Get out your carbon ration book

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To be honest, I had assumed that the idea - giving everyone in the country an equal share of carbon credits to be spent judiciously on heating, transport and goods and then allowing the carbon thrifty to sell their surplus - had been mothballed since it lost its patron saint, David Miliband, to foreign affairs.

I now see this was an error. Juliette Jowitt’s piece this week charts developments since those heady days of explicit government support. Leading proponent, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), which has developed CarbonDAQ (a virtual carbon trading site for personal allowances) reckons we’re on course for individual carbon budgets in 10 years’ time.

Yes, within a decade you could be making space in your wallet for another Nectar-style reward card that will clock every purchase, flight and lightbulb you buy and deduct them from your given carbon allowance. Or perhaps the chip will just be implanted in your forehead so you can run that through a head-height checkout in the fulfilment of the Orwellian nightmare that detractors envision.

Spookily, this is the second time within a week that I’ve found myself being reacquainted with the opportunity/spectre (which is it?) of personal carbon trading. It came up during a discussion called The Politics of Limits at the launch of the Fabian Society’s pamphlet The Green Crunch last week.

The author, Sir John Harman, the former head of the the Environment Agency, is not a fan. “The interest that the government is showing in personal carbon allowances is worrying,” he asserts at the opening of The Green Crunch.

Presumably he would be very anxious indeed were he to venture down to the RSA and the Local Government Information Unit thinktank who are again promoting it.

I’m not sure I buy the bad, mad and dangerous argument. Yes, it would be good to have what Harman calls a more “liberal version of collective action” as a solution to pressing environmental and social justice problems. But achieving this has many hurdles in its way, even though a lot of people find personal carbon trading an attractive option. It is seen as a potentially revolutionary way to cut carbon which can also redistribute wealth.

Carbon rationing is horribly complex. In January 2007, I came up with the bright idea of doing a carbon diet for the Observer focusing on the things you could do to cut personal emissions. Annoyingly, this was just weeks before Chris Goodall’s useful book was published so I spent weeks sobbing over my calculator and reports full of conflicting estimates of emissions tied to everything from washing towels to orange squash.

The RSA CarbonDAQ figures, and project director Matt Prescott, rescued me. Divining the embodied carbon emissions of every damned thing did not then appear to be an exact science, but progress was being made. In 10 years’ time, will we have watertight calculations to make the rationing of carbon a reality? Or will it be regarded as an unacceptably authoritarian tool and fall by the wayside?