On the day that Ryanair announced huge year on year profits, ‘Green Week’, the European Commission’s annual conference showcasing the European Union’s environment policy, has begun.

The link between these two events is that aviation pollution is responsible for the highest rising levels of carbon emissions in the UK, and the surge in global air travel is thus having a huge impact on speeding up climate change. In amongst all the worries I had over the elections and who I could possibly vote for with a clear conscience, my main concern was that in the end, none of the policies will matter if we don’t get environmental policies working first. And I think that one of the biggest problems with getting people to change their behaviour with environmental issues is that not only is the government not forcing us to make sounder choices, making them isn’t even made that easy – which, coupled with an apathetic and uninformed attitude from the public, means that being ‘green’ is still regarded by many as the choice of lesbians, vegetarians, social workers and other left-field members of society.

Consider it: in my house, we prefer to use less damaging household products. We all cycle as our primary form of transport. We collect and re-use our plastic bags (as we all cycle, we will often fill our panniers up without using plastic bags at all). We recycle weekly. We tend to all shop locally, especially at the weekly farmers market on Broadway Market, which sells predominantly British grown food. But it isn’t always easy to do these things. When our Ecover washing liquid ran out, I used a less environmentally friendly one which was lying around, and a stain which had been on a t-shirt of mine for a couple of months disappeared. The Ecover had never managed to shift it, and I have stopped using it. In our excellent council run recycling scheme, we get a small box to fill up with our weeks’ recycling. It isn’t big enough. My weekend papers alone fill it up. And if we leave it outside once it has been emptied, it tends to get nicked very quickly.

I am a firm believer that it isn’t enough to provide schemes for people to opt in to on a voluntary basis. Even people like me who do believe that it is one of the most important issues facing us, will get affected by apathy. And I was therefore delighted to read of a proposal for an EU wide scheme introducing carbon cards, whereby each government within the EU will give 40% of its carbon emission quota equally to individuals, with the rest being auctioned to business and industry.

The beauty of the scheme is that individuals would then be able to sell on anything they managed to save on their allowance. So for people like me, who never drive, I would almost certainly have points left over. I could then choose to ’spend’ these on such things as the long-haul travel I tend to take more than most, to visit my family in various places around the world. Conversely, if I were a four by four driver, I could create a well insulated home which requires less fuel consumption to run, and have more to use on my gas-guzzling monster. And if I am a paragon of environmental virtue, I will have credits left to sell on to individuals.

This is precisely the kind of scheme to grab the public’s interest. It is fair. Unlike proposed taxations on fuel emissions, which will add more to the bills of lower income households, it isn’t punitive, and offers the possibility of extra income to careful consumers. It gives people the choice of how they want to reduce their own personal emissions. And it highlights the fact that everyone needs to take responsibility for these emissions. It completely sidesteps the ‘it’s not down to me’ attitude that plagues the movement towards a more environmentally sustainable world.

At the moment, it seems like it is only a notion on the agenda. Perhaps it is self-interest which motivates my wanting it implemented – after all, as a cyclist, I have greater sympathies with those sticking guerrilla stickers on SUVs than those driving them, and I am top of the list of those likely to benefit from such a scheme. I sincerely hope that it could be implemented, and even go further, making people use credits on goods they buy which travel long distances such as vegetables from the other side of the world which have to be flown in refrigerated conditions to reach our tables within days of picking. Or clothes which have been made on the other side of the world. A reduction in the purchase of goods like this could even have the knock on effect of stopping companies using sweat shop labour in far-flung countries, the stranglehold of multinationals on small-scale farmers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2005 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Topical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.