Fixing the Earth: At last night’s (5 November) full Town Council meeting Louisa Davison from the Citizen’s Climate Lobby presented the concept of a new ‘Carbon Fee and Dividend’ to the Councillors, asking for their support in taking this forward.
What is the Carbon Fee and Dividend? Quite simply it is a device to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels by introducing a tax or fee for their extraction or import to a country, which is then divided up and given to the citizens of that country, who can use this to pay for the fossil fuel that they use. Or, they can save this and switch to clean or green energy which will be cheaper.
In practice, this would mean that we each get given money to pay for energy, this being the result of the tax/fee that the energy companies will pay for the fossil fuels they sell to us. If we want to buy their fossil fuel we can, but it will be more expensive (due to the tax/fee applied), or we could use solar or wind energy which will be cheaper as it wouldn’t be taxed in the same way.
The outcome for this will be a reduction in fossil fuel usage – because it would become more expensive – which should help reduce global warming.
What’s this to do with Marlborough? We can’t individually make a big dent in fossil fuel usage but collectively, with each town and resident supporting such a proposal there would be sufficient pressure on the Government to adopt this system. And then the more governments that do the same, the greater the effect.
Last night’s presentation was with that objective.
The dangers of global warming are being played out through all the media and we are probably witnessing the effects that it’s creating (more storms and more regular ‘extreme weather events’, where what would once have been regarded as a ‘once in a hundred year’ storm, hurricane, or period of intense prolonged rainfall now becomes a regular event. Not necessarily here in Marlborough but elsewhere in the world. Maybe the recent ‘beast from the East’ that hit us last March was due to this, maybe it was just ‘bad weather’, but climate change is definitely happening and this proposal is one way that can possibly help by making a bit of difference.
The Councillors shoed their support in the form of two rounds of applause at the end of her presentation and agreed to take it forward to the next full Town Council on 10 December.
Further information regarding this proposal can be found by clicking to the Citizen Climate Lobby website.
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