Dear Wengo

Thanks for getting me back on track. I intend this blog to be mainly about Climate Change and what we can do to deal with it. In answer to your post:

Yes, a price of $20 per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted will increase your electricity bill and the cost of oil and natural gas, and therefore the cost of many forms of transport.

ETS = "Emissions Trading Scheme"

The phrase 'Cap and Trade' means that the government enforces an upper limit on how many tonnes of CO2 emission will be permitted. This is called ‘the cap’. The government then issues or sells at auction enough permits to cover the capped total of emissions. Companies are permitted to trade these permits.

If a company emits less pollution than it bought permits for, it can sell them on the open market. A company that needs to pollute more than it expected will need to buy permits on the market. This process encourages, even forces, companies to change to less polluting technologies.

To achieve its purpose, the government must regularly reduce the cap and allow fewer and fewer emissions as time passes. This will cause, intentionally, the market price of the permits to rise, which intensifies the pressure on corporations and consumers to reduce emissions. It gives a competitive edge to corporations that pollute less.

Your efforts to economise at home on electricity and on oil products have reduced your emissions. But you cannot entirely cut out your emissions. Producing any food and getting it to the retailer causes emissions.

However, some food production causes more pollution than others. Beef and lamb are worse than white meats because ruminant animals emit methane, which causes at least 25 times more greenhouse warming than carbon dioxide (CO2).

Buying second hand clothes, which otherwise would have entered the waste stream, avoids the production of new clothes, and hence emissions.

It is impossible to be alive and cause zero emissions. But you can minimise emissions and then buy carbon offsets, if you choose to, for the irreducible emissions you are still responsible for.