Personal Carbon Trading

[Guest mattsta1964]

Yet another scam, apperntly designed to make people more environmentally responsible, in reality a ploy to tax people

Repellent scum

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7419724.stm

[chichi]

They're just rationing the oil!

If you're rich you'll be able to do whatever you want still. Didn't you realise that was what Nulabour was all about.

[Sheer Heart Attack]

The tax implications are spine-shivering enough, but the idea of a central database tracking everything you buy and the fuel/energy you use for their "CO2 political/religious correctness" is truly frightening.

[chichi]

But they've not managed to do the NHS databases yet.

[Bloo Loo]

Poor Sid the pensioner, needs a new cooker. In the summer.

he has no money, so he flogs his carbon credits via a card in the post office window.

come winter Sid is a bit chilly, but cant turn the fire on because he has no carbon credits.

social comes in and hands him some more as he is a hardship case.

result: no carbon saved. social spends a load of carbon sorting it out.Sid spends more than planned. Rich guy spends more than planned.

tossers.

[chichi]

come winter Sid is a bit chilly, but cant turn the fire on because he has no carbon credits.

social comes in and hands him some more as he is a hardship case.

Social comes in and moves him into a house share situation with other older people.

Sid's house gets sold off and sid is then cash rich and can afford to pay for the carbon credits needed to heat his home to 24'C.

It'd make more sense to export OAPs to warmer climates.

[Laura]

It'd make more sense to export OAPs to warmer climates.

Feck!! :angry:

.... you mean I should have been paid to live in Portugal for half the year?

Why do I always miss the handouts?

___________________

BTW:- When the data CD is lost enroute, how will the resulting carbon (waffle) debit be measured?

[Johnny Storm]

This wont go anywhere. All they need to really finish them off (labour) is another new unpopular tax.

Im expecting to see a lot more feel good policies to try to increase their popularity.

[lulu]

Yet another scam, apperntly designed to make people more environmentally responsible, in reality a ploy to tax people

Repellent scum

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7419724.stm

Just think of the jobs that will be created though with a scheme like this, thousands upon thousands of paperpushers who do nothing else but monitor just exactly how much carbon people are using with thousands of petty fines for anyone who mistakenly leaves a light on for 10 minutes.

There could be all kinds of 'carbon credits' that will be only be available to 'hard working British Families' Party voters, and the rest of us will will be simply taxed to pieces in order to fund the extravagent lifestyles of Party members and the so called 'poor' (who all have Sky TV, a free house and three holidays a year to Benidorm (they will be allowed to do this due to the 'carbon credits' they earn from signing on for long enough)).

Edited May 26, 2008 by lulu

[chichi]

Feck!! :angry:

.... you mean I should have been paid to live in Portugal for half the year?

Why do I always miss the handouts?

___________________

BTW:- When the data CD is lost enroute, how will the resulting carbon (waffle) debit be measured?

How much is that heating allowance? Same as cost of flights there and back?

The carbon scheme would be tied in to the ID card I think - so when you buy sweets or a paper they can charge you for the carbon in that too.

They've messed up putting increased "carbon taxes" on the annual tax on cars. I'd have thought they'd have put an additional few pence on petrol as a carbon tax - maybe they'll do that too.

[AgeingBabyBoomer]

Mirrored from a more catholic site:

The idea is that if you use up less than your quota, then you

get some kind of reward. However, they would need to know

each time you took a flight abroad, or turned on the light in order

to calculate how much carbon credit had been used.

Etc,etc ad nauseam until each and every purchase you make

is logged into a central database.

Of course this would be impossible to administer any other way

than having 'a single plastic card like a Nectar card' (sic).

Could this even be the carrot by which we accept the ID

card stick ?

The quota idea seems fine until you remember that quotas

can be cut, so what happens when the quota is smaller than

the amount of CO2 we exhale in a lifetime?

Presumably it becomes economically rational to terminate

the citizen at age thirty and render the carcass down to two

and sixpence worth of raw chemicals. :angry:

O Brave New World!

ABB

Edited May 26, 2008 by AgeingBabyBoomer

[Authoritarian]

The very idea of this scheme makes me laugh, they don't have the expertise to be able to implement such a system and as New Lab's popularity looks to be all but falling off a cliff face they would and already have bottled it. The public are weary of their social experiments, even ones have a green tint.

[Injin]

Poor Sid the pensioner, needs a new cooker. In the summer.

he has no money, so he flogs his carbon credits via a card in the post office window.

come winter Sid is a bit chilly, but cant turn the fire on because he has no carbon credits.

social comes in and hands him some more as he is a hardship case.

result: no carbon saved. social spends a load of carbon sorting it out.Sid spends more than planned. Rich guy spends more than planned.

tossers.

Ahhhh but Sid is now n the database with his carbon ID card.

It's a bribe system to get us all into an ID card scheme over time, just like them rounding the students up viz the libraries and bars.

[Laura]

Environment minister Hilary Benn said there were practical drawbacks to the plan although it did have "potential".

Not really Hils.

All you need is a massive fleet of hydrogen (& LA) fuelled 'Neighbourhood Carbon Policing' vans.

Then with council tax at an unbelieveable high only the unemployed will be able to afford to turn a light on

.......... except there wont be any unemployed as they'll all be driving an NCP van around.

Thus a classic true Labour solution scenario unfolds.

Yet another quality post from ykw

Edited May 26, 2008 by Laura

[Guest Steve Cook]

This kind of policy is simply stupid

It's stated aim is to reduce our carbon footprint via the amount of energy we use.

However.....

If I save on my carbon output and so save myself some money, I have a number of choices as to what to do with that money.

I could spend it on some other good or service that I hitherto could not afford. I could, say, go on holiday, or buy a brand new media system. However, the cost, in energetic terms, of producing those items completely wipes out the energy savings I have made from not burning as much gas or electricity in my home. So, no gain there then.

Alternatively, I could put the money in the bank. However, if I do this, my bank will lend it out (several times!) to other people who will spend it on (you guessed it) goods or services that will wipe out the energy savings made by me.

I could always stick the money under my mattress, or even take the nuclear option and burn the money I saved. This way I could permenantly deprive the economy of the money and so ensure that it was not used to consume more energy. However, this kind of deflationary tactic is the kind of thing that keeps central bankers awake with nightmares, since it would cause a deflationary recession. They would only turn on the printing presses and make some more to replace it.

So, all in all...

A complete load of b*llocks

[Grandad]

Just a new take on an old idea.

The Labour party just love rationing, kept it going for years after the last war.

It should certainly bring back the spivs.

Anyway how can they allocate the ration to everyone in the country if they don't know who is here?

Edit: spelling mistook.

Edited May 26, 2008 by Grandad

[Bloo Loo]

This kind of policy is simply stupid

snip

A complete load of b*llocks

Yes, but they would be SEEN to be doing something.

[Ash4781]

Isn't this just cover for the falling standard of living that the BOE governor mentioned ?

[King Stromba]

Wow, a lot of people are going to look mightly stupid when mans link to planetary warming via CO2 levels is disproved (if it hasnt already been).

Anyone who wants a synopsis of how insignificant human activity is on the environment compared to a meterorite strike or large volcanic eruption, might find Bill Bryson's book 'a brief history of everything' a good read.

There are some great chapters on the solar system and ice ages, that puts all this green house gas carbon trading ******** into perspective.

And as the mean planetary temperatures are no longer going up, i think we can shelve this environmental stealth tax for good, along wih all the other greenhouse gas related mumbo jumbo legislation.

[munro]

From the Beeb report:

'Cash benefit'

Committee chairman Tim Yeo said it found that personal carbon trading had "real potential to engage the population in the fight against climate change and to achieve significant emissions reductions in a progressive way".

He said "green" taxes, such as a petrol tax, cost poor people more because everyone - "billionaires and paupers" - paid the same amount.

"Under the personal carbon trading, someone who perhaps doesn't have an enormous house or swimming pool, someone who doesn't take several holidays in the Caribbean every year, will actually get a cash benefit if they keep a low carbon footprint."

So let's see. Energy costs go up and up, as they have done recently and will continue to do - as those pesky A-rabs and Russkis aren't going to give the stuff away and we've practically drained the North Sea. The rich keep on doing whatever they want as they've found very effective ways of taxing us, through private equity, bonuses, subverting NuLabour to support every tax scam and rake-off from jacking up asset prices they can come up with. The rest of us get ever poorer and end up consuming less anyway, as we're outbid at the pumps by the rich b*st*rd who offers more money than we have. So we become more and more the worker bees who get phuq all out of the system while the rich get the lot.

On the other hand, we could accept that there is a limited amount of energy to go round and that perhaps some sort of rationing/allocation scheme would be fairer. Mr Rich B*st*rd can pay me for my allocation, so I get some benefit from being outbid at the pumps. Lots of mainly older people who are overconsuming housing because there's little incentive for them to sell up are confronted with the true costs of maintaining and heating their houses, so they sell them to young families.

You lot are staring a gift horse in the mouth; either because you're deluded enough to think that you're going to be the rich git with the swimming pool taking multiple Caribbean holidays every year, or because you're so viscerally opposed to anything coming from politicians that you can't see that they are the only thing standing between us and total enslavement to the capitalist machine.

[munro]

Wow, a lot of people are going to look mightly stupid when mans link to planetary warming via CO2 levels is disproved (if it hasnt already been).

Anyone who wants a synopsis of how insignificant human activity is on the environment compared to a meterorite strike or large volcanic eruption, might find Bill Bryson's book 'a brief history of everything' a good read.

There are some great chapters on the solar system and ice ages, that puts all this green house gas carbon trading ******** into perspective.

And as the mean planetary temperatures are no longer going up, i think we can shelve this environmental stealth tax for good, along wih all the other greenhouse gas related mumbo jumbo legislation.

Forget climate change and look at it this way. You want to stop the rich outbidding you for every sort of good, be it energy, food, or housing, then some sort of compulsion is going to be needed. Otherwise all we'll be left with is shivering in badly built two bed executive flats with kids piled high in bunk beds in the second bedroom, with the parents hot-bedding so they can earn enough to feed their kids thin gruel. 'Cos that's the way the capitalist b*st*rds running the city are taking us.

Had a look at their bonus payments recently? £13Bn so far this year, a mere 1% less than last year. How much do you think will be swept off their table in crumbs for the rest of us to subsist on? Start tugging that forelock now or you'll be going cold and hungry in your garret, if you're lucky.

[Mrs Bear]

The tax implications are spine-shivering enough, but the idea of a central database tracking everything you buy and the fuel/energy you use for their "CO2 political/religious correctness" is truly frightening.

They'll never do it. Far too electorally unpopular, far too expensive, plus even the govt. knows that all massive databases turn into massively overspending disasters that don't work.

As for nosy, sinister databases tracking everything you buy, this is the reason I don't have a Tesco's or any other supermarket card.

[Guest anorthosite]

Anyone who wants a synopsis of how insignificant human activity is on the environment compared to a meterorite strike or large volcanic eruption, might find Bill Bryson's book 'a brief history of everything' a good read.

And how often are significant meteorite strikes? Or volcanic eruptions big enough to come anywhere near enough to match man's CO2 output? Regardless of what you think of man made global warming the idea that volcanoes produce more CO2 than man is very difficult to substantiate.

As to the original idea, its all rubbish. Given the fossil fuel based economy we have, you can measure your carbon footprint just by looking at your pay packet. They'd have to ration money.

[Elizabeth]

Lots of angry people here. With some fairly reasonable points for the most part.

My own beef is that it is just another way of increasing bureaucracy. Of course the next step would then be to reduce bureaucracy by contracting out to the private sector, therefore ensuring that either Bill the Pensioner (was that his name?) only gets 90% of his tax credits in the trade and the rest goes to "stimulate business" or that an expensive contract is let to the private sector for fairly menial work (pushing paper privately). They will then up his heating subsidy to compensate (and my question is, most of the people who need support for their heating are on the pension or benefits, so instead of having a separate heating subsidy, why not just whack another £10 a week on Pension?).

We already have exise on fuel, so it is just another bloody tax collection path on top of the current tax system. I think that whenever a minister sends his cronies out to invent a new initiative the first question that should be asked is "are we already doing it? - and better / cheaper than we could with whatever we are announcing".

Why don't they add a bit more to the excise - that standard, pay as you go, tax on consumption therefore totally scaled to meet environmental impact? (maybe that is because fuel costs are now hurting enough to force people to think anyway)

But my question is, clearly we don't like this idea, but what are YOU doing to support the environment? Please answer below.

My other beef is, the use of the ... word? sheeple. It was funny the first time I saw it, now using it just strikes me as the "sheeple thing to do on this site" Now that is irony. Me likes

[tegan]

As to the original idea, its all rubbish. Given the fossil fuel based economy we have, you can measure your carbon footprint just by looking at your pay packet. They'd have to ration money.

Absolutely. This looks very much like an attempt top reduce our standard of living dressed in green clothes. Not that I ever doubted this would be exactly what global warming hysteria would be used for.