What Kyoto means for personal incomes

Shane Mage shmage at pipeline.com
Wed Apr 10 12:51:34 PDT 2002


James Heartfield wrote:


>What Kyoto means for personal incomes: a reduction of two thirds!

This, presumably, on the basis of the following computation:


>...Meanwhile, power companies now offer clean electricity for sale
>at a premium of 0.25p per kWh. This equates to about £6 per tonne of
>carbon dioxide avoided. So a permit to emit one tonne of carbon
>dioxide seems to be worth about £6 today. On this basis, I owe my 22
>counterparties about £130 between them.
>
>What would happen if we all did this? Our payment for permits to
>cover the 300m tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted from the UK each
>year in excess of our individual Kyoto "fair shares", would amount
>to £1.8bn, or about 0.2% of the UK's GDP....

1/500 is a little bit less than 2/3, wouldn't you say? In reality, the switch to a hydrogen economy (a matter of making the right investments and exploiting very modest improvements in now-available windmill, photovoltaic, and fuel-cell technologies) plus transition to widespread organic farming à la Cuba would in and of itself result in big increases in real living standards everywhere.

Shane Mage

"Thunderbolt steers all things."

Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64



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