Citizens' Climate Lobby UK

Category: Climate Income

  • An unlikely opportunity to spread the word…..

    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, Wiltshire

    It’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.

    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….

  • Car Park Fee and Dividend

    Car Park Fee and Dividend

    CCL’s policy of carbon fee and dividend1 is designed to operate at a national level. Fees are levied when fossil fuels are extracted or imported into a nation and the revenue is distributed as an equal income to all citizens of the same country. But there’s a need for climate action at other levels too. CCL should be just as relevant in the personal, workplace, local government and international arenas. We should be offering solutions in these areas that are as beautiful and effective as fee-and-dividend at the national level.

    But, at first sight, fee-and-dividend doesn’t translate easily to other levels. Or does it? I think we can even apply it to running a local car park.

    I’ve been thinking about the University where I work and what we are doing about the Climate Crisis. Sadly, the answer is “almost nothing” but that’s starting to change. In fact, I’ve been asked to give a talk there about CCL and that got me thinking. Could we introduce a fee-and-dividend scheme for car parking to encourage staff and students to use public transport? The idea is simple, a fee for car-parking is introduced but, instead of the University keeping the money, it redistributes the income as a flat-fee to staff and students. The beauty of this is that you can set a high parking fee, to ensure a strong incentive to walk/cycle/catch the bus, without actually penalizing people very much (because the dividend would offset the full cost).

    There are a few details to work on. The scheme would probably need to be split into three separate parts, one for staff, one for students who live off campus and one for students who live on campus. This would recognize that the car-parking needs of these three groups are quite different. There are also tax-implications for staff who get a net-payment (students could just get a discount on their fees). But these are minor issues that I believe could be overcome.

    The same idea might also work for councils but it’s a bit trickier in that context. Parking price-hikes in return for council-tax rebates would penalize those not living in town centres and it would also drive even more of us away from the high streets. Perhaps this could only work if done in conjunction with introduction of greatly improved public transport. Still, it’s worth thinking about.

    At the international level, too, there is scope for fee-and-dividend approaches. The recent COP meeting in Madrid largely failed because of arguments over which countries should pay into a mitigation-fund and which should benefit from it. The answer could be that everyone should pay in and everyone should get payments out. For example, if we set a carbon price of $10 per tonne of CO2(eq), that would produce a dividend of about $65 per person. The UK, for example, would then pay in about $5 billion but get back a refund of $4.35 billion.

    The beauty of this is that, as with my car-parking example, incentives are magnified by the imposition of a relatively high fee whilst keeping the true cost relatively small because of the refund. Perhaps the fee-and-dividend approach to carbon pricing can be used across a wider range of applications than we’ve generally considered. It’s certainly worth thinking about.

    1. Sorry, I’m not calling it “Climate Income” here but only because my title wouldn’t work if I did.