International Law

The Guardian: Government scraps carbon card scheme for fear of ridicule

Just in case any Labour party supporters or others, disillusioned with Gordon Brown (as we have always been) are thinking that David Miliband, the current Foreign Secreatry, would somehow be any less of a totalitarian control freak, regardless of his "good intentions", the Guardian reminds us of his Flagship Policy Idea when David Miliband (not to be confused with his equally reprehensible brother Ed Mliband, who is also a Labour Government Minister) was in charge of the Department of the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

This scheme would have been pure evil - an unnecessary alternative currency of "carbon credits", which would have created new classes of organised criminals i.e. "blackmarket spivs") and would have required intensely detailed, very intrusive centralised database snooping into every citizen's use of energy at home, or work or their use of private or public transport.

Such a system of rationing did not work fairly, even under the desperate temporary dictatorship command economy conditions of World War 2. Why should it be tolerated now ?

Government scraps carbon card scheme for fear of ridicule

David Adam
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday May 8 2008

Ministers have scrapped radical plans to test a carbon rationing scheme that would have forced citizens to carry a carbon card to swipe every time they bought petrol or paid an electricity bill.

The plan was announced by David Miliband, former environment secretary, in 2006 as a way to cut greenhouse gas emissions and tackle global warming. But officials from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said today that the idea was too expensive and would be unpopular.

Why has it taken them 2 years to decide this ? It was obvious a few seconds after Miliband uttered his ideas about the scheme.

Defra said a feasibility study found that carbon rationing was "an idea ahead of its time in terms of its public acceptability and the technology to bring down costs." While there were "no insurmountable technical obstacles", the study found such a scheme would cost £1-2bn each year and would be perceived as unfair.

Defra said it was abandoning plans for a pilot scheme to test the idea, because it would be "unrepresentative" and "could lead to failure and subsequent public distrust and ridicule."

We would have been looking for ways to prosecute the miscreants who inflicted such an evil scheme on the public.

How could it ever hope to work more efficiently than the normal price mechanism of supply and demand ?

In a statement, the department said: "The government remains interested in the concept of personal carbon trading and, although it will not be continuing its research programme at this stage, it will monitor the wealth of research focusing on this area and may introduce personal carbon trading if the value of carbon savings and cost implications change."

No you will not !

Under the scheme, all UK citizens from the Queen down would have been allocated an identical annual carbon allowance, stored as points on an electronic card similar to Air Miles or supermarket loyalty cards. Points would then be deducted at point of sale for every purchase of non-renewable energy. People who did not use their full allocation, such as families who do not own a car, would be able to sell their surplus carbon points into a central bank.

High energy users could then buy them - motorists who had used their allocation would still be able to buy petrol, with the carbon points drawn from the bank and the cost added to their fuel bills. To reduce total UK emissions, the overall number of points would shrink each year.

[...]

Not even the Soviet Union's Communist Central Planners at GOSPLAN would have thought that such a scheme could ever be either practical or popular,

The fact that David Miliband thought that this was a good idea to inflict on the British public, speaks volumes about his wasted, twisted intelligence, and about the corrosive effect of his impractical Marxist intellectual upbringing.

Full post as published by Spy Blog on May 08, 2008 (boomark / email).