Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Household carbon cap and trade in the UK?
A few years ago, we published an article in Ten Year Forecast on the future of market-based environmental incentives, such as cap and trade markets. According to The Telegraph, Britain's DEFRA is now studying the possibility of implementing household cap and trade markets for atmospheric carbon.
Labour plans carbon cap on household energy use
Plans to impose a limit on the amount of carbon that every household in the country is allowed to emit are being drawn up by the Government.
The proposal, which gets one obscure reference in last week's Energy Review, is to impose an overall cap on household energy use, starting in five years' time.
The "cap and trade" scheme, to be administered by energy suppliers who would hand out energy saving equipment to bring down household consumption, would be revolutionary in its effect on how we heat and light our homes....
The proposed new "cap and trade" arrangements would impose a cap on overall household emissions and allow companies to trade any amount of ''undershot'' below that target with other companies by selling them permits to emit carbon, or purchase more permits to pollute if they overshot.
In other words, it would be like the European Union carbon trading scheme now in place for big companies, except that it would be the responsibility of the supply companies, not the domestic user, to reduce household emissions overall....
Cap and trade markets for sulfur dioxide are everyone's favorite example of how markets can be used to reduce pollution; but those succeeded in part because the number of players involved was not very large (when the U.S. implemented cap-and-trade in the 1980s, it knew that power plants were the main generators of sulfur dioxide), and those players could apply (however grudgingly) prior familiarity with commodities markets. Creating enough knowledge about how households are consuming energy and producing (or contributing indirectly to) emissions would, the article notes, "require more snooping about what we use energy for - through smart meters."
Technorati Tags: energy, environment, UK
"