Polly Toynbee: Carbon credits tick all the boxes. What's the delay?

...Personal carbon trading was the most popular option: it was the fairest and it wasn't seen as a new tax. Here's how it works: each year everyone gets equal carbon credits to spend on petrol, home heating or air travel. People exceeding their quota can buy more credits. People who use less can sell credits. It encourages home insulation, energy saving and less driving or flying. Since low earners use less - 20% have no car, 50% don't fly - they can profit by selling to those with big houses, foreign holidays and gas-guzzling cars. It would be a powerful but voluntary agent for redistribution.

Failure to pursue personal carbon trading (or any other method) joined the long list of good causes killed by Labour cowardice. At Defra, David Miliband took it up with enthusiasm and commissioned a feasibility study, but after he made a strong speech advocating it, Gordon Brown at the Treasury banned any further mention. Miliband was moved away and what was called a "pre-feasibility study", limped out with the judgment that this idea was "ahead of its time". They guessed it would cost £2bn a year to run, threw up sundry obstacles, and the report disappeared.

Odd that a government with computers thinks it can't introduce a simple credit system, when a Nectar or Oyster card shows how easily home and car fuel bills and airline tickets could be deducted. Historian Mark Roodhouse of York University draws comparisons with his work on wartime rationing. Back then the state provided ration books for all, covering not just fuel but coupons valuing virtually every individual item in the shops from clothes to food.

Have we become more administratively incompetent since then?

Letter - Denmark’s Green Energy Policies - NYTimes.com

Thomas L. Friedman is right to praise Denmark’s green energy policies (“Flush With Energy,” column, Aug. 10). But he doesn’t mention one crucial point: If the historic achievement he admires was created by hands-on government, recent history has shown that government policy can also break a positive energy circle.

The current conservative government slammed on the brakes when it took over in December 2001. In a free-market, climate-skeptic spree, it canceled three offshore wind farms, abolished government schemes for energy conservation, slashed research in renewables and recently abolished Denmark’s historic freeze on coal-fired power stations.