Carbon Labelling

Defra and the Carbon Trust today announced a labelling scheme that will inform consumers of the amount of carbon emissions associated with the products and services we buy. It's been described as "voluntary", but is obviously government funded and will probably only be a matter of time before becoming a compulsory standard. Currently Boots, Walkers and Innocent provide customers with the carbon footprint of various products, and whilst the scheme sounds lofty you'll be unsurprised to hear that I have serious reservations.

My initial thought was that this might be a useful means to inject clarity into the current debate over the environmental impact of goods. Expanding the supply chain of a product might reveal that some SUVs/4x4s aren't so damaging afterall, whereas hybrid vehicles shipped from afar and produced with complex metals have a larger footprint. If this aids consumers to lower their emissions, all the better. But underlying the scheme is an assumption that consumers not only do wish to lower their emissions, but that they should. Indeed the scheme is presented as a measure to minimise your carbon footprint, and this thinking is harmful, fanatical, and therefore wrong.

The consequences of minimising emissions is to forsake the economic prosperity that is the surest way to combine increasing living standards with technological solutions to provide sustainability. There is a real danger that a blanket quest to reduce carbon footprints will merely be a short-term fix for the deeper issue of how we can create the right institutions to facilitate geniune solutions. The opportunity cost of lower growth now, is drastically lower living standards in the future - population growth and capital accumulation are the twin forces that will save the planet, rather than condemn it.

Therefore the pragmatic goal should be to optimise our carbon footprints - to acknowledge that pollution can create value, but that it comes at a price. It's only by comparing those costs and benefits that we can make sensible choices. Minimisation is simplistic and counter productive.

But all this assumes that the numbers on the packets will be meaningful, and I'm not at all convinced that measurement is possible. The Carbon Trust seem to counter this by claiming that "something is better than nothing", or that "regardless of the accuracy, they can be used as a target to be reduced". As mentioned, reduction per se is the wrong vision, and therefore the accuracy is crucial - and if the accuracy is wrong, "if you have nothing of use to say, better remain silent" etc.

The bottom line is that invoking the notion of measurement is a myth because (as The Economist mentions), the carbon footprint cannot be measured: the labelling scheme gives an aura of scientific credibility to a subjective phenomena. If the purpose is to go back into the whole life-cycle of the product, then where do you begin? The inputs? The employees commute? Previous investments? All, surely, are relevent, but all are excluded. And why stop at the moment of purchase when the majority of a product's carbon emissions can come from it's use?

The real shame here is that nobody seems to appreciate that we already have an alternative that takes all the costs associated with production into account. A mechanism so simple to use and understand we are completely reliant upon it for our day-to-day existence, and yet hardly give it a thought. Can't we just judge a products environmental impact from it's price?

Comments

[Thom]

I'm still troubled by the way this shifts the focus onto consumer choices. At the end of the day, which is doing more damage, the ready meal you buy, or the open fridge, powered 24 hours a day, that the supermarket stores it in?

If the government really wants to make a difference in terms of global warming, we need to be looking at regulating businesses, not simply guiding consumers.

[Matthew Whitfield]

No measure of environmental impact is going to be perfect, but surely price is more imperfect than most methods. This would only be relevant if companies passed on the costs they have incurred for being carbon heavy, but on the whole (except as a side effect of concrete costs like transport) they don't incur such costs, do they?

[AJE]

It's always going to be costly to use carbon, but even if it's agreed that the price system is far from perfect, that simply begs two questions:
1. Why not focus on the implementation of the best theoretical solution (i.e. a flexible price system), rather than the creation and implementation of an imperfect, flawed proxy
2. Why doesn't an effective market exist? Is this because a) governments are too busy investigating supermarkets to do their proper job of creating the foundations required for a market economy; or b) the costs of creating one outweigh the benefits, and therefore there isn't actually a problem

Also, if the logic of your argument is true why stop at carbon? Why not measure each and every type of footprint?

[Larry Teabag]

Can't we just judge a products environmental impact from it's price?

No doubt I'm too thick to understand this, but until environmental externalities have been incorporated into the price somehow, the answer seems to me to be a resounding and unequivocal NO.

[Craig Hubley]

" Can't we just judge a products environmental impact from it's price?" No, and what's more we'll never be able to.

Price inherently models the inconvenience that others are willing to bear to get us what we want. Externalities borne by the whole biosphere, future generations, etc., are only reflected insofar as governments or other entities that represent those and collect compensation for harms done those are able to intervene in a given transaction.

That will never be a perfect system. The resistance however is less to labelling, which will have a similar effect to a rise in price (fewer people buying because they do not wish to create the harm done by the product they buy, i.e. the services they consume when they choose that product). So separate labels will always be welcome for social and ecological impacts, though there will be controversies about which ones are most urgent and/or deserving of being marked directly on a product. Over time some of those will be reflected in price, or simply assumed in product standards, at which time the labels may change but will still be inspected by anyone who cares to scan a bar code.

For better or worse, the social/ecological/financial "triple bottom line" is beginning to appear on supermarket labels. There are a lot of different and conflicting theories on whether it's more important to save small bits of money and invest it in some larger project or just avoid consuming with it at all, or to deal with social problems like education, or ecological ones like global warming, deforestation and loss of pollinators. An advantage of the triple bottom line approach is that it lets the consumer decide which theory they believe.

[Craig Hubley]

" Can't we just judge a products environmental impact from it's price?" No, and what's more we'll never be able to.

Price inherently models the inconvenience that others are willing to bear to get us what we want. Externalities borne by the whole biosphere, future generations, etc., are only reflected insofar as governments or other entities that represent those and collect compensation for harms done those are able to intervene in a given transaction.

That will never be a perfect system. The resistance however is less to labelling, which will have a similar effect to a rise in price (fewer people buying because they do not wish to create the harm done by the product they buy, i.e. the services they consume when they choose that product). So separate labels will always be welcome for social and ecological impacts, though there will be controversies about which ones are most urgent and/or deserving of being marked directly on a product. Over time some of those will be reflected in price, or simply assumed in product standards, at which time the labels may change but will still be inspected by anyone who cares to scan a bar code.

For better or worse, the social/ecological/financial "triple bottom line" is beginning to appear on supermarket labels. There are a lot of different and conflicting theories on whether it's more important to save small bits of money and invest it in some larger project or just avoid consuming with it at all, or to deal with social problems like education, or ecological ones like global warming, deforestation and loss of pollinators. An advantage of the triple bottom line approach is that it lets the consumer decide which theory they believe.

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