CarbonTracking

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, created a commision some time ago to study the form that a carbon tax might take in France. That commission, led by former prime-minister Michel Rocard, presented its recommendations to the French government on July 27th.

The heart of the matter is the introduction of a tax on all fossil fuels and electricity, which in France is 80% nuclear.

The recommended price is €32 per tonne of CO2 in 2010 rising to €100 per tonne in 2030. This breaks down to an increase of 6~7c per litre of petrol/diesel ans a 10% increase in the price of gas.

The government will face great difficulty in the implementation such as tax as it is wide open to claims of taxing the poor more heavily than the well-off. To counter this, the government is considering the concept of a "green cheque" where families will receive an annual cheque accoridng to their revenues. Obviously the idea is that they can use this cheque to invest in less energy-intensive products, insulating their homes, buying more efficient cars etc.

Interestingly, the commission also recommended that the tax be applied also to electricity even though 80% of France's electricity is from nuclear power which is considered a low-emissions source of power. Rocard indicated that he believes that the tax should serve to increase overall energy efficiency, not merely the use of fossil fuels.

Going back to a previous post the impact on flying would be minimal, with the price of a Dublin-Paris return flight increasing by just over €4.

Emissions figures are becoming pretty commonplace in our climate-change sensitive world. Every car ad will tell the the amount of grams of CO2 each kilometre produced by their latest beauty, albeit in really small text tucked down the bottom. The airline industry is getting up to speed as well, Air France, Lufthansa, BA, to mention but a few, all let you calculate the emissions generated by your flight. So far,so good, the public conscience is being served.

There's someone missing though. The ferry companies serving Irish routes are all mum on the topic. Now, Ireland is an island, at least the last time I checked, and there's quite a bit of ferry traffic going on with our neighbours. Figures from Irish ferries show that 845,000 cars and 3.27 million passengers made the trip in 2007.

Now since the ferry companies won't give the emissions info we'll have to go and look for it ourselves. Happily, Irish Ferries provide quite a few facts and figures on their 2007 activities, and with a bit of picking and choosing we can start our calculations.

Its a four step process:

• From the total fuel consumption of the fleet we can calculate the associated emissions: 206,393 tonnes CO2e
• From the revenue split we can decide how much of these emissions are due to transporting cars : 82,557 tonnes CO2e
• Breaking this down we get the emissions per car-km.: 1.13 kg CO2e
• With the car-km figure we can get the emissions related to a specific route, : e.g. Dublin-Holyhead 113kg CO2e one way

The maths for the above figures can be seen in this report. All sources are referenced so if anyone can find a mistake in the figures feel free to leave a comment.

While the figures seem quite high, one has to remember that we're talking about transporting cars here, the average car weighs in at just over a tonne, and also that passenger ferries are damn big, the Ulysses ship in the Irish Ferries fleet weighs over 50,000 tonnes.

A number of ferry companies were contacted during the writing of the report in an effort to base the report on the most accurate figures available. Without exception, the replies indicated that the ferry companies think that their emissions are their business and theirs alone.

The report does not pretend to provide definitive figures for ferry transport but rather presents a methodology and a first attempt. Only the ferry companies themselves can provide fully accurate figures.

Let's hope they think the travelling public deserves that.

Now there are only three ways out of this not-so-positive scenario. Firstly, you can ramp up the tree-planting, that's what I call the Catchup factor e.g. for every 1 ton of CO₂ you emit, you offset 2 tons. Go ahead and drag the slider on the left and see how the trees curve reacts.

Otherwise if going the offset road, be sure that the project you support has measurable impact in a timescale closer to your emissions timescale

Another way is getting that horribly linear emissions line to come down a tad by reducing one's emissions year on year. That's a story for another chart, another day.

Links

The tree science figures

The trouble with trees

Tech

The jQuery javascript framework

The flot javascript graphics library