New Labour fascism ... part far to many to count

David Miliband, is laying out the idea of the government rationing the amount of carbon that everybody can emit. Environmentalism is the excuse but don't we already have the best way know of getting the CO2 emitting activities to where they are really of most use? The market, plus a carbon tax (fuel duty) to cover the externalities.

You could argue that fuel duty does not cover the externalities of producing carbon. And you would be wrong.

There are many companies that offer Carbon offsetting services, and the average price is roughly $16.13 per metric ton of C02, or £8.81 per metric ton at the time of writing, according to Google. Car fuel duty is 47.1 pence per litre, or £471 per cubic meter of petrol. One cubic meter of petrol is 737.22kg. Assuming the molecular masses the oils that make up petrol are on average that of pure Octane (since it is a mix of all the oils, but mainly the alkanes, with between 5 and 12 carbons) this will burn to roughly 2447kg of CO2. So one Cubic meter of petrol will cost about £39.50 to offset on the open market. That is 3.95p per litre. So yes Fuel Duty covers the externalities of producing CO2, in fact you are paying over ten times the actual cost of the externalities. But rampant inefficiency has got to be expected with anything that the government gets it's claws into.

They want to replace the best system that we know how to build, that more than covers the externalities that it is supposed to, with one that is demonstrably worse. Wonderful. This cannot be about the environment, or they would not be proposing changing to a worse system for the environment than we have at present. So, like Perry de Havilland, I must conclude that yet again this is are fascist government trying to gain more control over what is none of it's business.

UPDATE

Via the Devil's Kitchen here is The Register's take on this little disaster in the making.