Incentives for a low carbon footprint

[Jon]

It is all very well the political elite telling us to cut our footprint while travelling around in jets to spread the message, just like Al Gore does. But if we curtail our freedoms to make our environmental impact less, while others do not, then this could encourage tit-for-tat approaches. "I can't be bothered because most people I know don't bother." This is altogether different from the argument, "If everybody thought that way, then nobody would cut their carbon footprint", since you are talking about extremes and this is highly unlikely.

So, how about having incentives for keeping your carbon footprint low? Perhaps we could dawb the doors of the worst offenders with a skull and crossbones, and put roses on the most virtuous. Al Gore would have a pile of skeletons in his driveway, since it appears he is one of the worst offenders, and perhaps the biggest hypocrite of them all.

Maybe a simpler way would be to have a sliding scale of tariffs for energy use, just like a tax rate that goes up in different bands.

I've often pulled out the argument that I would help the environment by buying a fuel guzzling Hummer. Sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but I do low mileage each year and so would take it away from a high-mileage user, thus saving the planet!

[All the above is a mute point if our actions are making very little difference to the planet and the change in temperature is predominantly caused by variations in global temperatures that have happened throughout history. But for this argument, I assume our carbon is a nasty carbon.]

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Without getting into the Anthropogenic Global Warming debate here (because that horse has already been beaten pretty badly in the Access World Forums thread), I'll say that some things make sense anyway.

Reducing the carbon footprint doesn't always mean literally reducing your own carbon footprint. It can also mean reducing OTHER carbon footprints. Just last week my wife and I had our favorite handy man come over and replace our fluorescent lights with super-bright LED fixtures in three rooms. When the house was originally built, fluorescent lights were in vogue and the previous owners had them installed. Now, LED is here. This change indirectly reduces the carbon footprint in several ways.

1. LEDs consume a LOT less energy so place a lesser demand on the power generation system to consume fossil fuels to supply that energy.
2. LED's longer lifespan (estimated 13,000 to 15,000 hours) means less frequent replacement which means less demand on manufacturing them.
3. LED's lower power consumption reduces the threat of overheating that carries with it a risk of causing house fires (which SURELY would add to the carbon footprint if your house burned.) With traditional fluorescent lights you run the risk of having an overheating ballast as well as the heat of a bulb that requires gas to become ionized. They get HOT pretty quickly.
4. The eventual disposal of a "dead" LED fixture is not as big a problem as disposing of CFC or other types of fluorescent light sources that contain some non-zero amount of mercury, a known liver-killer (through heavy-metal poisoning).

The fifth benefit has to do with more light because the modern LED strip produces more light than the fluorescent strip but that is not a carbon footprint thing. The sixth benefit is reduced RFI in the household since fluorescent bulbs have to put out enough power to ionize neon gas in a long tube. Maybe not many amps, but LOTS of volts required. Again, not a carbon issue, but a valid safety issue.