For most people it would directly incentivise energy efficient behaviour. It would be likely to create a surge in demand for low carbon energy services and in turn support low carbon innovation, a transition to a low carbon society prompted by consumer demand, potentially much more effective than many a top-down policy intervention. Along with its benefits of encouraging healthier lifestyles, active travel, reducing air pollution, maybe even creating more green sector jobs, this is an idea with the potential to unite individuals and communities behind a collective effort to control climate change, to make low carbon lifestyles the norm.
' Carbon credits have the potential to unite individuals and communities behind a collective effort to control climate change '
A promising purple patch
This policy idea clearly stretches responsibility for environmental protection to its limit – to you and every other individual in within the boundaries of the scheme( conceived initially as a national). It experienced a purple patch in the mid-noughties when, under the Blair government, Environment Minister David Miliband fleetingly backed it while he surfed the temporary wave which was Britain leading the way on climate change. Confident in its climate salvaging potential, Miliband announced that every citizen should carry their own personal carbon credit card. The real reason for this enthusiasm is known only to him and his advisors. The cynic would assume that it was the perfect idea with which to build green political capital – bold and ambitious, yet impossible to implement on your watch. Or perhaps he was persuaded by the sound thinking of two men in particular: the late David Fleming, a genius independent energy and lean thinking analyst and Richard Starkey, a brilliant philosopher-environmentalist researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
The reason that personal carbon trading didn’ t gain traction back then was because it was presented as a national policy tool, but there was no way that the national population was ready for it, and nor is it now. I also wonder whether some of its behind-the-scenes advocates were late to see the penny literally drop – this was unlikely to be a way for anyone to make a stack of money through a massive expansion of carbon markets. revolutionise. it 58