Every adult should be forced to use a ‘carbon ration card’ when they pay for petrol, airline tickets or household energy, MPs say.

The influential Environmental Audit Committee says a personal carbon trading scheme is the best and fairest way of cutting Britain’s CO2 emissions without penalising the poor.

Under the scheme, everyone would be given an annual carbon allowance to use when buying oil, gas, electricity and flights.

Anyone who exceeds their entitlement would have to buy top-up credits from individuals who haven’t used up their allowance. The amount paid would be driven by market forces and the deal done through a specialist company.

MPs, led by Tory Tim Yeo, say the scheme could be more effective at cutting greenhouse gas emissions than green taxes.

But critics say the idea is costly, bureaucratic, intrusive and unworkable.

The Government says it supports the scheme in principle, but warns it is ‘ahead of its time’.

The idea of personal carbon trading is increasingly being promoted by environmentalists. In theory it could be used to cover all purchases – from petrol to food.

For the scheme to work, the Government would need to give out 45million carbon cards – each one linked to a personal carbon account. Every year, the account would be credited with a notional amount of CO2 in kilograms.

Every time someone makes a purchase of petrol, energy or airline tickets, they would use up credits. A return flight from London to Rome would, for instance, use up 900kg of CO2 credits, while 10 litres of petrol would use up 23kg.

Mr Yeo, chairman of the committee said personal carbon trading rewarded those with a low carbon footprint with cash.

‘We found that personal carbon trading has real potential to engage the population in the fight against climate change and to achieve significant emissions reductions in a progressive way,’ he said.

‘The idea is a radical one. As such it inevitably faces some significant challenges in its development. It is important to meet these challenges.

‘What we are asking the Government to do is to seize the reins on this, leading the debate and coordinating research.’

The Government is committed to cutting CO2 emissions to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2010.

The Climate Change Bill going through Parliament aims to cut emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. The Government has said it backs the idea in principle, but it is currently too expensive and bureaucratic.

Environment Minister Hilary Benn said: ‘It’s got potential but, in essence, it’s ahead of its time. There are a lot of practical problems to overcome.’

A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs report into the scheme found it would cost between £700million and £2billion to set up and up to another £2billion a year to run.

Tory environment spokesman Peter Ainsworth added: ‘Although it does have potential we should proceed with care. We don’t want to alienate people and we want everyone to be on board.’

But critics say the idea is deeply flawed. The scheme would penalise those living in the countryside who were dependent on their cars, as well as the elderly or housebound who need to heat their homes in the day.

Large families would suffer, as would those working at nights when little public transport is available.

It would need to take into account the size of families, and their ages. There is huge potential for fraud.

Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers’ Alliance said the cards would be hugely unpopular. ‘The Government has shown itself incapable of managing any huge, complex IT system.’ he said.

HOW THE SCHEME WOULD WORK

Every adult in the UK would be given an annual carbon dioxide allowance in kgs and a special carbon card.

The scheme would cover road fuel, flights and energy bills.

Every time someone paid for road fuel, flights or energy, their carbon account would be docked.

A litre of petrol would use up 2.3kg in carbon, while every 1.3 miles of airline flight would use another 1kg.

When paying for petrol, the card would need to swiped at the till.

It would be a legal offence to buy petrol without using a card.

When paying online, or by direct debit, the carbon account would be debited directly.

Anyone who doesn’t use up their credits in a year can sell them to someone who wants more credits. Trading would be done through specialist companies.

[…]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1021983/Every-adult-Britain-forced-carry-carbon-ration-cards-say-MPs.html

My emphasis.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Every place that sells alcohol or cigarettes, every post office, every pharmacy, and every Bank will have an NIR Card Terminal, (very much like the Chip and Pin Readers that are everywhere now) into which your card can be ‘swiped’ to check your identity. Each time this happens, a record is made at the NIR of the time and place that the Card was presented. This means for example, that there will be a government record of every time you withdraw more than £99 at your branch of Nat West, who now demand ID for these transactions. Every time you have to prove that you are over 18, your card will be swiped, and a record made at the NIR. Restaurants and off licenses will demand that your card is swiped so that each receipt shows that they sold alcohol to someone over 18, and that this was proved by the access to the NIR, indemnifying them from prosecution.

[…]

Oyster, DVLA, BT and Nectar (for example) all run very detailed databases of their own. They will be allowed access to the NIR, just as every other business will be. This means that each of these entities will be able to store your unique number in their database, and place all your travel, phone records, driving activities and detailed shopping habits under your unique NIR number. These databases, which can easily fit on a storage device the size of your hand, will be sold to third parties either legally or illegally. It will then be possible for a non-governmental entity to create a detailed dossier of all your activities. Certainly, the government will have clandestine access to all of them, meaning that they will have a complete record of all your movements, from how much and when you withdraw from your bank account to what medications you are taking, down to the level of what sort of bread you eat – all accessible via a single unique number in a central database.

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1207&pid=8915&st=0&

That is from the famous “Anonymous email” that warned everyone about ID cards; once again the prescience of its author is vividly demonstrated.

What this Carbon Trading card will do is exactly what ‘Frances Stonor Saunders’ predicted; it will require the creation of a massive centralized database that contains a record of all your purchases, against which (at a minimum) will be your name and your carbon account balance. Of course, what will also be measured is the amount of petrol you bought, where you bought it and when you bought it, and your car registration. The database will also record where you are flying to and when as you book your ticket. You can be sure that it will also record your every journey by train.

Once they put this database together, they can adjust at will, the amount that people ‘pay’ in carbon units manipulating the market at will and without any oversight.

This is the original specification of the ID card through the back door.

What this article, inexplicably, fails to do is connect the dots. Once you have issued 45 million Carbon Trading Cards with every adult’s name, address and a unique number, you have the framework for an ID card that uses the same database. In order to save money in the running of the scheme, the Tories will claim that they are the good guys by merging the Carbon Trading System with the NIR so that they save money on the running of it. That inevitable event will make another part of the Anonymous Email come true:

There will be spaces on this database for your religion, residence status, and many other private and personal facts about you. There is unlimited space for every other detail of your life on the NIR database, which can be expanded by the Government with or without further Acts of Parliament.

Like the email says, there will be unlimited space to add, literally, “every other detail of your life” onto the NIR and this is exactly and precisely what evil, ignorant MP Tim Yeo is advocating; that the NIR be expanded to be used to run this Carbon Trading scam.

This database will record every purchase, every movement … everything, and all of it will be open to examination, all of it will be subject to the same dangers, wholesale releases deliberate and accidental as is and has been the case with these databases.

What’s next? I’ll tell you what’s next: the NIR will be used to monitor how much alcohol you drink. Everyone will be given an alcohol allowance, and this will be monitored through the NIR, as will your calorie intake, as every purchase at a supermarket will be monitored. Monitoring your groceries is a logical extension of this scheme, and in fact, an essential part of it; if you are buying apples from New Zealand, they will have a higher ‘Carbon Footprint’ than apples grown locally. This should be taken into account when you shop because demand for New Zealand products have to be shipped from half way across the world.

I wonder how the New Zealanders are going to react to all of this? Essentially it means that they will no longer be able to export food to the rest of the world, since it ‘costs’ too much to ship the goods they are making. It would mean, at the very least, a contraction of their economy. But I digress.

This scheme is built on a lie, the lie that mankind is responsible for global warming, and it is a pretext for introducing not only new taxes, but an unprecedentedly fine grained surveillance system, built around a single ID card that everyone will be compelled to carry.

The system will centrally record everything you do and which is related to your life, including but not limited to::

• A record of all your groceries.
• A record of every time you buy alcohol.
• A record of every time you buy cigarettes.
• All your medical records.
• A record of all your prescriptions.
• A record of all your journeys by train.
• A record of all your journeys by underground.
• A record of all your journeys by bus.
• A record of all your journeys by car.
• A record of every country you have visited.
• How much gasoline you buy.
• How much electricity you use.
• How much water you use.
• How much natural gas you use.
• Everywhere you visit online.
• All your emails.
• All your text messages.
• Your fingerprints.
• Your iris scan.
• Your ‘race’.
• Your religion.
• Your name and address.
• Your qualifications.
• Your criminal record.
• The names of your wife and children.

In fact, there is nothing that they will not record, except your thoughts.

As we can see, it will cost two billion pounds to set up and two billion a year to run. It is a contractors wet dream, in fact, I would not be surprised to see the contract given to Nectar, who have the skills and capacity to take on a brief like this from a running start.

In the end, they will have created the ultimate system of control, through which your every move will be monitored and taxed and steered. If you dare to complain or to refuse to comply, your card will be stopped and you will not be able to eat, or move unless someone is willing to help you.

That is what the Tories are advocating, and what Hillary Ben describes as ‘ahead of its time’.

It should be abundantly clear to everyone in the country and the entire world that the Global Warming threat is in fact this Carbon Trading scheme and the Carbon Trading tax, radical environmentalists are many millions of times worse than ‘radical jihadists’ and that the former are the greatest threat mankind has ever faced.

They want to completely transform the world so that it fits into their imagination-less frameworks and makes slaves of everyone to that lack of vision.

There are two ways out of this. Both of them can be described as a revolution.

The first is a revolution of the flesh, where the masses dismantle the system.

The second is a revolution in technology, specifically in energy production, making all of this carbon fanaticism irrelevant.

Whatever happens, if these monsters succeed, it will be the beginning of a nightmare that very few people have the capacity to comprehend.

Thanks to TH for the heads up!

Post Script

Does anyone other than me see the irony in these socialists turning to market forces to control the carbon footprint ‘problem’?

They want to create a market in carbon points that will use the forces of supply and demand to govern people’s usage of non renewables, but they will not allow those same, reliable, predictable forces to control the wider economy, where if they were unleashed, these problems would cease to exist altogether.

The example that is trotted out these days is that of cellular phones. If Hillary Benn was tasked with getting a mobile phone into every home, we would still be using suitcase phones and they would cost £1000 each and the network would not work, would not interact with any other cellular network of any other counry, calls would drop repeatedly, sound quality would….you get the picture.

The same goes for energy. If it was left to the market, it would be vastly different to how it is now; electricity would have its true value, and so would gasoline. In response, engine efficiency would be hundreds of times greater than it is now, without compromises, and we would not be talking about any of this nonsense.

These same people would say that the market cannot deliver, but then they turn to it when it suits them. This is the dictionary definition of hypocrisy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Bollocks, Insanity, NIR, No no no!, The Facts, Told You So, wtf?.