It worked during the war, so why shouldn’t the ‘all in it together’ approach work to combat the climate crisis?
It was great to see Sonia Sodha highlighting the potential unfairness of carbon taxes and promoting the possibility of rationing as an alternative policy to combat climate change (“Sin taxes on meat or flying won’t change a climate hypocrite like me. Rationing might”, Comment). In relation to what Sodha calls climate hypocrisy, it is worth noting that, according to a wartime Home Intelligence report from May 1942, the British public showed “a complete and expressed unwillingness to make voluntary sacrifices, but an apparent readiness to face compulsory sacrifices without undue grumbling”.
However, Sodha suggests that we modernise rationing, introducing a market and allocating “polluting credits” allowing people to buy and sell rations. But would this be an improvement? Arguably, the rejection of markets, and a commitment to fair shares, is precisely what made rationing attractive to the general public in the 1940s. A report from 1941 stated: “As long as people believe that all classes and sections are suffering and enduring equally, they will put up with very great hardship. It is ‘unfairness’ that people resent.”
Either way, Sodha’s suggestion that rationing would be better than a carbon tax is supported by the historian Mark Roodhouse, who argued that rationing would be more effective than a carbon tax if a government needed “to reduce carbon emissions quickly and dramatically”.