A big thanks to everyone who rallied to our urgent request to submit a response to the government’s consultation on the Carbon Emissions Tax! We will shortly be adding the official CCL UK submission to the website for you all to read. In the meantime, you can pat yourselves on the back and put your feet up (briefly!)
Author: Catherine Dawson
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Why writing letters to the press is so useful……
In a recent blog I mentioned the value of writing to the media to get more people aware of the advantages of CF&D and that we have set up a media team. A CCL Europe member, Brigitte van Gerven, has just written a very good explanation of why CCL Europe is planning to do the same…….
The goal is to establish a good relationship with the mainstream press and other media, make the carbon fee and dividend and CCL more well known among journalists, and to get articles, letters, and opinion pieces published in the mainstream media…..
When we go lobbying politicians their reactions are generally positive, we have their respect and we come across as people who know what they are talking about. But there are still some barriers which make politicians hesitate to go a step further and support CF&D.
1. CF&D should become more well known
2. CF&D should be broadly supported by the public
3. CF&D should be more credible e.g. backed up by experts and studies
4. CF&D should be perceived as feasible within the EU contextThe media group can contribute significantly to 1. and 2. and therefore advance our cause. An article in the mainstream press genuinely attracts the attention of politicians and makes them take notice. Even more ideal would be if we succeed in starting a public discussion about the CF&D in the media.
If you would like to join our media team – just drop a note to [email protected].
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A good argument for Carbon Fee and Dividend by a Free Marketeer
Ambrose Pritchard, writing in The Telegraph criticises the proposed Democrat Green Deal as being a dirigiste policy with an ulterior motive of ‘fuelling’ the trade war with China. He gives a very cogent explanation of the mechanics of carbon fee and dividend and why he prefers this market led method of carbon pricing. He also argues why the dividend should go directly to consumers…
Mr Biden’s new age Gosplan is not to my taste. Should the Democrats be pledging to install 500 million solar panels and 60,000 wind turbines over the next four years? Is such dirigiste planning the American way?
The laissez faire way is to set a carbon price that ratchets up predictably, letting business respond to the price signal, and letting Schumpeterian competition find its own answers. All former chairmen of the Federal Reserve and a cast of economists of all ideological stripes have backed HR 763, a bipartisan House bill for a carbon tax and dividend.
It starts at $15 a tonne and ratchets up $10 every year until CO2 emissions are almost eliminated. The money raised is rotated back into people’s pockets. The higher the carbon price, the bigger the cheque, and the poor do best.
Needless to say, Ursula von der Leyen’s variant in Europe aims to siphon off its carbon tax to fund the Commission’s apparatus. The EU seems to have learned little from the gilets jaunes and the sociology of revolt.
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An unlikely opportunity to spread the word…..
A hot tip from a fellow member of the CCL UK Media Team gave me the hook to write a letter about Climate Income that has been published in last Sunday’s Observer (26th July).
The trigger was an interview in the fashion section of the magazine with the supermodel and activist Lily Cole, whose book Who Cares Wins: Reasons for Optimism in Our Changing World is published on July 30th (Penguin Life). To our delight, Lily Cole ends the interview with a brilliant endorsement of CF&D – which offered a clear lead to this letter…..Cole, not coal
Lily Cole describes two types of environmental activists, the wizards and the prophets (“We need to be more forgiving”, the Observer Magazine). Currently the prophets seem to grab the headlines in the UK, which results in surveys in which 59% of adults say they can’t afford to be greener. When asked what she would do if she were prime minister for the day, Cole described a method of carbon pricing known as “carbon fee and dividend”, which would enable us all to benefit from the wizardry without having to wear hair shirts.
This method, also known as “climate income”, is already adopted in Switzerland and Canada and is seriously being considered in the US. As Cole states, it would “put a price on pollution”, rendering greener fuels, heating, production methods etc cheaper than those made with fossil fuels. The monies earned from the escalating fees on fossil fuel extraction are given back to the public as a dividend. Our government has even acknowledged its advantages, but isn’t minded to adopt it at the moment.
We in the UK Citizens’ Climate Lobby are working hard to encourage our government to change its mind. Carbon fee and dividend could rebuild the economy in a way that doesn’t compound either the disastrous social and economic effects of the pandemic or the disastrous environmental effects of basing our “rebuilding” on fossil fuels.
Catherine Dawson
Devizes, WiltshireIt’s only a few months now since a few of us formed the Media Team in order to share tip-offs, ideas for publication, and, especially, encouragement. There are numbers of possibilities to spread the word this way – check out Writing to the Media, under Action, on this site – but working as a team can increase our power. Please consider joining us – just drop a note to [email protected]. Remember, letters on the same topic persuade editors as well as MPs of that ‘groundswell of public opinion” which is such a key objective for CCL UK.
Meanwhile, if you fancy reading Who Cares Wins (and it does look like an enormously readable and thoughtful book), try to get a book review out on websites like Goodreads, Librarything.com, social media, local environmental group websites or parish newsletters – and send us a copy!
Green prophet: Lily Cole’s new book divides climate activist into Wizards (who innovate) and Prophets (who champion less consumption). Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Observer -
The public perception of the cost of going green and one celebrity’s endorsement of Climate Income.
In Millions of Britons cannot afford to ‘go green’ poll claims (Independent 8/7/20) Emma Elsworthy reported that 59% of 2000 adults said their budget would not allow them to be any ‘greener’. Government policies such as the Climate Change Levy and Green Deal as well as Macron’s disastrous policy have ‘fuelled’ this assumption that going green has a price. We have to strive to show that with Carbon Fee and Dividend this need not be the case, especially now that everyone is arguing that we can not go back to the status quo after the pandemic.
One celebrity who seems to have got this is Lily Cole, who was interviewed in last week’s Observer newspaper, (the Fashion section) in an article entitled We need to be more forgiving.
Lily has written a book, Who Cares Wins: Reasons for Optimism in Our Changing World. She divides environmentalists into prophets and wizards…
The Tesla tech whiz Elon Musk is just one of the so-called “Wizards” she has interviewed for her book, Who Cares Wins: Reasons for Optimism in Our Changing World. The Wizards are the people who are using technology in an attempt to innovate us out of the environmental crisis. In the other camp are the “Prophets” who say we must cut back, travel less, consume less, simplify. Cole examines both approaches in the book.
Lily discusses how tree hugging activism can be alienating to people who don’t want to end up in prison, which I presume is most of us, and also recounts a horrifying plane free journey we can all sympathise with! Although she is doing a lot to live out and encourage a sustainable lifestyle Lily has realised that piecemeal individual efforts are not enough and that we need a mechanism to make structural change the no brainer option which benefits rather than penalises society and she describes just that….
What law would she introduce if she were prime minister for the day? “From an environmental point of view? Put a price on pollution.” A similar tax caused uproar in France, when fuel tax riots engulfed Paris in 2018. “But the devil is in the detail right? They didn’t design it in the right way, so it impacted people financially. But there are examples, like Canada, where it’s well designed and doesn’t penalise poorer communities, and can even offer wealth redistribution, with the tax redistributed equally among citizens, so the less you pollute the more you make.”
Here’s hoping that, like Lily, we can help shift the perception that that going green has to hurt to be effective and get the message across that there is another way….
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Virtual mass lobby – useful, but not the only chance
I have been a member of CCL for just over a year, having been persuaded by a talk by Prof. David Waltham that this was a group which had an effective and doable solution to climate change and a democratic and sensible way of achieving their goal.
I wasn’t really sure how much the mass lobby last year had achieved and signed up to attend this one with some trepidation, especially as our Devizes CCL group had already started correspondence with our new Conservative MP Danny Kruger and a Zoom meeting at which we had managed successfully to get him to agree to look into the current government thinking on climate policy issues and report back to us. I was worried that the virtual lobby may jeopardise the good rapport we had built (which is so embedded in the principles of CCL but not in that of other pressure groups).
We started thinking about strategy in advance and decided to use a question based on the carbon pricing report published earlier in the month (which we would have lobbied our MP about even if the mass lobby hadn’t happened) and to suggest all CCL lobby participants used it. This was a question which all MPs could do something about, by agreeing to ask about this issue in parliament, and could be the ‘beginning of a beautiful friendship’ or at least a productive one between CCL groups or individuals and the local MP.
The Constituency Office had asked for questions to be submitted beforehand which meant the MP could be prepared to a certain extent and time wouldn’t be wasted. We decided that one person who had been most active in engaging with our MP and building a good rapport would field the question. I think this helped the MP to feel comfortable with the process. Strategy was finalised in a Zoom meeting the night before.
I think because of the rapport we had built with Danny Kruger he decided to have our question first, which was a huge relief because I was worried that the lobby would be taken over by lots of vague demands that no Conservative MP would be likely to have truck with and we would have no time to field our question. We were allowed to ask secondary questions, ‘putting a hand up’ in the chat box if we wanted to ask a question, the MP could then decide who would speak next.
MP Danny Kruger in the Zoom virtual lobby The Government’s plan to revive the economy had also been published the day before and this also enabled the other questions fielded to be very ‘concrete’ (pun intended) as they were asking about the emphasis on new build and roads rather than investing in retrofitting which had even been promised in the election manifesto. One participant was an expert in passive house construction, again this meant sensible questions could be asked about policy which the MP was capable of looking into. The chat function also enabled participants to add facts or links to information, I copied this to the CCL participants and the MP after the lobby as I am not sure what happens to the content of ‘chats’ afterwards.
The hour long ‘lobby’ went very well and was a means of showing our faces. I do feel that the success of the lobby owed a lot to the fact that we had already built a working relationship with the MP before the lobby, he knew that our approach would be respectful and positive and we knew his background and interests (as a new MP we had to do the research and know what not to mention!). In short, the lobby was a useful tool but should not be seen as the only opportunity to engage with your mp so if your voice wasn’t heard don’t despair, write a letter and hopefully get the ball rolling!
Judging by Danny Kruger’s constituency newsletter released on Saturday the 4th the lobby has achieved what we had hoped for! Danny has gone public on his commitment to discuss carbon fee and dividend (aka climate income) with the government and to look into the retrofitting issue further. Result!
Catherine Dawson took part in The Climate Coalition’s The Time is Now virtual lobby on 30th June 2020. More than 30 people, of which a third were CCL UK members, took part in the Devizes Constituency meeting with Conservative MP Danny Kruger.
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The response to the Covid 19 Emergency is influencing the response to the Climate Emergency (and mostly in a good way).
Christina Figureres wrote in the Guardian of June 1st about how many international institutions and corporate leaders are learning the lesson of governmental responses to Covid 19 to call for ambitious green economic stimulus packages.