The future of personal carbon credits

Imagine paying your electric bill twice. Once you would pay with money, and the second time with personal carbon credits. The pollution caused by using energy would be accounted for by a forest somewhere in Africa that has been designated to absorb your pollution.

It is likely that this type of personal account will exist in the UK in the next few years. It is called Domestic Tradable Quotas and represents a personal quota to pollute. About 12,000 big companies and institutions already trade in carbon credits in Europe, regulated by the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The next stage is for individuals to be accountable for their personal carbon dioxide emissions.

"In this system, individuals are literally stakeholders in the atmosphere," says Richard Starkey, a scientist at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Umist to the UK's parliament. "One could get [people to] buy-in to the process of emissions reduction and even generate a sense of common purpose." Richard Starkey, along with his colleague Kevin Anderson, are working towards a working model. They propose the government sets an annual carbon budget that is broken down into carbon units (say 1 unit = 1 kg of CO2). The proportion of units is allocated equally and without charge to every citizen over 18, and the remaining units are auctioned to organisations.

The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution says "every human is entitled to release into the atmosphere the same quantity of greenhouse gases" and endorsed a policy of "contraction and convergence" under which nations gradually move towards sharing emissions. Much thought has been given to applying the per capita principle to the allocation of emissions between nations, but almost none to applying it within nations.

The government has pledged that the UK will cut CO2 emissions by 60% by 2050 in its March 2007 Environmental Bill. Individuals will need to be accountable by name, if the UK will achieve its world record target. Reducing Carbon is now mainstream concern, and many people are making simple steps to reduce their pollution. It is very likely that legislation will be passed in the near future in the UK for a personal carbon credit system.

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