Carbon Tax
Carbon tax
is a tax on non-renewable fuels, based on their carbon content, producing carbon dioxide at combustion. Among the first to introduce carbon tax were the Netherlands (1990), Sweden and Norway (1991), Denmark (1992), and Great Britain (1993), followed by a growing number of countries around the world.
Using an incrementally but exponentially increasing carbon tax has been advocated by, among others, the World Bank
(after guidance from Maurice Strong in the 1990s).
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…the expected effect of a carbon tax is not to decrease emissions immediately or brutally, as that would be a costly shock to the economy. Instead, a carbon price is expected to first progressively reduce the pace at which GHG emissions are growing until that growth stops and emissions finally start to decrease. Also, the best design for a carbon price is to make it grow exponentially over time. (
Decarbonizing Development: Three Steps to a Zero-Carbon Future
, World Bank Group, 2015)
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Carbon Quotas
Cap-and-trade is a system where national governments set a quota of greenhouse gas emissions for companies. Any excess can be sold to other companies needing more. The system has been used in various regions for several years, including in the European Union.
The proposal for emission quotas originates with
William W. Kellogg (RAND and NCAR) and Margaret Mead at the conference Endangered Atmosphere 1975, where they suggested that various nations be assigned polluting rights to keep carbon dioxide emissions below a globally agreed-upon standard.
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The proposal was later revived by Al Gore (in
Earth in the Balance
, 1992) and David Blood, Mark Ferguson, and Peter Harris (Goldman Sachs Asset Management), seeing profits to be made on the scheme.
The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the ‘cap' on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that
this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time
. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually.
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Personal Energy Quotas
Tradeable Energy Quotas (TEQs) is a system where each individual is allocated a quota of energy (or greenhouse gas emissions) to consume. Any surplus can be sold to others.
The idea of personal or domestic energy quotas was developed by British David Fleming (1940–2010), with a past in the Green Party, Transition Towns, and New Economics Foundation. It was first published in June 1996.
However, the idea originally dates back to the Technocracy movement of the 1930s, which advocated – and still does – even more extreme measures such as replacing the price-based economic system with an energy-based system calculated on the distribution and consumption of energy for each product or service.
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Just like M. King Hubbert (one of the founders of Technocracy Inc.), Fleming warned that Peak Oil was imminent, but combined this threat with the threat of climate change.
In 2010, Fleming presented his concept at a seminar in the Swedish Parliament with Johan Rockström, Anders Wijkman and parlament member Per Bolund, current leader of the Swedish Green Party.
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Every adult is given an equal free Entitlement of TEQs units each week. Other energy users (Government, industry etc.) bid for their units at a weekly Tender, or auction (David Fleming).
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The energy unit is measured in carbon dioxide – one kilogram per unit. The individual's values and behaviour should also be modified by being able to track in real time how one's lifestyle gives rise to the greenhouse gas emissions said to be destroying our planet.
TEQs have long been Green Party policy, as we believe that we need a fair and transparent system to reduce energy demand and give each person a direct connection to the carbon emissions associated with their lifestyle. (Caroline Lucas, Green Party, and GLOBE)
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The idea is also that we should “help each other" by keeping track of our neighbours’ emissions – just like in Songdo. A Climate Change Committee, independent of national governments, is to determine the size of the annual budget. The ration is then meant to decrease year by year and each individual gets less and less non-renewable energy to use, until reaching the desired target.
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The European Union, or example, has set the target of an 80–95% a reduction by 2050. Given how negligible the portion of renewable energy so far is, and how dependent on fossil fuels it is to be produced, the concept appears diabolical. The rich can buy their way out while the poor end up getting less and less each year.
This closely resembles the dystopian film
In Time
(2011), where a time quota (to stay alive) is the currency and the ration keeps decreasing – except for the ruling class which has unlimited time rations.
The infrastructure for managing TEQs is based on Smart Grid networks and each individual being part of the Internet of Things. When connected to home electronics these could be automatically shut down if the allocated quota is exceeded.
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This opens up for extensive surveillance and mapping to determine who is sufficiently “sustainable
”,
as well as for hacking and abuse of power.
The development of smart electricity networks means that data and information will be collected with ever higher resolution and with ever shorter time intervals. When the data on the individual's electricity consumption increases, the possibilities of mapping persons and companies' movements are also increasing. (Swedish Smartgrid)
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A recent unexpected spokesperson for this solution is the young climate activist Greta Thunberg (daughter of the Swedish opera singer Malena Ernman and descendant of Svante Arrhenius on her father’s side).
In January 2019, she was invited to the World Economic Forum Summit in Davos, where she urged world leaders to introduce a new global energy currency.
No other current challenge can match the importance of establishing a wide, public awareness and understanding of our rapidly disappearing carbon budget, that should and must become our new global currency and the very heart of our future and present economics. (Greta Thunberg, 2019)
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Most likely she is unaware of the technocratic roots of the idea, or the Orwellian dystopia it might lead to if it was actually implemented.
Carbon Currency
Carbon currency is a system where each product or service gets its carbon footprint fixed. With blockchain technology or special apps collecting and storing each consumer’s transactions, it is possible to calculate that person’s total carbon consumption footprint.
In March 2017, Stockholm Environment Institute and WWF launched its digital Climate Calculator.
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A year later, Swedish supermarket chain ICA offered a digital tool to enable their customers to follow their own climate footprint month by month.
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Although initially voluntary, such registration opens up for it becoming mandatory and no longer private in the future.
Carbon Offset
Carbon offset is a
means of compensating for emissions (e.g., from aviation) where the company or the consumer pays a fee towards projects assumed to reduce CO
2
emissions, e.g., solar panel projects or tree planting programs.
For companies, carbon offset schemes is a convenient way for a polluting or carbon intensive company to greenwash their image by investing in offset projects, often in developing nations. Now, concerned consumers can also ease their assumed climate conscience by buying such climate indulgences.
A growing number of companies are now offering various online calculators or mobile apps for calculating and compensating for one’s carbon emissions, including MyClimate.org,
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SAS,
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and Poseidon (a Swiss foundation).
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Offset schemes such as REDD (Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation) have also become a growing business for opportunistic entrepreneurs and NGOs – and for developing countries in need of investments. However, they are often fraught with problems, including monitoring and assessing success rate.
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In some cases, projects have led to ruthless land grabs where the original inhabitants get violently evicted from land they’ve inhabited for generations, and/or prohibited from using land earmarked for the project.
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Circular Economy
An essential component of the vision of sustainability is circular economy – a utopian model based on the idea of recycling and more efficient management and use of resources, ideally leading to a world without waste.
In 2017, World Economic Forum initiated the public-private collaboration Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE), chaired by the CEO of Philips, Frans van Houten.
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Connected to this project is also British solo long-distance
sailor,
Dame Ellen MacArthur. In 2000, she founded the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (in partnership with Cisco, BT Group, B&Q, Renault and National Grid). In 2013, she became a member of the Club of Rome and has become a passionate champion for circular economy.
To be effective over time, proponents insist that circular economy requires the Internet of Things, where all products and components are tracked in real time throughout their life cycle.
To be sustainable, a system must be responsive; actions and behaviours must be connected via data and knowledge. With the embedding of intelligence in almost every object, we can imagine systems that adapt and respond to change in order to remain fit for purpose. (Tim Brown, IDEO)
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The origin of the idea of circular economy can be traced to the view of earth as a closed system with finite resources which need to be carefully used and recycled, like on a spaceship. This idea was spread through Barbara Ward’s book
Spaceship Earth
(1966),
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made into a film just before the Stockholm Conference;
Kenneth E. Boulding’s essay “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth" (1966);
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Buckminster Fuller's “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” (1969).
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“Spaceship Earth: The Life Support System
”,
was also the title of Chapter 7 in RBF’s
The Unfinished Agenda
(1977). It has since been marketed by the Club of Rome and New Economics Foundation.
In 2016, former European Parliament member Anders Wijkman (GLOBE, Club of Rome, World Future Council) made a “study” for the Club of Rome, based on models predicting positive effects on climate, environment, and economy and pointed out the engagement from European Commission resulting in the Circular Economy Package.
The ’circular economy’ is an industrial system that is restorative by intention and design. The idea is that rather than discarding products before the value are fully utilized, we should use and re-use them.
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David Rockefeller Junior's wife, film director Susan, has also been enthusiastic about the vision of a zero-waste Utopia.
My greatest hope is for a worldwide spiritual transformation simultaneous with advanced technology and global empathy in the way we approach all our production and processes—in essence, to have a circular economy where there is zero waste. (Susan Rockefeller)
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Sharing Economy
Closely related to circular economy is the sharing economy (or access economy). It is an informal peer-to-peer business model where individuals can “share” (free of charge or for a fee) personal assets like their homes, vehicles, tools, or time, with strangers, often via a mobile app, which charges a commission for offering a platform for booking and payment. Such digital platforms are said to make it easier for entrepreneurs, freelancers and private citizens to market themselves and rent goods or services, resulting in lower prices and greater accessibility for the consumer.
However, this “informal” rental market has rapidly become dominated by more hierarchical giants such as Airbnb and Uber, resulting in hotels and taxi companies facing unfair competition from amateur operators without professional experience, education, trade union membership, fixed costs or tax registration.
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This is also true of the closely related “gig economy” where easy access to global labor for small temporary jobs (e.g., TaskRabbit or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk), which have been criticised for creating a “race to the bottom” for disenfranchised workers desperate for even the smallest income.