything is more expensive. Only problem is that voters in democracies tend to vote out governments when inflation is high.
If you chose the thresholds wisely then some stuff becomes cheaper
Nothing would become cheaper if you have a policy of making energy consumption more expensive.
Any policy of making the user pay will ultimately mean the end user of the goods will pay more. As energy is a major component of pretty much everything we consume, a limit on energy use will mean extreme inflation. You’re basically going to constrain the supply of things that people want to buy so prices will rise until supply and demand are balanced.
Yes, if the transaction is monetary, but if it were conducted in 'CO2 allowances' there is freedom to set the 'supply' side at an appropriate level. (It's how the EUETS was introduced).
End users are paying more anyway because of the various 'at source' environmental levies / charges that already exist.
The difference would be that the people who want to buy things would accrue the CO2 that resulted (either individually or aggregated by country) allowing them to make an informed choice about whether and where to buy.
It would also remove the ridiculous situation that we currently have where it matters where the CO2 is generated: Efficient production in the UK, in a controlled facility, paying their environmental dues is *worse* for UK CO2 statistics than inefficient production abroad, combined with transport emissions. We need to remove such perverse incentives.
From the ONS:
Consumer expenditure is still the largest single contributor to UK emissions, with 27% of all UK GHG emissions in 2021.
Nothing would become cheaper if you have a policy of making energy consumption more expensive.
correct - but you forget that the tax take on energy means less tax is needed elsewhere so you could reduce income tax or VAT or or property taxes so less energy dense stuff becomes cheaper
It al lhas to be multifactorial and multipronged
Proper rationing of CO2 would give everybody their share. If it was just enough then trading wouldn’t be an option.
Trading will always be a problem. There will always be desperately poor people who will trade anything for drugs or alcohol. The lower you make the allowance, the greater the suffering for poor people.
Point is that aircraft aren’t strictly limited to fossil fuels. Biofuels is one way to power them. Another is to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and use renewable electricity to produce methane from the CO2.
The problem wit this sort of thinking is you may as well just say aliens will save us, because it's about as likely TBH.
Turning atmospheric CO2 into liquid fuels is monumentally expensive, and renewables doesn't make it free. You still need to build the plant (and they're enormous), and then power it at an efficiency of about 20%.
As I said in my post, a single long-haul flight PER PERSON uses about as much fuel as a small house needs for heating in a year*. So to keep planes in the air on CO2-to-liquids (catchy industry name for this stuff) would require about 5-6x more renewables capacity than we will already need to convert housing stock to electric heating.
*specifics of house, plane, flight, car size, mileage, fashion choices, etc are all variables, but they're all within an order of magnitude of each other.
Any policy of making the user pay will ultimately mean the end user of the goods will pay more.
Yes... And?
As energy is a major component of pretty much everything we consume, a limit on energy use will mean extreme inflation. You’re basically going to constrain the supply of things that people want to buy so prices will rise until supply and demand are balanced.
Isn't that the point? That rationing ultimately means we consume less, and think more about the things we do consume? Even, dare I say it, incentivise companies to be more efficient in how they use energy so they can 'win' at capitalism by undercutting the competition?
Ultimately I don't think energy rationing is compatible with capitalism, or perhaps to cut it another way; capitalism and survival of the human race are incompatible, so something probably has to give. Which one would you choose?
May be it's time to dispense with capitalism to save the planet. The problem seems to be that if I buy food in a supermarket. I have to support the farmer, the company infastructure and the share holders the bit in the middle is where the money goes.
Ultimately I don’t think energy rationing is compatible with capitalism, or perhaps to cut it another way; capitalism and survival of the human race are incompatible, so something probably has to give. Which one would you choose?
That's a very tough idea to sell in a democracy.
Turning atmospheric CO2 into liquid fuels is monumentally expensive, and renewables doesn’t make it free. You still need to build the plant (and they’re enormous), and then power it at an efficiency of about 20%.
You're missing the point, which was that aircraft aren't fundamentally limited to fossil fuels. We really don't know what the cost of energy will be in 100 years time - if cheap fusion turns out to be possible, it might be very cheap, we really don't know. The theoretical efficiency of the conversion of CO2 to liquid fuel is much higher than 20% so we really don't know what air travel will cost in 100 years.
May be it’s time to dispense with capitalism to save the planet. The problem seems to be that if I buy food in a supermarket. I have to support the farmer, the company infrastructure and the share holders the bit in the middle is where the money goes.
Perhaps, or maybe simply start getting a bit tougher with the super wealthy; enforcing regulations and taxes. Musk might flog Leccy motors (the environmental benefits of which are debateable), but does he need Billions of dollars tied up as personal wealth? Could those resources be deployed better for the wider good of humanity? He could probably fund a 10kWh solar array on the roof of 10 million households, That's probably more use to humanity than some janky motorised Gullwing doors...
That’s a very tough idea to sell in a democracy.
Maybe it's more that it's tough to sell in our current flavour of 'Democracy' which is very much geared toward Capitalism and preservation of a pretty unbalanced social order which disproportionately favours those with more accumulated wealth.
The problem is circumstances are going to change things for us like it or not. Are Democracy and Capitalism intrinsically tied together or is democracy arguably bolstered once you implement safeguards (regulatory/legal) to prevent a handful of people tying up the majority of resources?
Clearly a lot of us are trapped in rather "orthodox" capitalist thought patterns, the fact that price inflation is the worst thing some can think of when the alternative is rising sea levels and extreme weather events sort of illustrates the point.
I don't think that's atypical of the wider population, and I don't think you magically change the mindset by proposing energy rationing.
You might change it by showing the consequences in as stark a way as possible and by pointing back at those wealth hoarders and being clear they are now frustrating our species efforts at survival. Perhaps we just have to let the Isle of Wight get washed away, and then explain that Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos basically sponsored the event. People might twig that you don't just buy your way out of climate change. Who knows.
Fred Pohl wrote a satirical SF story in the 1950s called The Midas Plague, which posited a future of unlimited fusion(ish) energy. Freed of energy constraints, the only way to keep the capitalist juggernaut rolling is enforced consumption. Only the rich can afford a life of ascetic minimalism. The poor have to consume, consume, consume; meeting their quota of gaudy tat and rich food relentlessly pouring off the production lines in order to prevent economic collapse. The poorer you are, the more you have to consume, and the worse the punishment for failure to do so....and all the while the excess heat produced is gradually making the planet uninhabitable....
It would be an real incentive to offer lower carbon products
Steel is real folks.
If you chose to have kids then you really wouldn’t have much energy credit left for anything else.
chrismacFull Member
If you chose to have kids then you really wouldn’t have much energy credit left for anything else.
granted that would stop climate change dead within a few decades. Make having any children illegal. Implement it across the world and watch the human population be wiped out.
Hurrah! 🙄
Can I buy an early adopter ticket to your Lake District please?
No. You stay home.
Given my transport is the bicycle. Can I trade some of my allowance with car drivers, for cold hard cash ?
I can't wait for every businessman's wet dream, charging as much as possible for as little as possible to be mandated by governments. It's going to be wonderful and ruinously expensive for some, with those that can afford it carrying on as normal.
granted that would stop climate change dead within a few decades. Make having any children illegal.
no one said anything about making them illegal, just that if that’s the lifestyle you choose then that’s where you spend your energy credits
do the these legal children come with their own energy ration ?
Yeah, surely the kids would have their own allowance. So a massive family like them there Waltons would have more carbon to play with?
how much carbon is captured in creating a human being..
Small generators attached to the wrists of teenage boys.
You're welcome.
There's a lot of mention of how this won't fly in a democracy, but the key problem there is that the people most affected by climate change don't vote in our elections.