A major bank in Australia now links a customer’s purchases to their carbon footprint and warns customers when they are going over the limit along with enabling them to pay a fee to offset the violation.
According to the bank, the national average of carbon emitted is 1,280 kilograms, while a sustainable figure is 200. The bank has provided the option to “pay a fee” to offset the carbon footprint.
CBA said it does not share data with CoGo. It added that eventually the data will be broken down into each individual transaction.
The bank calculates a person’s carbon footprint based on the transactions using their credit or debit cards.
As it turns out, a similar proposal was floated by four so-called climate experts last year in a research paper published in the scientific journal Nature. Their scheme involves issuing a mandatory ‘carbon allowance card’ that would “entail all adults receiving an equal tradable carbon allowance that reduces over time in line with national [carbon] targets.”
Carbon units would then be “deducted from the personal budget with every payment of transport fuel, home-heating fuels and electricity bills, and anyone going over the limit would be forced to purchase additional units in the personal carbon market from those with excess to sell.”
The authors also noted that the COVID-19 pandemic may have helped contribute to the acceptance of curbing personal freedoms making the enactment of their idea easier to achieve. In short, this is a scheme very much like China’s social credit system and is all the more reason to reject it and any institution, like banks, who enact similar policies.
Image by Joseph Mucira from Pixabay
Green Jihad 