The Brit down the hall--he loves when I call him that, he claims to be "English"--pointed me towards this story in The Guardian:
In a few years from now you will have another plastic card in your wallet - your carbon card. You will start the year with 1,000 points on it and each time you fill up your car, you put the card in a slot on the pump and it will deduct a few points.
Each time you buy an airline ticket, it will cost you a minimum of 100 points. If you fly regularly, you may have to buy more points through the carbon market - but since it is all in the cause of reducing greenhouse gas emissions you do not mind so much.
An environmentalist's pipe dream? Not at all, but a scheme put before parliament 18 months ago in a private member's bill sponsored by Colin Challen, the Labour MP for Morley & Rothwell.
[...]
Each of us would get the same allowance at the start of the year. "If people weren't particularly interested in messing about with carbon units, they could sell them back straightaway and buy them again when they needed them," he said.
The carbon market would work similarly to the foreign currency markets. You could walk into a high street bank or the Post Office and buy or sell your units there. Just as they do now with foreign currencies, the financial institutions would offer carbon units at their own prices and the die-hards amongst us would shop around for the best deals.
Many in the poorest 30% of households would stand to gain from trading. Those who do not want or cannot afford to go for holidays in the sun could sell their allowances on the market to be snapped up by frequent flyers.
Of course, you should read the article to find out why it will probably never happen. Here are the highlights:
- "One has to be looking at the end of cheap air flights"
- Price volatility could be a problem
- What would happen to the Kenyan economy, for instance, if the UK stopped importing mangetout - as it could well do as a domino effect of a personal carbon trading scheme?
Nevertheless, I get happy when I see talk of markets being designed to solve environmental problems. It's enough to bring a tear of joy to this environmental economist's eye.
