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Allowances for children?
Thread started on 23/8/2007 15:28

Reevesie

Reevesie

carbon allowance

In Leicester at the moment, we’re discussing at present what to do about rations for children/babies/teenagers. It’d be interesting to know what other CRAG groups are doing for this – can’t find any info at the moment on the website.

We’ve noted that most of the proposed national rationing schemes don’t give kids an allowance, but for a CRAG at least, it seems to be appropriate.We’ve not reached agreement yet on the size of rations and the different age bands we’ll apply ‘em to. On the table at the moment we have..

· 18 yrs and over: full adult allowance

· 12-17 yrs: ½ adult allowance (on the assumption that there’ll be some ‘independent’ energy use like maybe having your own PC, stereo, etc., but you’re benefiting from heat, light, etc. that would be used by your parents anyway)

· 5-11 yrs: ¼ adult allowance (you’re probably starting to use some energy that your parents wouldn’t otherwise be using, perhaps getting driven around a bit or occasionally using a PC)

· 0-4 yrs: zero allowance (unlucky, you don’t get anything yet because you are so wee as to have negligible personal energy use/emissions)

.. but we’ve not talked it through yet.

There’s also the question of how you count kids when they’re using energy… if you’ve got 2 adults and a child in a car do you divide the emissions up by 3 or by 2.5? if a 5 year old is occupying a full seat on a plane do they have the full amount of credits deducted for the flight (even though they might be getting half the allocation.. in effect making them pay double!)?

Thoughts?

- Reevesie

‹ second quarter stats and 15 jan date CRAGger in search of crag ›
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12-17 yrs

written on 24/8/2007 12:01

john ackers

john ackers

I think kids should have allowances AND emissions counting using the same ratios that you suggest above (or not be part of the scheme). But if carbon debitors and are paying carbon creditors, i think you need to work how to do that calculation in advance – it could be complicated.

In the Islington CRAG, Deborah has a teenage daughter but only Deborah is in the scheme. I assumed that the daughter is a half occupant in terms of heating and electricity emissions. So in your case of the car, emissions would be divided by 2.5.

Aviation is complicated because I think takeoff fuel is mainly related to weight and crusing fuel is mainly related to aircraft volume (which is why first class seats attract a higher carbon debit). But I think we have to ignore this.

If mum picks up her son from his friends 5 miles away does the carbon emitted get added to mum’s or son’s account? In a real PCA scheme, it probably does not matter as the carbon for the family car might come from a shared carbon account.

p.s. Catherine Bottrill at ECI says ‘We have been pulling together information for a paper about children in a PCA scheme, but have not written the paper yet’.

 
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children

written on 25/8/2007 16:03

andy_ross

andy_ross

Last year in the Leamington CRAG we agree that children should get the full ration. But others have tried different approaches. Check:

http://www.carbonrationing.org.uk/search/node/children

Andy

 
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carbon burning aliens

written on 28/8/2007 16:29

robinsmith3

robinsmith3

Given there are 6 times as many carbon burning aliens on the planet as the planet can sink carbon, perhaps some more careful thought needs to go into familly planning? Wishful thinking I know

So I would go for zero ration until that person reaches the age of consent/voting or similar. Its plausibly not fair in this context that the external costs of the young get paid for by the rest of the population, particularly if you chose for this reason not to have kids

You could always do some research and figure out actually how much extra does having a baby add to your family footprint. Its not as simple as suggested here. Parents will burn much more carbon as a collective once the child is born which kind of negates the economy of scale of living together as a couple only

 
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Allowances for families

written on 29/8/2007 21:46

sandersp

I have a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old and I would support the allowance banding proposed by Reevsie. When very young I found the kids had a negligable effect on household energy use, but once at school they start wanting to visit friends and go to clubs etc which leads to extra travel. Since splitting the emmissions arising from a family is so difficult, it makes it easier to effectively join a CRAG as a family group. However, even then it still involved me adding the emissions of the car to my own allocation to avoid having to work out what proportion of the cars milage was due to which person. For any public PCA system I would hope that allowances are handed out per family rather than per person to avoid silly arguments as to whose car to use for a particular journey etc.

Peter

 
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kids and their useage

written on 30/8/2007 02:25

kirti

kirti

This is good as I was going to write to Andy and ask…so how do we approuch our kids that want to be a part of CRAG? My 16 year old has already joined it! and now my 13 year old wants to be a part of CRAG?! as her brother is and she feels strongly about the issue, is there an age limit in CRAG? I am interested to know so I can let my 13 year old know soon and not alienate her.Also have my 16 year old friends that might be interested! I personally would like to include the young generation as they are the ones going to make a difference ultimately for their future.
If there is anyone that can help with this please let me know..its a big issue in our household right now!

 
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this is what CRAGs is all about

written on 30/8/2007 18:00

andy_ross

andy_ross

There is no definitive answer to this one yet. But we CRAGgers are best placed to find one! In the Leamington CRAG last year, both Peter’s and Karen’s kids were part of the CRAG and got a full ration as agreed at the outset. Interesting to see Peter agreeing with Reevsie’s proposal.

 
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Thoughts on the 'kid thing'

written on 30/8/2007 18:29

krueschan

this really IS an interesting one… Most (actually I would think all of them do but I’m usually a bit cautious using words like ‘all’, ‘none’ etc) of the future emission scenarios that are in the literature account for projected population growth (in other words: kids) and then calculate per capita emissions that are not to be exceeded to make a certain CO2eq stabilisation and associated warming more or less likely. These per capita are per capita living on the planet at the specific point in time regardless of their age. In conclusion, in that case kids should receive full ration (and maybe make their parents buy some of their rations – for a sociologist that I am this could imply very interesting inner-family power relations)
However, a problem with that is that it might create unwanted incentive for unclever family planning. Since there are indications that we (as the population of this planet) are close or boyond sustainable numbers, this might be a problem. We know from other areas that economic reasons can be a large driver for having a lot of offspring. If ‘carbon’ becomes a scarce good (which automatically follows from implementiong a rationing scheme) it might become a reason to increase the size of one’s family. (Giving a global rationing scheme, there are people that suggest that the national rations are determined at a fixed date and then do not allow for population changes other then migration. In that case the control of incentives and disincentives for population growth would be in each country’s responsibility) From all that, it would follow that it is not advisable to give kids the full ration.
So now we have perfect reasons for either of these options. So I guess the trick is to find some sort of middle ground (just as legislators would have to if a carbon rationing scheme would be implemented nationally or globally). My initial thought would be to give kids no ration for the first x years of their live (until they have some sort of control over their lives) and then either give them the full ration in one step or incrementally. My ad hoc idea for that would be 0% (of full ration) from age 0-7, 25% age 7 and then linear up to 100% at age 16, ie every year approx 8% more.
Sorry that this got so long. When I started this post I thought I can sum that up more more shortly bit then more and more things came up, which just shows how difficult an areas it is.

 
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What we did in the end...

written on 8/10/2007 16:59

Reevesie

Reevesie

We ended up deciding on a blanket “kids count half” rule for simplicity’s sake – so under 18s get a half-ration, and they count as half a passenger in cars (though as a full passenger on trains/buses/planes. i realise as i’m typing this that there’s a bit of a car-public transport inconsistency there that we might have to look at…).

People might be interested in some research I came across that looked at what factors affect household electricity consumption in Sweden (“Different Everyday Lives – Different Patterns of Electricity Use” by Gram-Hanssen), and it found that for a given household size, if one of the residents is aged 0-6, the house uses less electricity (as you’d expect if kids use less than adults), it makes no noticable difference if you have a 7-12 year old, and if there’s a 13-19 year old, the household actually uses more. So, in the light of this maybe a half-allowance isn’t completely justified…

Of course, there’s also heating+hot water (which increase with number of people in a house, and i doubt that those people being kids makes a great difference) and transport (where amongst people people i know at least, having kids means loads more car journeys). Perhaps kids should just get a full allowance in a CRAG after all?

 
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