Tuesday, 15th December 2009
December Brussels Briefing
1. GIVE EVERYONE A CARBON CARD
As thousands of delegates look forward to their second week of talks in Copenhagen, the world holds its breath. Lashed by storms and floods, Scotland knows that the spectre of global warming is very real.
But even as oil prices creep back towards $80 a barrel, we queue at the petrol pumps and we burn gas and electricity in our homes, offices and factories, like there was no tomorrow. And if we go on like this, the experts warn, there may indeed be ‘no tomorrow’. Our gas guzzling habits and the vast quantities of CO2 we emit have caused massive environmental damage.
CO2 is almost entirely emitted as a result of the burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. Around 40 per cent of energy emissions currently arise from households. There are therefore few better ways to help the environment than lowering the fuel bills for homes and dwellings. So energy efficiency must be a top priority. Don't fill the kettle to the brim before you boil it. Don't leave your TV on standby when you are out. Switch off lights when you leave the room.
On the other hand offices, factories and vehicles produce much of the remaining greenhouse gases. Petrol and diesel engines are major offenders, but virtually every city, town and village is now clogged with vehicles from dawn to dusk. Motorways and even country roads are routinely grid-locked, with lorries, buses and cars, often reduced to a nose-to-tail crawl, spewing forth vast quantities of toxic exhaust fumes into the atmosphere. Even the skies above are facing traffic congestion. Aviation emissions are set to double from 1990 to 2010 from jets criss-crossing EU airspace.
In the face of apocalyptic predictions about global warming, it is astonishing that we are still dragging our feet when it comes to taking action. We need innovation and lateral thinking if we are to tackle this problem effectively.
Carbon card systems should be considered as a means of reducing emissions from all forms of energy use.
Under this scheme, every individual citizen and organisation would be issued free of charge with a CO2 emissions quota, with 40 per cent going to individual citizens by way of a carbon card. The remaining 60 per cent would be auctioned off by the Member State Governments to business and industry, with the proceeds used for other environmental control measures. The EU would allocate an annual carbon budget for each Member State. This budget would be reduced year on year until we reach the target set by the Copenhagen summit.
Citizens would be issued with a ‘carbon card’, providing them with a free entitlement to a set number of carbon units per year. This carbon card would be swiped every time they buy petrol, diesel, coal, gas or electricity. It would be swiped each time you buy an airline or train ticket. 60 per cent of adults are below-average emitters and would be able to sell their surplus units; it would likely be popular with the majority of the public. Gas-guzzling 4 by 4's would disappear from city streets overnight. People who cycle to work would have a windfall new source of income with carbon units to sell.
Everyone would become, quite literally, environmental-stakeholders, carrying their share of national emissions on their carbon card, surrendering units to their gas and electricity suppliers by direct debit and flogging their surplus units on-line.
A carbon card system across the 27 Member States of the EU would quickly have a dramatic impact on controlling CO2 emissions. The market would be utilised to tackle a serious environmental problem, while ensuring equality remained at the heart of the system. Personal carbon quotas would enable every citizen to play a part in cutting CO2 emissions, thus helping to avoid the increasing cycle of floods, storms and landslides that are the hallmark of global warming.
2. STORM CLOUDS IN THE EAST
Since Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won his second fraudulent election earlier this year, the Tehran regime, under the iron grasp of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has advanced its goals by taking advantage of indecision and division among Western allies.
The clerical regime is conveniently advancing its domestic and foreign policy objectives. Domestically, repression has been ramped up, with a rising number of executions, amputations, stoning to death of women and men and mass arbitrary arrests. Leaders of the popular uprising which took place following the elections, have been rounded up, imprisoned, tortured, subjected to show-trials, and several have now been sentenced to death.
On the 4th of November, tens of thousands of protesters again took to the streets of Iran’s main cities chanting “Death to Khamenei, Death to the Dictator”. Once more, hundreds were beaten and arrested.
This week (14 December), Iranian authorities arrested several people accused of destroying photos of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at student demonstrations. They oppose him for backing President Ahmadinejad's disputed June re-election.
Supreme Leader Khamenei who, once was deemed to hold sway because of his direct line to God, is now seen as a corrupt dictator who personally intervened to ensure Ahmadinejad was declared the victor of June’s elections. His grasp on power now relies on brute force and oppression. Freedom and democracy in Iran are a forgotten dream.
The mullahs are advancing their destructive foreign policy agenda, too. They dream of Tehran as the centre of an Islamic Empire, ruled under a strict Sharia code and stretching in an ominous crescent around the key oil-producing nations of the Middle East.
For over three decades, their fingerprints have been found on many of the worst terrorist atrocities around the world. Their malign influence is evident in Palestine, where they fomented the civil war and the division of that country. They backed Hezbollah in the war against Israel in Lebanon, supplying arms and cash. Only two weeks ago, the Israeli Navy intercepted a huge shipment of missiles and other armaments that the Iranians were attempting to send to Hezbollah in Lebanon. They have poured money into Yemen in support of the Shiia rebels who are fighting a bloody war against the Sunnis on the border with Saudi Arabia.
The mullahs and their clique of fascist supporters are eerily similar to the Nazis in Germany during the 1930s. Like the Nazis, they are intolerant of even a shred of dissent and torture, hang and oppress their own people to maintain an illegitimate monopoly on power. Like the Nazis, they undermine international peace and security by spreading their brand of fascist hatred worldwide through conflict, bloodshed and terror. Like the Nazis, they are adept at countering fear with hope, deluding other powers into negotiations when necessary and later opening the tiger’s cage when opportunity knocks.
For them no laws are respectable and nothing is sacred. What is more, they share an intense feeling of anti-Semitism with Hitler. Hitler’s Nazis portrayed the Jews as parasites and locusts. Ahmadinejad referred to Israel in a speech as “A black and filthy microbe called the Zionist regime.” He denies the holocaust and has repeatedly said he wants to wipe Israel off the map. Now he is building the nuclear weapons that will enable him to do so.
Ahmadinejad is the Hitler of this millennium. And yet, like Europe’s initial reaction to the Nazis, we are following the path of appeasement. While Europe dithers and delays, the mullahs race ahead with their nuclear programme. While the West pretends to impose tough sanctions, leading European companies are all the while supplying sanction-busting equipment to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Ahmadinejad has rejected all offers of compromise and has continued the expansion of the project with over 3000 centrifuges now operating in cascade to enrich weapons-grade uranium.
And yet we recently witnessed the unedifying spectacle of Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Authority and an apologist for the regime in Tehran, exposed as having tried to stitch up a secret deal that would have allowed Iran to keep the bulk of its nuclear programme in return for the West lifting all sanctions! It is almost unbelievable that such craven appeasement could even be contemplated.
The US and Israel say that Iran has to be stopped from developing a nuclear weapon at any cost and that a military strike on their nuclear installations might be the only option if dialogue fails. But that would be a catastrophic mistake. A military strike on Iran would simply pour petrol on the flames of conflict in the Middle East and unite the Islamic world against the West.
But there is an alternative to either military intervention or appeasement. There is a third way, which seeks to cultivate the vast potentials of a suppressed population. We should give our support to and empower the main Iranian opposition movement to the mullahs, the People’s Mohajedin of Iran (PMOI) and help them to achieve regime change. We should help them to provide leadership and support to the tens of thousands of ordinary Iranians who risk their lives daily to take to the streets in protest.
The current situation has placed the West in front of a fateful dilemma on Iran. We must either accept the emergence of a nuclear-armed theocracy, potentially the world's first 'suicide state' and its dominating role in the most sensitive region of the world, or we must adopt a firm and resolute policy to confront the mullahs’ ambitions. The critical situation in Iraq and Iran’s well-advanced nuclear programme mean that the West has only a limited amount of time to make this crucial decision.
It is shameful that Europe continues to act out of fear and cowardice and it is high time they realised that the peace they have bought is only temporary and the price they have paid has been freedom and democracy for the people of Iran.
Unless we take decisive action now, the specter of Ahmadinejad’s regime will come to haunt us in the future.
