Green Choice letter to editor published Sat 17th March

The letters to the editor on Friday 16th about John Mackay’s comments point out the difficulty with a voluntary system. Most of us agree that we should to do something about green house gases, even if it is only an insurance that global warming may be real, but we are not willing to be one of the few bunnies willing to sign up to Green Choice (although I have:). To tackle green house gases effectively means we all have to contribute. This means making green house gas producing energy include a cost for carbon emissions. We can do this as a tax, but we are suspicious that the government will just collect the tax and spend it on something else. Also a tax to make a difference to investment decisions on producing green energy would be too high to be readily accepted – and unnecessary. A simpler solution is to put a surcharge on all green house gas producing energy and call them green points. We leave the green points under the control of the purchaser. The purchaser has to spend their greenhouse gas points on something that will reduce green house gases – like insulate their house, buy shares in a wind farm, put it into research into photo voltaic cells, or anything else that we agree will help solve the problem. We could have it in operation almost immediately and so start to make a difference now and not wait 10 years for nuclear or clean coal.