Earth Equity News

'Sandbag' Proposes to Buy Up ETS Permits and Destroy Them. Posted by Chris Turney, Celsias.com, July 20, 2008. "Recently... I learnt of a fantastic new initiative in the UK that allows people to make a real difference. Here I chat to Bryony Worthington at Sandbag about a new campaign to be launched [this fall]... CT: Traditionally, the focus... has been on appealing to people to make personal life choices to lower their carbon footprint. But [Sandbag] is different isn't it? This is actually using the European Trading Scheme (ETS)... BW: ...We're setting ourselves up as a membership organization. People join by paying a subscription and we'll use that money to campaign to cancel [ETS] permits... We're aiming to get permits back... from the companies [who've] been given [them] under the EU trading scheme... The idea is to give the polluters the option to do the right thing and give back some of their permits... If... asking for them back doesn't work we will still guarantee to take a certain number of permits out of the system... [by]...buying [them back] if we have to... As we [eliminate the permits, they'll] go up in value [which] creates a bigger incentive for companies to invest in cleaner solutions. People ask me, won't industry complain [that] it's not fair [for] NGOs [to destroy] the permits? Can't they ask for more? But they can't really. There's nothing the Government can do to take them back or to create new ones. And because ultimately we can't buy them unless someone is willing to sell them to us, they can't really cry foul. It's a free market. If we want to destroy them, that's up to us." Chris Turney is a British geologist and professor of Physical Geography at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the author of Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from Climates Past (Macmillan, 248 pp). Before Sandbag, Bryony Worthington worked for Friends of the Earth, running their UK climate campaign at the time when the current round of ETS rules were being debated.