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The Jubilee idea could save the earth

The vision for personal carbon trading can be found in the Bible, says Nick Spencer

Going down: Tristan Nunn (<i>left</i>) and Charlie Nunn at the launch last month of a project by Stirling to become the first carbon-neutral city in Britain PA © not advert
Going down: Tristan Nunn (left) and Charlie Nunn at the launch last month of a project by Stirling to become the first carbon-neutral city in Britain PA

Rationing is not a vote winner. That is why the Government decided recently to wind down its research into one of the most promising responses to what most politicians agree is the world’s most pressing environmental problem.

Personal Carbon Trading (PCT), as yet untested anywhere in the world, has been the subject of numerous studies over recent years. It works along the lines of existing industrial cap-and-trade schemes, such as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. Under this, governments set emissions targets for participants, such as power plants and heavy industries. Participants are then compelled (at least in theory) to meet the targets — either by adapting their practices, or buying credits from those who do so — or else face a fine.

PCT does for people what such schemes do for industry. It allocates to every adult a number of carbon units, which they then surrender when purchasing energy and fuel. Under-emitters (the car-less, those with 100-per-cent-renewable electricity, and so on) can make a profit from selling unused units back to the market, while heavy polluters are forced to pay more to support their lifestyle.

In one (admittedly big) stroke, what the economist Sir Nicholas Stern called the “greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen” is corrected. The economic ground is tilted towards prudence and efficiency, and a degree of social equality — everyone, from prince to pauper, gets the same allowance — is achieved. PCT is a masterstroke.

Yet there remains a problem. PCT is a form of rationing, and ministers know that no one willingly votes for rationing, however necessary. As one of DEFRA’s recent studies reported: “There was considerable [public] reluctance to the idea of imposing ‘limits’ on individual carbon emissions.”

Not surprisingly, the Government kicked the idea into the long grass. Technically feasible, socially equitable, environmentally inspired, PCT lacks the public credibility to make it happen. What no one seems to have noticed is there may be a moral case for personal carbon trading that is not only persuasive but also inspiring. It comes, perhaps strangely, from the Bible.

The Jubilee Drop the Debt Campaign did two extraordinary things. First, it secured the cancellation of debts that seemed impossible even five years earlier. Second, no less remarkably, it made the book of Leviticus mentionable in polite conversation. The Old Testament inspiration behind the campaign was not hidden — it was celebrated. “It is no longer Morris, Keynes and Beveridge who inspire and change the world,” wrote Will Hutton in The Observer in October 1999. “It’s Leviticus.”

One of the things the Drop the Debt Campaign also did, however, was to popularise the view that the Jubilee legislation of Leviticus 25 was simply about cancelling debts. In reality, although debt-cancellation was crucial, it rested on three foundations that remain vital to understanding the whole system.

First, while the people of Israel could use the land in which they lived, they could not own it. They were “aliens and tenants”; leaseholders, not freeholders, prohibited from selling the land “permanently”.

Second, the land was distributed equitably. The long (and, to us, irredeemably tedious) chapters in Numbers and Joshua record in meticulous detail the division of the land “according to their clans”, which was crucial to the nation’s socio-economic structure. In them, we read that the land was to be shared equitably between all — rather than owned by an élite, which would then rent it to the rest, as in other societies of the time.

Third, in between Jubilees, land could be traded freely. People could, as it were, sell their inheritance, safe in the knowledge that every 50 years debts were cancelled and the land returned to its original owners. What they were really trading was not land but usufruct, “the legal right to use and derive profit from property that belongs to another person, as long as the property is not damaged”.

Put into modern terminology, the Jubilee sought to combine equality of opportunity, a stakeholder economy, and a healthy level of social capital. Most significantly from an environmental point of view, it guaranteed everyone equal access to natural capital, in such a way as to encourage personal responsibility without risking permanent disenfranchisement.

This is precisely what personal carbon trading does. PCT works by granting everyone an equal share of common natural capital, in this case the atmosphere rather than the land. As with Leviticus 25, people do not (indeed cannot) own that natural capital, but they can use or trade it as suits them. Profligacy will cost, but never permanently impoverish them. In the long term, and in spite of what they do with it, the reallocation of carbon units effectively cancels all debts. Capital is returned to them for the next cycle.

The sheer moral passion that the Jubilee Drop the Debt campaign generated offers a good precedent for any Jubilee-based environmental campaign. No one should ignore the difficulties: rationing is rationing, however inspiring it is made to look. But if we are half as serious as we claim to be about climate change, we need to face the prospect of changed lifestyles seriously.

Criticising the Government’s decision to sideline PCTs, the cross-party House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee commented recently: “What is needed, urgently, is a shift in the debate away from ever-deeper and more detailed consideration of how personal carbon trading could operate, towards the more decisive questions of how it could be made publicly and politically acceptable.” It is a long shot, but the vision and rhetoric of the Jubilee may be just what we need.

Nick Spencer is Director of Studies at Theos (www.theosthinktank.co.uk).



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