LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS DEBATE AND TOWN HALL MEETING ON JUNE 25TH AT 3PM.

TEN BY TEN = 10X10 = 10% REDUCTION OF CO2 IN THE UK BY 2010. Come join the debate to save a tithe. A savings of CO2 of 10% by taxation, public policy and resource management is the only easy and fast method to achieve progressively the 60% savings by 2035. The matrix is as follows. 10% by 2010, 20% by 2015, 30% by 2020, 40% by 2025 and so on to 60% by 2035. It is a sensible and progressive reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere for the near future. An economic axiom is that higher energy price expectations in the marketplace along with the certainty of the taxing of CO2 emissions will lead to an economic stimulus. It will certainly also lead to a greening of the economy. And that is what Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman agreed with me in our last conversation at LSE this past Thursday.

We can thus achieve the objective of a 10% reduction in CO2 emmissions by the end of the year 2010.

Of course Public policy and the taxation mechanisms are at the heart of this. The price of energy is the obvious way to reduce consumption. A tax on energy would do this. Accordingly the emissions will be reduced. Now which political party vying for leadership in the UK will actually deliver this mechanism?

We will ask them on the 25th of June at LSE.

Environmental Parliament has a simple plan.

There are the usual three main points:

 1) It is essential an energy tax is a replacement for other taxes, not an additional tax. For example, if the tax was set at 10% of revenue (national and local), business rates, council tax, vehicle excise duty and insurance premium tax could all be abolished. The average person would overall gain as much as they would lose. Those who waste energy would be worse off, while those who use little energy would be better off -- which is the whole point.

 2) The tax should be levied on the end user. Waste heat from fossil fuel and nuclear power stations should not be excluded from the tax. This has two benefits. If the power station operators are taxed on the waste heat -- of which they are the end users -- and have to recover that from their customers, it transforms the economics of renewables vs non-renewables, since renewables in general produce no waste heat. It makes renewables much more price competitive. The second benefit is that it encourages the use of waste heat in CHP systems, since then the power station operator would not be the end user of the waste heat, and the tax would be paid by the person whose property is being heated.

 3) The methods above will also reinvigorate the economy by creating jobs in the building sectors where energy efficiencies will be sought by weatherizing old homes to making them more efficient and in the new building sector. This will lead to an economic stimulus and a greening of the economy. These are all green jobs and businesses that are set to progressivelly decrease the CO2 emissions. Additionally all the savings can be redirected to alternative sustainable technologies and energy generation as well as sustainable environmentally friendly finance and services.

As for the figures, a 10%-of-revenue tax would mean roughly 2.5p per kWh on renewable electricity and domestic gas, 21p per litre on oil fuel products; and 8p per kWh on fossil and nuclear electricity where the waste heat is not reused.

There are also international measures the Environmental Parliament could call for.

A) Climate Change, once it starts disrupting global food production, will kill a significant proportion of the human population of the planet. Depending on which books you read, forest clearance accounts for between 25% and 40% of human carbon emissions to the atmosphere. People who destroy mature native forest are therefore committing a crime against humanity on a far larger scale than anything seen in, say, Rwanda. They should be treated exactly as other war criminals.

B) That's the forest "stick". The "carrot" should be a fund administered by the UN and contributed to by each country in proportion to its fossil fuel emissions. This fund should be of sufficient size to rent mature native forest worldwide under threat of destruction, and to do so at such a price that the owner, be they government, corporation or individual, cannot make more money than they're paid in rent by converting the forest land to agricultural use.

C) The world spends just over a trillion dollars a year on defence. That makes for a hugely powerful vested interest and a lot of jobs. Suppose Climate Change were declared to be a "threat to national security" (which it soon will be) and the defence industry were given the task of tackling it. Say for example a defence contractor was asked to build a geothermal power plant instead of an aircraft carrier. Would they really object? By defining Climate Change as a defence issue it would enable the defence budget to be tapped while permitting the military-industrial lobby to keep their budgets and their workforce. Suppose every country pledged to spend 50% of its defence budget incrementally on defence against Climate Change by 2020. That'd be over 2.5 trillion dollars worldwide over the next decade. It would buy a prodigious amount of green technology. Furthermore, since defence is an expenditure, not an investment requiring a pounds-and-pence payback, the cost of developing green energy sources through the defence budget would not need to be paid back, any more than the cost of a jet fighter or a battle-tank has to be. This would have a large positive effect on the economics of renewable energy. See You all at LSE at the 25th of June to question your politicians and specifically the Environment ministers and shadow secretaries as well as the city of London administration.

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