‘Live simply so others may simply live’
Joe Burlington writes in support of Tradable Energy Quotas
In August last year, a fifteen-year-old girl, Greta Thunberg, decided to sit outside the Swedish parliament rather than go to school. Education has little point, she said, if the politicians continue to ignore climate facts. A few weeks later, she addressed 10,000 people in Helsinki, Finland. ‘Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every day,’ she said. ‘There are no politics to change that… Everything needs to change and it has to start today.’ She has also stimulated demonstrations: an estimated 15,000 left their classrooms in thirty locations across Australia on 30 November; more than 20,000 demonstrated in Switzerland; and 12,500 in Brussels on 18 January. There were many thousands more in Germany, Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, Finland, the Czech Republic, Italy, the UK, Sweden, the US, Canada, Colombia, the Faroe Islands and Ireland.
Quaker Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for the South West of England and Gibraltar, in her article ‘The Inward Light’ (16 November 2018), is emphatically right to point out that ‘vested interests and unaccountable wealth are destroying the chance of any sort of life for future generations and the beautiful creatures that are part of our life on this earth’.
Similarly, The Guardian, on 5 December last year, ran an editorial that said: ‘We are losing the war against climate change; the use of fossil fuels is driving higher carbon emissions when they need to be coming down.’
The appropriate goal for the world is that all fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas (including fracked gas) – be left in the ground. That has enormous implications. We must not believe that renewable energy will continue to enable wealthy Westerners to have the ‘right’ to have large, well-heated homes, run big cars, and holiday in whatever continent they choose. As an illustration, a huge offshore wind farm is planned for the North Sea. It will generate enough power for nearly 138,000 families in Germany. This sounds good until you hear that an extra 245,000 German houses were built in 2017. Fifty or sixty years ago, most Europeans had a very decent standard of living while consuming only a small proportion of the resources now regarded as ‘essential’.
It may all seem unbelievable – but we have to believe it. Those of us who have some understanding of the science have either not properly appreciated the implications ourselves, or have communicated badly.
Fifty Conservative MPs have called on Theresa May to adopt what they call ‘an ambitious target of cutting carbon emissions to net zero before 2050’. If every country adopted the same target, emissions might get to zero, but the concentration could go on increasing. This means that floods, droughts, wildfires and animal extinctions could well be very, very much worse by 2050.
There is no hope. But we have to give up hopelessness and, somehow or other, make a transition to zero emissions that is hugely more rapid. That is hard to imagine, but it must be done. How?
To address the problem, from 1993 the Conservative government implemented a policy of repeatedly increasing duties on fuel. Labour continued with this approach. Subsequently, though, it was abandoned. France recently tried the same method – until the ‘yellow vest’ protests put an end to their efforts.
When food and fuel were scarce during the world wars, governments realised that high prices would leave millions hungry. ‘Rations’ were allocated so that everyone could exchange coupons as well as cash for an entitlement of particular goods. The system was seen as both necessary and fair.
Those ideas have been developed. Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) are a well thought-out scheme that has been evaluated in parliament. This is a proposal for a national emissions and energy trading scheme that includes personal carbon trading. If introduced, TEQs would, in my view, guarantee that UK emissions would go down. More than that, TEQs would encourage us to be frugal in our use of electricity, petrol and gas.
To ‘live simply so that others may simply live’, it would be a useful first step.
Further information: http://bit.ly/COP24Thunberg
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