During his talk in Vancouver promoting his new book, Heat: How to stop the planet burning, London’s Guardian newspaper columnist George Monbiot extolled the virtues of a personal carbon trading system—a concept he says is the best means to quickly reduce a nation’s overall contributions to greenhouse gas emissions.

It wasn’t his idea, he told The Republic, but rather Mayer Hillman’s, a senior fellow emeritus at the Policy Studies Institute in Britain. Whatever it’s original source, it is certainly the most effective known solution to high and growing national levels of greenhouse gas emissions. It is also, amongst all proffered solutions, the most likely to win broad political backing, because it is also the least onerous to any existing economy.

The Republic described an independently developed personal carbon trading system in a past issue, and the concept in one or another of its many manifestations is now increasingly seen in widely divergent policy circles as the one solution that actually has a chance of winning legislation. The concept deserves closer scrutiny by all citizens concerned about greenhouse gas emissions and the global climate change they cause. As well, all policy makers as well as politicians at all three levels of governance should also feel compelled to study it carefully and discuss ways of supporting it and implementing it municipally, provincially, nationally, and internationally.

The concept of personal carbon trading has evolved into several locally-developed varieties, but the main structure is elegantly simple and it’s operation easily imagined. A simple example is a gasoline trading scheme.

Implementation of a national gasoline trading system in Canada might look something like this: Everyone with a social insurance number in Canada would be issued an electronic card like a debit card or store credit card that carries on it a certain number of gasoline-purchase credits. Canadians presently burn about 40 billion litres of gasoline in their private cars in total, per year. To lower the total national consumption of gasoline by, say, 5%, the government would put on these electronic cards 38 billion purchase credits in total, or about 2,100 purchase credits per adult over the age of sixteen.

Every time we go to fuel up, we must present our card, which then has its purchase credits deducted by the number of litres we just bought. Some people, if they don’t change how they drive, will run out of credits before the end of the year, while others will have excess credits they can’t use. Those who wish to can buy more credits from those who have some to sell in order to keep on purchasing more gasoline. A simple on-line trading system can be established, or there may even arise a private bulk brokerage industry that makes selling and buying of gasoline purchase credits easy for individuals.

In this way, no one is telling anyone what they can or cannot do. Everyone is free to do as they wish, buying as many extra purchase credits as they need to continue driving what they want for as many trips as they desire. As more drivers do so, those who conserve their credits will find their market price going increasingly higher. This will encourage more people to conserve their credits to take advantage of the prices being offered by other drivers.

No one, not even the government, needs to be in any way involved in establishing or changing prices at which credits are bought and sold in the market. The market can be allowed to peg the price wherever it naturally falls.

In subsequent years, the total number of litres allowed to be sold in the country can be lowered by manageable increments of say 5% each year. With this method, in ten years, we can have lowered our national consumption of gasoline by 63%, nearly two-thirds. This measure alone would lower Canada’s emissions of greenhouse gases by over 21%—and will have produced the additional benefit of diverting over $26 billion away from international oil companies and into other far more productive areas of the economy like local restaurants and small businesses.

Personal carbon trading systems evolved out of already up-and-running carbon trading systems applied by national and US-state governments to specific industries. There they have worked marvelously at deploying the forces of market competition to fairly and effectively produce overall lower levels of pollutants and emissions with none of the usual rancor over state involvement in the economy with regulations and taxes. In this solution, there are no regulations or taxes.

One serious drawback to this concept is how those who live further away, or are poorer, or who absolutely require a car for their work, will pay more than those who can easily get by without using their car as much. But that’s the case already with high and rising gasoline prices: those who need more gasoline than others for whatever reason will pay more for it over the course of the year. It’s true that the scheme amplifies the cost disparity. A further mechanism involving the government holding back some of the available credits and selling them themselves and then diverting the proceeds to a lowering of taxes at the pump would serve to mitigate some of that disparity.

There is certainly a strong and growing international consensus that something must be done by all national governments, and soon, to combat what is increasingly viewed as a looming massive climatological disaster, and that cutting greenhouse gas emissions, in particular those produced by private cars, is the top priority. The treatment the Canadian government was subjected to at recent meetings in Europe underscore the urgency. The dead-on-arrival Kyoto alternative proposed by the governing Conservative Party in Ottawa demonstrates the need for new ideas on cutting greenhouse gas emissions that are not economically catastrophic. Some form of personal carbon trading system may well be the answer.

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