Carbon
December 1st, 2006
The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) allows carbon dioxide emissions, by the tonne, to be bought and sold like shares. At the current price of about €8 / tonne (I think… there are very few free sources) and given that a transatlantic flight emits about 1.2 tonnes, you can purchase back your own CO2 for less than £7. Sadly, I don’t know if ETS even allows public trading and I couldn’t find a site on the web that does it either.
The total EU budget for carbon dioxide is about 245,430,000 tonnes per year, but there are about 456,953,258 people in the EU. Even if only one in 100 bought carbon we’d only have to spend about £30 / year to buy up the whole carbon budget – forcing everyone to become carbon-neutral. The companies would probably just pass the costs straight back to us, but its an interesting idea nevertheless.
Entry Filed under: Politics
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed