Today’s Free Story Idea is, as they say, ripped from the headlines. The original article by Andreas Kluth appeared in Bloomberg Opinion a few days ago, but since then it’s been infiltrating out via syndication to all the other newspapers too cheap or lazy to hire their own staff and write their own content. I saw it in this morning’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, but since both of these sites are behind paywalls, if the above links don’t work for you, this search query should turn up a site where you can read it for free.
The thrust of it is in the headline: “We need cap-and-trade for individuals as well as companies.”
Let that sink in for a moment.
For the Greater Good and to save Mother Earth, our betters are proposing a global, individual, carbon tax and credit system. But not that overtly, of course.
Some selected highlights:
“In systems for individuals, by contrast, hassle is a deal breaker. Around 2008, the U.K. looked into person carbon allowances. [...] But the details would still have been fiddly, requiring new types of carbon “accounts” with plastic cards and such. People wouldn’t have accepted the system. The idea was discreetly dropped. [...]”
But not forgotten...
“For another thing, the pandemic and other trends have changed our relationship to technology. We’ve grown accustomed to using our smartphones as one tool to fight the virus, as ever more people in ever more places use apps to trace contacts or prove vaccinations. They’re also tracking their health, nutrition and exercise, shopping and ordering food, transacting and trading. Carbon allowances would be just one more app.
“If designed well, an individualized system could therefore reach consumers in a way that’s not only simple but even fun. [...] Managing our carbon budgets [...] would become socially cool.
[...]
“The bigger challenge will be social and political. In principle, personal allowances should help reduce inequality because poor people tend to emit less than the rich, so that folks with lower incomes can make money out of the jet set, in effect taxing the fat cats. Still, people in rural areas, who drive more, might need extra permits to keep the peace.
“Even then, not every country will be culturally ready. [...]”
Oh really, ya think?
Never mind that any such system would be run with the same corruption-free integrity and efficiency we’ve come to expect from any large governmental or international program. Let that last paragraph I quoted percolate in your writer’s brain for a minute. Then imagine a world…
• where some people exist solely to be “harvested” for their carbon tax credits
• where signing over your carbon tax credits is a condition of employment
• where extra carbon credits are an important executive perk
• where signing over your carbon tax credits is a prerequisite for getting public housing (and where all housing is de facto public housing; that’s about ten years out, but a topic for another column)
• where even the choices you make when you buy food at the grocery store count against your carbon budget
In other words, imagine a world of utter, absolute, and remorselessly enforced serfdom, where most people are dependent on the corporate/government structure for the fundamental necessities of life—food, water, shelter, and warmth—but they embrace that serfdom, because they’re being constantly reminded that it’s for the Greater Good! And besides, it’s fun!
Now as a fiction writer, here’s your challenge: either defend that system, or find a way to throw some sand and junk in the gears.
__________
I’m filing this one under “Books I’ll Never Finish” because in a way, it is. Back in the 1990s I began researching and writing what was to be my big, serious, non-fiction futurism thesis. I called the project TechnoFeudalism, because that was the gist of it: that this coming wave of awesome computing power and communication technology was only briefly going to appear to be liberating. In the long run the resulting social changes would lead to an effectively feudal society, run by oligarchs for the benefit of oligarchs, who felt even less sense of obligation to or responsibility for their serfs than the average Medieval lord felt to his.
I’ll never finish this book now for one very simple reason. It ain’t futurism anymore.
—Bruce Bethke
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