Date published: 2006/05/02
The BBC says:
Environmental advisers to the UK government are urging more radical action to promote green lifestyles.
The Sustainable Consumption Roundtable (SCR) says people need a clear lead from government.
Its report, I Will If You Will, urges measures such as taxing flights, rewarding water conservation and banning over-fishing of cod.
It says consultation shows that people want to adopt greener habits, but many believe individual action is futile.
Action stimulated by regulation can be effective and go down well with the public, it adds, citing the example of standards mandating energy-efficient boilers.
The SCR report comes after 18 months of consultations with members of the public, businesses and other stakeholders across Britain.
"Going green can be smart and stylish," commented SCR co-chair Ed Mayo, "but it is not yet simple.
"We want to call the bluff of politicians, to take action to make the sustainable choice the easier choice."
The report's main conclusion is that people are generally quite happy with measures which bring positive environmental results, even at some cost to themselves, so long as those measures are applied fairly.
This means, says the SCR, that government must take a lead in mandating and implementing such measures rather than waiting for consumers or business to act first.
"Government and business must focus fairly and squarely on mainstream consumers, rather than expecting the heroic minority of green shoppers to shop society's way out of unsustainability," it declares.
Among the concrete measures it proposes are:
- a tax, with an opt-out mechanism, on air travel to compensate for carbon emissions
- making on-site energy generation common in homes and public buildings
- rolling out "smart" meters to raise awareness of energy consumption
- creating a major cost incentive to buy efficient cars
- removing threatened fish such as cod from sale until stocks recover
Government could take a clear leadership role, the SCR feels, by committing to making all its own activities carbon-neutral.
The SCR is a joint initiative between the Sustainable Development Commission and the National Consumer Council, supported financially by Defra and the DTI.
Another totally pointless quango. Most of the points they make are suspect, which means that little they say has any credibility.
Are "energy-efficient" boilers really that energy efficient? Well, they are when you only consider direct energy consumption, but that ignores the indirect energy consumption due to their maintenance (which is more frequent than for traditional boilers). Maintenance means there are a lot of road miles (and hence petrol consumption) for service engineers. And do they even last as long as traditional boilers (which can easily last for 15 or 20 years)? Someone needs to do the sums properly (and that somebody is not the SCR).
And you have to laugh when people are so desperate that they claim that "going green can be smart and stylish". You might as well say "going green is for rich posers", since it means much the same thing. Similarly, describing "green" shoppers (whoever they are) as a "heroic minority" is sticking two fingers up to the majority of Britain, in the worst sort of patronising way (as to be expected from a member of the ruling elite).
And what does it mean that the (allegedly) green "measures are applied fairly"? Needless to say, what "fair" really means to most people is that in fact they themselves suffer no consequences (e.g. higher taxes) but that someone else (hopefully "the rich", whoever they are, or drivers) does. It is particularly spurious when the argument is based on what people have said so in a survey. People say one thing in public and another thing when it counts, either in the shop or at the ballot box. (Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s many people claimed they voted Labour to pollsters but the Tories always won the elections.)
Of course everybody believes that air travel (well, specifically airplane fuel) should be taxed, and it is a scandal that it is not. But if car fuel tax is anything to go by, this tax, when it arrives, will not be fair and will be way over what a real carbon tax should be. Meanwhile other bigger sources of carbon (e.g. domestic gas and electricity) will get off scot free. Anybody that mentions cars and/or airplanes without mentioning other sources of carbon should just be ignored.
And of course there is already a "major cost incentive to buy efficient cars", it's called the petrol tax, which is indeed way above what any reasonable carbon tax on petrol would be. But the effect has not been what the ruling elite want, i.e. people have not stopped driving (because the convenience still outweighs the cost). So of course the ruling elite propose much higher, completely unfair, taxes (in particular a much higher annual car tax for politically incorrect cars, even though this tax has nothing to do with petrol consumption, since the same amount is paid whether you drive your car ten miles or ten thousand miles each year).
And the mention of cod is a perfect example of how meaningless the SCR consultation has been. Many people don't even like cod, so they are hardly going to miss it. And even most people who do like cod are not going to suffer. The people who are going to suffer are the cod fishermen. But the SCR obviously does not give a damn about this small minority of British citizens. And the EU already carefully regulates fishing, needless to say, taking into account the interests of the public and the fishermen (and the fish).
And the government can never make its activities "carbon neutral". To be carbon neutral you yourself have to pay for your carbon emissions. Nobody in government pays for anything, it is all subsidised by the taxpayer. Of course one easy first step for the government would be to save lots of money (and hence energy and hence carbon emissions) by disbanding all the useless quangos, such as the SCR. How much carbon was emitted producing this useless report?
_________________________________________________________
All material not included from other sources is copyright cambridge2000.com.
For further information or questions email: info [at] cambridge2000 [dot] com
(replace "[at]" with "@" and "[dot]" with ".").