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AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

I have seen the website. [Interruption.] No, it does not work at all, but it is a wonderful spoof. A lad called Alex can be sponsored for 50p a week, and he will remain celibate so that the sponsor can carry on doing whatever they like. However, they can do it with a clear conscience only by sponsoring him for 50p. In other words, such people can offset their infidelity. Does it reduce the sum total of infidelity in society? No, not a jot, but it makes such people feel better. It has the ring of high moral tone that is so attractive at the moment, to judge by some of our policy making, but it is a scam. We should not seek to offset against future generations and to undertake speculative projects that do not deliver a ha’p’orth of serious change in terms of carbon reduction. I should point out that the website is not serious—its intention is to ridicule an approach that deserves to be ridiculed. If we stand back from the technicalities of such schemes and proposals, we see that the reality is that they do not deliver anything like the scale of change that we need today. Sadly, the same applies to emissions trading. It is a barking mad idea to seek to tackle the climate change challenge by inventing a mythical good called the carbon credit, and to invite the speculative trading of that credit on world markets against second-guesses of what the price of carbon might be in 10 or 15 years time. On asking anyone in the industrial sector about how they make their investment decisions, they will say that it is a question of assessing how those investments will play in real markets. It is hard enough for them to make even those assessments, but asking them also to gamble on assumptions about the cost of carbon in 10 years’ time makes the process a nightmare. The emissions trading scheme has a number of intellectual and practical flaws from which it will never recover. The grandfathering rights that give credits to those who pollute, but not to those who do not, impose a monstrous burden. The scheme applies to the polluting half of the economy but not to the more virtuous half, which is a nonsense. Countries set their own loose limits—many give themselves more in credits in a given year than the amount of pollution that they emitted—so the situation is irretrievable. The scheme is an invitation to cheat, and the only people who make money out of it are the banks and the specialist niche market traders, who charge between 8 per cent. and 30 per cent. to handle the transactions. It is a great market for those who are in the land of wild-eyed speculators. But that is not the economy or the ecology in which we must play a profound part as the agents of change. The mechanisms that have really delivered in the short term are carbon tariff systems, not carbon credit trading systems. If we have the sense to adopt the former, our grandchildren will have much to thank us for.