Adopting: The Personal Carbon Cap or PCC

Adopting: The Personal Carbon Cap or PCC

I want to start with these numbers and graphs from the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii.  One graph shows the CO2 increase from 2016 to 2020, and the other one shows the increase from 1960 to 2020.  You are all probably quite familiar with these graphs and measurements from NOAA.  Bending this graph downwards might seem simple but it’s the most difficult thing we will have to do to save the biosphere and biodiversity from catastrophic damage.

We humans often try to have our cake and eat it too when it comes to anything environmental.  Take wild salmon, BC Hydro installed dams that killed the salmon, so we installed hatcheries to make new salmon, but it was all a Grand Illusion, which has not worked as intended, indeed, it has been a huge failure.  The idea seems to be, “Let’s do something, so we don’t have to stop doing what we are already doing.”  It would be much better to deal directly with the original problem in the first instance, than dreaming up a workaround which will probably fail.

Carbon taxes are also a failure waiting to happen.  Coincidentally, the new Bill Gates book just came out, and it addresses this topic — badly — in my opinion.  I quote Bill;  “Working on this book has made me even more conscious of my responsibility to reduce my emissions.  Shrinking my carbon footprint is the least that can be expected of someone in my position.  In 2020, I started buying sustainable jet fuel, willfully offsetting my family’s aviation emissions in 2021.  For our non-aviation emissions, I’m buying offsets through a company that removes carbon dioxide from the air, and installs clean energy upgrades in affordable housing units in Chicago.”  Gates has no intention to reduce or stop flying, to stop building giant homes, or to curb his extravagant lifestyle.  He has no intention of making any such sacrifices, or directly reducing his carbon footprint.  He wants to have his cake and to eat it too, like most of his kind in the one percent.  He refuses to set an example that we all can follow.  For the few people on the planet that personally acted on Greta Thunberg’s no/fly movement, by taking fewer flights, Bill Gates just wasted all the carbon we saved.  No, such people will have to be directly reined in with caps on their personal emissions.  There is no way we are going to turn this number around by implementing a tax that will be paid by those that can afford it, but which allows them to continue burning huge amounts of carbon.  Who believes ordinary people will make sacrifices, if the rich don’t have to do the same?

The PCC, the Personal Carbon Cap.  There is no possibility we are going to address the problem of Global Heating unless we revolutionize our entire way of doing things.  Every person on the planet has a carbon footprint and can make that footprint smaller. We are going to have to ration carbon by way of a Personal Carbon Cap, or PCC. Of course, the size of this number cannot be figured out by politicians. I suggest a respected scientific body, such as NASA or NOAA calculate the PCC. Just like a speed limit on the highway, everyone will have to obey that number.

Selling the PCC.  A lot of politicians and scientists are saying that we should treat Global Heating as if it were a devastating military attack or struggle equal to World War II.  Some others talk of a climate emergency.  In 1935, I am sure there were plenty of  issues, many not much different from those of today, but that all ended four years later when World War II began.  Almost the entire focus of politics was to bring the war to a successful conclusion.  I think this is where we are today.  There are many issues out there that are very important, but unless we reduce atmospheric carbon, those other issues won’t matter much.  During World War II, the citizenry in the Allied countries had to ration almost everything, from butter to gasoline, and the entire population, rich or poor, had to obey the rationing laws.  Marketing the PCC, I think we can learn a lot from the past Wars and how they used celebrities, the rich, and the well-to-do, as an example.  Everybody was involved and everybody rationed for the war effort and it was considered patriotic