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Carbon Rationing Action Group

What is Carbon Rationing?

The atmosphere has a limited capacity to soak up green house gases. Carbon rationers believe that this represents a unique shared resource.
In a carbon rationing society, those producing more than their fair share (or ration) of green house gases can only do so by finding someone who is living within their fair share and therefore has some ration to spare and buying their ration. In this way, polluters are penalised, the rest of society benefits and the total amount of green house gases produced is controlled.

If we reduce the size of our ration year by year, carbon rationing becomes a pathway to a fairer, lower carbon future.

 Check your CO2 emissions 

What is a Carbon Rationing Action Group or CRAG?

A CRAG is a group of people who have decided to act together to reduce their individual and collective carbon footprints. They do this in annual cycles. First they set themselves an annual emissions target or "carbon ration". Then they keep track of their emissions over the year by keeping a record of their household energy use and private car and plane travel etc.

Finally, at the end of the year, they take responsibility for any "carbon debt" (i.e. emissions over and above their ration) that they have built up. All carbon debts are paid into the group's "carbon fund" at an agreed rate per kilo of CO2 debt. The fund is then distributed as agreed by the members of the group.

 Carbon Rationing Action Groups 

If you would like to get involved with a carbon rationing action group? Plymouth Environment Centre is looking to form such a group -  get in touch  if you would like to get involved with this project.

Ok lets do it for Plymouth and surrounds. Initial decisions to agree on are:
  • Do we limit the area to : the Plymouth postcode?
  • Who will keep the accounts (tally not money).
  • Initial meeting and how often do we meet?
  • Agreed starting level of CO2 : 4 Tonnes (4,000Kg)
  • Penalty for excess use eg 6p.
  • Sharing of penalty fees by proportion.
  • How often do we settle accounts?

Update

For a National Option :  Personal Carbon Allowances 

The Government is looking into the feasibility of tradable personal carbon allowances. This is just one of a number of potential long term options being explored for making individuals better informed about, and involved in, tackling climate change.

An initial scoping study has been produced for Defra by the Centre for Sustainable Energy. This study concludes that a personal carbon allowance and trading system has the potential to achieve emissions savings in a fairer way than carbon taxes. The Government is now developing a work programme which should provide the information to lead to a decision on whether or not a personal carbon allowance is a realistic and workable policy option.

Personal carbon trading – variously described as personal carbon allowances, domestic tradable quotas, and tradable energy quotas – is a potential way of reducing domestic greenhouse gas emissions. An overall emissions cap is set, and emissions rights are then divided equally across the population. These "carbon credits" are then surrendered upon the purchase of energy/fuel/transport. Those who need or want to emit more than their allowance will have to buy allowances from those who can emit less than their allowance. Over time, the overall emissions cap (and hence individual allocations) could be reduced in line with international or nationally adopted agreements.

More information


For starters, you can discuss this issue via a  bulletin board .

To avoid spammers: Please register on the soapbox and provide a PL postcode in the location option but do not add a www entry.

Added 9th February, 2007 by Erica
Updated 3rd June, 2007 by Roger

Internal links checked Goto Xenu Link Sleuths' Website on 11th February 2008

 
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