On Sat, 15 Sep 2007 11:33:05 +0100 "Jon Grant" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Will be interesting to see what politicians come up with, probably > some free-market system, where we pay for CO2 output rather than for > KWH like at present? Such a system has some (putative) advantages over your suggestion: * buyers have an incentive to reduce CO2 emissions during the lifetime of the product by using it more efficiently and/or using it less, not merely when they choose which one to buy. On the other hand, some might argue that nudging people to buy more efficient products is more effective than nudging them to use them less - and that could be true, at least for citizens as opposed to businesses. * taxes on half-a-dozen different things are a bureaucratic and piecemeal solution which encourages people and businesses to distort their behaviour in "irrational" ways (e.g. buying an energy-efficient computer and then blowing all their carbon savings many times over by taking loads of flights and driving the car to the supermarket round the corner). By contrast, theoretically, taxing the "root problem", carbon emissions, should optimise the speed of reduction of emissions, by encouraging the most wasteful businesses to reduce their emissions earliest and fastest (that's the idea behind the EU-wide emissions trading scheme). The question is of course, will the incentives be high enough? Of course, given that both Labour and the Tories seem to want to faff around and bring about only a fraction of the reductions we would probably need to achieve to bring climate change under control, in the hope that someone else will sort out the problem (engineers and/or their political successors)... the incentives probably won't be high enough to make much difference. -- Robin _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
