The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | Introducing A New Currency: The Carbon

7 comments on Introducing A New Currency: The Carbon

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Boof on June 28, 2008 - 1:16am

Some quibbles about timing and coverage if I've understood this correctly. If that tree has a 100 year lifecycle then maybe your dollar credit should be $1.50 a year. That's after deducting carbon costs such as the trip to the nursery. Also if the tree burns down say 10 years later that's a debit of $15 though maybe some carbon in the roots will be left behind.

Also what about the carbon debt embodied in houses, cars, TVs etc? Perhaps we should depreciate that over their average lifetime, say 50 years for houses and 10 years for cars. If a car embodies 900 US gallons of gasoline that may be (this is arguable) equivalent to around 8,000 kg of CO2. Over 10 years that is 800 carbons a year which doesn't leave much for anything else.

Another problem is the carbon allowance for public goods eg sending a Minister to an anti-whaling conference in Chile. Do we all have to chip in for that and cut back on other personal items to meet our allowance? I prefer the global target of 350ppm CO2e for all of us lumped together.

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Kiashu on June 28, 2008 - 1:35am

When you buy carbon credits from some tree-planting group, they usually claim that trees absorb 500-2,000kg CO_2e over 100 years. So that'd be ¢5 to ¢20 a year.

Realistically, we can expect that at most a third of the trees will be allowed to get to their full growth, and that the survivors will probably only last a generation, 20-40 years. That's because over a generation land tends to change in use - 40 years ago my suburb was half fruit orchards.

So I just chose a middle figure which seemed reasonable. If you find a figure you think is better, then on the spreadsheet you can unhide the 'B' column and change it.

For all things, I thought it better to charge them when they came to their first use. If you say, "well, my plasma screen TV is a 500kg CO_2e, but will last five years, so that's ¢100 a year," what happens if you replace it after two years, or six? What if you split with your missus and she leaves the tv, how much does she pay? What if you bought 40lt of fuel expecting it to last a week but it lasts two, or vice versa? It gets confusing. Easier just to pay upfront, the way you have to do with $ money.

Yes, cars, houses and so on then become extraordinarily expensive in ¢. Just like in $. And in fact it's true that if we want to achieve 350ppm - or even avoid 1,000ppm - then we are not going to have everyone on the planet buy a new car or build a new house every ten years.

Concerning public goods, I already said,

I've also noted that of all our emissions, all our spending of Carbons, about half are things we can control directly in our daily lives - how we get our electricity and how much of it we use, how we transport ourselves, what we eat and so on.

Households control about half of total emissions directly through their own actions. The indirect stuff we don't worry about, that's another issue, write to your MP and tell him to take the bus.

The idea is to have an approach which encourages reduced greenhouse gas emissions and consumption of depleting resources. This would do it, dealing with half of all emissions and consumption. I think if widely-adopted it'd have flow-on effects - less cars driving means less maintenance of roads, and so on.

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