Tim Worstall

Polly Today: Climate Change

Factchecking P.

One minor thing that Polly does seem to have missed:

But Miliband’s electric radicalism comes in his plan for personal
carbon allowances. Here is where social justice meets green politics
for the first time. Give every citizen the same quota of energy and let
them buy and sell it on the open market. The half of the population who
don’t fly will make money from selling their quota to the half who do.
Drive a gas-guzzling 4×4 and you will have to buy a quota from the
third of the population with no access to a car. Who could complain
about such transparent fairness? It is relatively easy to do: swiping a
quota card to pay gas and electricity bills or buying petrol is a
simpler transaction than Tesco’s complex information on their loyalty
card. In wartime, ration books were produced quickly for all, covering
almost everything bought and sold, involving every little corner shop.
(Could paper ration books be easier than trying to computerise it all?)
Why is this a quintessentially Labour policy that the Tories would
never copy? Because it in effect redistributes money from the rich to
the poor, from the frequent flyers to never-flyers, with a parallel
currency.

Anyone care to imagine the size of the black market that will grow up?

A further thought. The Mili-Dave spent £6,200 on setting up his blog. Now we’re going to put him in charge of computerising the entire economy?

In

13 responses

  1. GeoffH Avatar
    GeoffH

    “In wartime, ration books were produced quickly for all, covering almost everything bought and sold, involving every little corner shop”
    Ah, rationing. How Labour supporters long for the Good Old Days of rationing. They just love the idea of telling you how much you can have of anything. And think of all those civil servants needed to operate it.
    Deep in every Labour supporter’s heart there’s a beating pulse longing to get us all back to the 1940s.

    Reply
  2. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    I’m not sure about the black market – the main things covered will be petrol/diesel and home and business heating and power (and other transport, such as coaches,trains and increasingly flights). Only the former has the potential to be sold on the black market, and surely the amounts are too large these days to make it viable?

    Reply
  3. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    Also of course you’d be able to buy coupons, which you weren’t in World War II, so in effect there’d be no more point in the black market than there would in one designed to avoid gasoline taxes, and that’s not a particularly big scam.
    Tim adds: Red diesel isn’t a big scam?

    Reply
  4. Dr Dan H. Avatar
    Dr Dan H.

    Not only would you have a tremendous black market, you’d also have an incredible problem with smuggling and illict acquisition of fuels.
    Say you’ve just run out of carbon credits to heat your house. At this point, the Government are supposed to race out and shut off your gas supply. At this point you’ve a choice: freeze, buy more credits or visit that nice Mr Smith the bootleg coal merchant, who just happens to be operating a small coalmine.
    What most people don’t realise is that coal is actually quite abundant. Most of the local coalmines have closed due to the fuel being hard to get, and low quality; without cheap labour places like Burnley cannot run a coalmine. Yet, look on a historical map and that area was dotted with coalmines.
    Give people an incentive, though, like making standard fuels stupidly expensive, and the old coal mining will re-start, bringing back all the old problems of pollution along with fossil CO2 emissions to boot.

    Reply
  5. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    “Give every citizen the same quota of energy” – Some poor widow woman (cue violins) with a pack of bairns, living above the 1000 ft contour in Aberdeenshire, gets the same quota as a millionaire gadabout basking in the mild climate of Poole. Polly would be the first to compain. Give the children a quota too: Polly would complain that that would be unfair to an elderly couple, she bed-bound, he exhausted by caring for her, living above the 1000 ft contour in Cumberland. It’s a wonderful world: Polly, unhindered by the need for any consistent rationality, and helped by her intellectual incapacity to spot an inconsistency anyway, can urge changes which would themselves just generate even more opportunity to whinge. Not so much perpetual motion, more perpetual moron.

    Reply
  6. Tim Almond Avatar
    Tim Almond

    Isn’t this resolved already?
    I drive a lot of miles. I pay above the price of fuel and externalities. That’s money into the treasury, that they don’t collect from taxes elsewhere like income tax and VAT.
    So, in effect, those people who use less fuel are paying less into the system than if taxes were just on income tax and VAT. Therefore, I, as a high user of fuel, pay them for their lack of use.
    This seems to me the simplest way to implement a “personal carbon credits” system.

    Reply
  7. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    Red diesel isn’t a big scam, no. If the carbon credit price was what you suggest it should be, ie lower than the current petrol tax, then I suspect there’d be less black market sales.
    The heating arguments are interesting, but I can’t see huge numbers of people buying black market coal to escape what will be a relatively small cost. Similarly with heating, I guess you could even pay the cost of credits each time you had your bill, thus making it credit neutral.
    What might be worth doing if I hated Polly Toynbee as much as you all do, is see what she said about the imposition of VAT on home heating fuel in the mid 1990s, or what she said about its semi-removal. If I’m feeling generous I might have a look for you.
    Tim adds: Please do have a look. It’s been one of those questions I’ve been asking recently. Tried to get Tony Juniper and Tony Blair to answer it in ‘The Big Ask’ but they didn’t. Why, if climate change is such a problem, and 30% of emissions come from homes, do we have a special lower tax rate (which many would call a subsidy) on home heating and energy use?

    Reply
  8. Unity Avatar
    Unity

    Ehem…
    I can see it takes a lefty to inject a sense of reality into this discussion 😉
    “Drive a gas-guzzling 4×4 and you will have to buy a quota from the third of the population with no access to a car.”
    So you buy from the people on a low income, welfare benefits or a pension, who don’t have a bank account or credit card and won’t have a fucking clue how anything as complicated as a person carbon market will work and who, if they do manage to sell their spare credits, will have to declare the proceeds as income and either pay tax on them or lose they entitlement to the benefits they receive.
    And that’s transparent redistribution of wealth is it, Polly?
    Tim – how many times have you tried to explain marginal tax rates to Polly?

    Reply
  9. Unity Avatar
    Unity

    And don’t again – you’ll only get called a pendant.

    Reply
  10. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    The idea that pensionsers, welfare recipients or people on low incomes can’t understand a rationing system is ridiculous.
    Having searched Polly’s written output over the last 20 years unless I’ve missed an obvious search term she only mentioned VAT on fuel once, which was in this paragraph in 1997 (April).
    “The serious problem is enshrined in the manifesto’s second commandment, that most holy vow of all – no extra income tax for anyone and a cut in VAT on fuel. There follows a Jesuitical argument: “The myth that the solution to every problem is increased spending has been comprehensively dispelled under the Conservatives. Spending has risen. But more spending has brought neither greater fairness nor less poverty.” A good debating point maybe, but a gaping non-sequitur that does not fill the gaping hole in Labour’s spending plans.”
    You might, however, like this fact, from the FT in 1997:
    Mr Brown said he would have liked to abolish VAT on fuel altogether, but was prevented from doing so by European rules.

    Reply
  11. Unity Avatar
    Unity

    >>> The idea that pensionsers, welfare recipients or people on low incomes can’t understand a rationing system is ridiculous.
    Doesn’t that all rather depend on who’s designing the rationing system in the first place?
    Or, to give a two word response – tax credits.

    Reply
  12. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    Reading the old news clippings though does remind one how politically sensitive VAT on fuel was (partly because the Tories had expressly ruled it out in their 1992 manifesto), and how generally it was considered politically astute to lower it.
    The Independent declared, “There may be justification in taxing non-renewable resources. But gas is one of the least polluting forms of energy. In any case, short sharp price shocks do little to encourage conservation among householders, who are notoriously slow to respond. Perhaps in this knowledge, the Government never marshalled an environmental argument to defend these tax increases.”
    On the other hand Monbiot and Hutton were generally consistent (in favour on environemntal grounds though concerned about distributive effecets). John Redwood though campaigned against it in his 1995 manifesto, “If one of the tax changes was to remove the 8 per cent VAT on fuel, it would not only be popular but would bring substantial savings in public expenditure. This single act would cut the inflation rate substantially. That would mean savings on every benefit that has to be increased in line with inflation, while leaving benefit recipients better off because fuel is a bigger part of their budget. It would also mean savings on the public pay bill, where pay increases are related to price increases. This step could save Pounds 800 million. ”

    Reply
  13. EU Rota Avatar
    EU Rota

    Shouldn’t a “personal carbon allowance” cover all purchases by an individual which involve a carbon component?
    Food, clothing, medical care, etc?
    Isn’t that the point?

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Discover more from Tim Worstall

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading