I hope this never reaches the light of day. Its another excuse for the government to tax people. I’d question if the money made from such a tax would be invested in green technologies for the future as well. In fact, could they make a profit? How are the government going to track how far you travel in your car? Such a system would cost an awful lot of money, indeed it could reach many billions to install a box in every single vehicle in the UK.

The government needs to lead by example and really make a proper investment itself – why not invest in offshore wind farms and wave energy? If they invest in the research and implementation of wave energy in particular we’d reduce our carbon emission by a lot – we’re an island for pity’s sake, we’ve plenty of water to rely on.

Go outside, and look at the how many different electricity mains are connected to your building. You’re right – there is only one. It is the connected to the same grid that provides electricity to everyone else in your neighbourhood.

Despite the fact that you buy your energy from utility company ABC and your neighbour purchases his/hers from utility company XZY, it still comes down the same wires, from the same source. So you might be paying for “green” energy, and your neighbour might be purchasing “non-green” energy, but it’s still coming from the same place.

With the exception of hydro-electricty, the only way to generate the large amounts of power required for modern living, at a reasonable cost, is to do so from non-green methods. I’m talking about the baseload necessary to energise a major power grid. The options essentially are either nuclear or coal – both of which have distinct environmental disadvantages.

None of the green options are capable of carrying the baseload. Both solar and wind generation can only be utilised to cover peaks on a major grid, because they are both too variable and too expensive. Solar is useless at night, because major grid systems cannot store energy to be released at a later time like a battery can.

Other forms, such as geothermal and tidal energy, are still in the experimental phase. Geothermal energy created by extracting steam from water injected into hot rock is an idea being pursued in Australia, but the idea now appears to have some fundamental flaws in that may cause geological damage.

Your utility company is simply a retailer who buys the quota that it resells to you from whatever the cheapest source is at the time, because they are in the business of making money. And that unit cost changes on an hourly basis as the different energy generation companies who supply energy to the grid vary their unit pricing in response to load variations during the day.

So please don’t be fooled by the idea that “…if you pay a little extra, we can ensure that your electricity is provided from green sources..”, because the reality is that they can’t.

Hence why I agree with the author that personal carbon ration would end up being the same giant fraud that carbon tax is – the rich who could afford green options will look for loopholes, the poor who can’t afford to become greener will get screwed, and the environment will be no better off whatsoever.