On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, James Heartfield wrote:
> You miss the point. Englishman Richard Barry calculated his own personal
> production of greenhouse gases and compared it with the Kyoto target
> divided by the number of people. Barry's conclusion is that his
> consumption habits gave rise to three times as much CO2 as Kyoto allowed
> him. Translate that into the expected change in income, his wages fall
> by two thirds.
Jim, really. Go look at that math again. CO2 emission is about as directly related to income as caloric intake is. Past a basic threshhold, you could easily double or halve the one while holding the other constant. It depends on your concrete consumption practices rather than your abstract income.
Also, you seem to be conflating expenditures with income. Lowering the former doesn't lower the latter. It just leaves you with more savings. Raising required expenditures might lower income in real terms. But, to got back to point one, practices that lower personal CO2 emissions could just easily lower personal expenditures, e.g. switching from the car to the bus. You might argue that quality of life went down in such a case, but that's a different thing from lowering wages, real or nominal. In the bus example, real wages and quality of life can actually move in opposite directions, with the fall in quality of life being accompanied by more money left over to spend on other things because the minimum necesary transport costs have been diminished.
Barry's calculations actually bring him to exactly the opposite from yours that satisfying Kyoto would take a big bite out of first world incomes. He says that under his nonwheedly version of the Kyoto trading scheme (where countries like the UK get no dispensation for being cold and damp), the UK would have to transfer 0.2% of its income to poor countries to come out even -- which would be in itself a good thing by your lights, no? And that if he did it on his own in a retail market, relatively high C02 consumer that he is, it would cost him #130 a year. At current exchange rates, that's $187 -- about 0.44% of the 2000 US median household income.
Your argument doesn't fall on this point of course. But I sure wouldn't stand on it if I were you. I think the privations you are concerned with have more to do with time budget losses (and thus opportunity costs) and frustrated desires. But not, on this reckoning, with falls in real wages.
Michael