People need to save more for retirement. The planet could do with much less carbon in the atmosphere. Combine the two. Climate change problem solved. 

If you want to debate whether global climate change is “real,” argue about how severe the impacts are and will be, or whether humans should even be contemplating behavioral and economic changes to manage global climate change, kindly check out of this post now.

Rather, this post explains a conceptual and, if I do say so myself, elegant (on paper) means of reducing carbon discharged into the atmosphere as individuals participating in our economy.

First, recognize that when we talk seriously about reducing carbon, by default we are talking about massive social and behavioral change. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. Individually, and as a society, we emit carbon everywhere, our mouths, our automobile tailpipes, our furnaces, our sources of electricity (unless nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, or other non-carbon source), our offices, our schools. Everywhere!

I have been an electricity/energy industry professional for 35 years, and have been in the middle of environmental management and global warming debates for all of that time. There have long been two gaping holes in climate change “solutions.” They fail to appropriately account for individual responsibility and change and they fail to offer long-term incentives for changing behavior. Most of the time, I throw up my hands at the complexity of the problem and the solutions (at least from a systems, multi-dimensional perspective), and conclude, that there is only one way to articulate the solution: Use less! Consume less. Have less stuff. Reduce your life’s footprint, whether you measure it in carbon, dollars, community, locavores, etc.

Yes, there are periods when people collectively are not only acutely aware of environmental issues but engaged with them. Usually, they are short-lived episodes, always coinciding with periods of escalating energy prices. When prices return to “normal,” people go back to complaining but not doing.

Why do we go to work, earn money? Because the economy revolves around money. If we don’t have money, we starve. If we make more than we need for survival, we thrive. We can even have fun, have more leisure, etc. One of the basic tenets of a modern economy is that we save for when we are older and can’t work, or don’t want to. We contribute to government programs (through payroll contributions) that help us in retirement. All modern economies do this. We save on top of that if we don’t want to just “subsist” when we quit earning money.

This is the key to my elegant solution.

My solution has two parts: First, develop standards for monitoring carbon reduction, whether it is how you heat your home, commute to work, buy your groceries, grow you food, or school your children. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. If you take mass transit rather than drive alone to work, you reduce your carbon footprint. If you ride a bike, you reduce it even further. If you use less heat for your home than, say, the average American household (commensurate with your household size and square footage of your home) or the average home in your state or your area, you reduce the carbon footprint. If you are vegetarian, you have a smaller carbon footprint than if you are a hearty meat eater. If you home-school your children (maximize use of your home as a resource, for example) and use resources from the web, rather than travel a long way to a private school, you positively impact the carbon footprint.

You see where this is going. You need yardsticks. You need to authenticate the behavioral change with a number determined from an agreed-upon methodology. This won’t be easy. But it can be done.

Then, you can tally an individual’s carbon reduction regularly. You can tally a business, a school, a house of worship.

Now, imagine you make behavioral changes with carbon reductions for your entire working career. In a bank somewhere, quietly summing over the course of that career or life, are your “carbon reduction credits.” What if the government treated this just like an IRA or a 401K? Over the course of your retirement, the government rewarded you. The more carbon emissions you avoided, the larger your carbon IRA/401K-like savings account is. The means of reward could be discussed. It could be lower taxes (this is how IRA and 401K programs work today and the tax advantages are compelling). It could be social security like payments. For young people, it could be student debt forgiveness. It could be a choice that changes over the course of your life. But it has to be something substantial. something that makes you want to sacrifice for the long term in the same way you sacrifice the now for retirement, spending today for the kids’ college tomorrow, and so on.

Ever seen the national debt clock? How fast it spins? Think if a plurality of Americans contributed to their personal carbon avoidance or carbon credit clocks and thereby a national carbon clock.

Now, I have not figured out how the government will back these payments with real money. Then again, the  federal government has unfunded liabilities coming out the wazoo, war expenditures which are off the “balance sheet,” oodles of treasury bills held by China and Japan (and god knows who else), and the dollar is strengthening! Which goes to show you, the amount of debt is immaterial, if your country is still, in a relative way, considered the safest bet out there. Controlling the high seas, the skies, the digital air waves, and the global monetary network probably doesn’t hurt either. But I digress.

I hesitate to suggest that at the end of each year, along with our tax returns, and other end-of-year financial record-keeping, we could also have carbon credit filing? God, I more than hesitate. To think of one more government form on the order of the tax code? Ugh! BUT, you know, if you want to solve a long-term, global problem, then everyone has to be in it to win it. It doesn’t have to be complicated (although I recognize the vagaries of bureaucracy mitigate against simplicity over time), and maybe on-line record-keeping or even automation through our personal digital devices could help.

Only carrots or sticks permanently alter behavior. You can force automobile manufacturers to make more efficient cars. You can force electric utilities to use less fossil fuel. You can spend a great deal of money to put in light rail and bus lines. You can hector people about living more simply. But the best way to achieve long-term behavioral changes is to incentivize individuals to change the way they consume stuff. Energy is consumed in and of itself and as part of every bit of “stuff” that’s made, acquired, and disposed of. That’s why carbon reduction is an exceedingly difficult problem. And that’s why you have to solve the problem at its source, rather than shifting the problem from one part of the economic system to another like the bathtub ring in The Cat in the Hat. In a consumer-based economy, consumers are the source.

Develop standards for monitoring and aggregating individual carbon reductions and reward that behavior with the equivalent of a retirement account. Instead of talking about carbon cap and trading schemes, which will only create more financial engineering shenanigans from the wizards of Wall Street, push it down to the consumers. Reward us for doing the right thing, not the bankers for manipulating trading markets. Make the incentive something besides an Energy Star designation from the EPA, or a LEEDS platinum for an energy-efficient commercial building, or a subsidy to a energy company for some people paid for by other people (like most rooftop solar incentive schemes).

People need more for retirement. The planet needs less carbon in the atmosphere. Combined the two. Problem solved. I am of course being tongue in cheek. It would be a massive undertaking to implement the solution I describe here. But similar things have been done on a grand scale before. Income tax has only been a permanent fixture in this country for 101 years. On climactic scales, that’s not that long. IRAs were established forty years ago.

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