On the 8th June an Environmental Audit Committee session heard that “To meet 1.5C, we need to think about the impact of our production in the global context. 60 % of oil and gas reserves globally need to stay in the ground. For the UK, we need to see a 6-7% reduction in production annually.” Michael Lewis, Chairman of E.on, stated that insulating 19 million houses would save the equivalent energy output of 6 nuclear power stations, and tweeted that putting solar panels on new-build houses was a ‘no brainer’. What we don’t need is new oil and gas field developments – was COP26 that long ago?
There has been growing acknowledgement worldwide that there is a need for a globally applied carbon pricing policy which would show the true cost of fossil fuel reliance and which, by gradually pricing fossil fuels out of the mix, would facilitate the implementation of renewable energy and carbon sequestration. Calls for such a policy came from the IMF last year. A recent paper in Nature and report by the Autonomy think tank have shown how a carbon pricing policy such as Climate Income in which the revenue is returned equally to the populace as a dividend, if applied globally, would benefit the Global South.
The civil society advisers to the G7 are now adding to the call for comprehensive and just carbon pricing. Citizens’ Climate Lobby International has a useful summary of the various requests and a petition to ask the G7 to heed the call of its civil society advisers. Please consider adding your name and disseminating.
* Catherine Dawson is a Lib Dem member from Devizes.
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Sorry but I don’t support increasing the costs on families already struggling to make ends meet. Increasing the prices of goods and services so as to reduce consumption is the most unfair method of all. If we want a fair way of reducing consumption, we need to use a robust system of rationing that can not be evaded by those with wealth.
If you have rationing, there will be a black market. Sure, jailing racketeers and people who buy on the black market may deter a few faint hearts, but have these threats ever stopped the drugs trade?
No. Insulate massively, give incentives to change to non polluting vehicles, give large subsidies to enable people to move to air source, ground source or solar heating.
Only by ending the need to rely on fossil fuels will we ever get away from killing our planet. It takes political will and political courage by leaders to face down the big polluters and fossil fuel producers. Has the current LibDem leadership got what it takes?
I support this as a concept, with a number of caveats.
We need to face the fact that our carbon intensive behaviours are doing serious damage to the planet and to its inhabitants, and it’s about time that those costs were factored into prices. It’s the world’s poorest who are worst hit, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think that it’s not going to hurt the fairly well off in rich countries like the UK too. We’re all going to notice it when global food shortages hit, and record numbers of people are displaced due to famine and war.
If you have any doubt on the effectiveness of this sort of policy, then compare the size of cars in the US to the UK. Cheap fuel in the US meant fuel efficiency was rarely something considered when buying a new car.
Rich people consume the most, and do the most damage to the environment. They’ll be the ones hit hardest by this. It will also mean that environmental impact will be better considered during procurement and better design choices made.
Taxes raised can be redistributed to support the poorest in society, and provide the necessary support as society adjusts to making better choices. Supporters of UBI often claim that it can be funded by a carbon tax, making it a doubly progressive policy.
The keys and the only real ways to change the narrative are to reduce consumption of gas and oil (build to an effective standard and retrofit to an equally high standard for all buildings) and to produce more renwable energy with a rapid investment in solar / wind and battery storage. No new tech needed for the solar and wind production, just more of it, and a rapid large scale investment in Battery Storage to make all the difference.
We certainly globally need to do something. The Ukraine crisis is distracting from measures to combat the environmental emergency. A global carbon pricing mechanism sounds like something worth considering.