David Fleming, 1940-2010

David was always inspirational, and quietly innovative, and I was always excited after conversations with him.  As well as the role he played in developing the organisation that eventually became nef, he was one of the founders of the Green Party and its economic spokesman in the late 1980s.

He will always be remembered for developing the idea of Domestic Tradeable Quotas (DTQs), the idea that we might have personal carbon budgets which we could sell on if we didn’t use them – the basis for a citizen’s income in a petro-currency.  These have had a long life in the policy world, both in the European Commission, and more recently as Tradeable Energy Quotas (TEQs) in the academic world.

Strange that the idea began life in an article by David, rather bizarrely, in the pages of Country Life.

More recently he has been writing about nuclear energy, calculating that the entire energy that would be produced by the new generation of nuclear reactors would not cover the energy used to build and run them in the costs of extraction, construction, decommissioning and storage of nuclear waste.

Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Movement, also has an obituary of David Fleming at his blog, Transition Culture.