If Carbon Cuts Were Wages…

by Dave Bath

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 05:46 AM EST

Imagine if the rules for carbon emissions constraint by different countries were applied to wages and taxation within the community:

Those who are poorest would be hardest hit, needing to return to wages of a few years ago… and as most would be young "developing" workers, that might be before they were working, or working for a pittance as a trainee.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest might well be getting more money, based on their income from boom times when they were ripping everyone else off through commissions on dodgy derivatives.

There’d be a bloody revolution.

The only equitable method for assigning country-by-country emissions is to define the total allowable emissions based on a per-capita allowance that is the same regardless of the country, capped to the population of that country in a given year (let’s say 1990).

Instead, it’s as if a crew of castaways was looking at a limited food supply, and then dividing the food according to current bodyweight, never minding that some are underweight, and the morbidly obese who should be losing weight would be given more food than others, and never minding the child that should be growing.

It’s as if drunk-driving rules were calculated based on half your average blood alcohol in tests over the years… repeat offenders might be told it was ok to drive at 1.0% BAC, while the drivers who’d never drunk might have to figure out how to get a negative BAC.

It’s as if the big business associations were given control of the minimum-wage definitions.

And why is this simple fact of equity in carbon emissions per person not being explained in the mainstream media?  Because then consumption by the overconsumers would drop, and advertising revenue would suffer more.

That still doesn’t explain why mainstream media without the need for advertising revenue, like our ABC, doesn’t drive home the logic of per-capita carbon emissions allocated to countries on the basis of 1990 populations.

It is about time that the morbidly-carbon-obese trimmed down.