Your baby's name may exceed its carbon budget

Under a scheme now being modelled for next year, every name registered at birth would be charged against a lifetime carbon allowance, calculated per character. Parents whose chosen name exceeded the budget could register it only with offsets or a shorter statutory variant. The first appeals would be heard in the family division, between the maintenance orders and the adoptions.

Carbon budgets, once a tool for national climate targets, are increasingly applied to smaller and smaller units: companies, products, buildings and individual purchases now carry carbon labels or allowances. At the same time, the emissions of digital storage and data centres have become a recognised part of climate accounting, so that even records and documents are counted. Many countries regulate what parents may name a child; registrars can refuse a name, and disputes can end up in court. Meanwhile, given names have become longer, more unusual and more often double-barrelled in many countries.

Family Division, Court 4, 10:30. In the matter of an infant, R. (born 3 March), appeal against the refusal of the Registrar of Births to record the forename Maximilian-Bartholomew Sebastian under regulation 7 of the Nominal Carbon Allowance Scheme. Listed for two hours. Interpreter not required. The child need not attend. That would be the entry, according to a draft list circulated among registrars, and it would be the fourth such appeal in a single morning. Court 4 would be chosen because it has the widest door, and prams would be expected.

The scheme would work like this. A regional emissions authority would estimate, for each character in a name, the lifetime cost of typing it, printing it, storing it and reading it aloud in waiting rooms: every form, every database backup, every school register, every boarding pass. The figure would be small, which is the point of a budget. Names would be issued an allowance of fourteen characters, including hyphens, and anything above would be charged to the parents at the prevailing offset rate. A spokesperson for the authority would describe the fourteen as “generous, in the context of surnames.” The surname would count.

Dorottya Fenyves, a paediatric nurse from a town outside the capital, would be among the first to receive a letter. She and her husband had chosen Konstantin, which fits, and the surname Fenyves-Adamovics, which does not. “They told us we could keep the name if we bought a tree,” she would say. “A specific tree. It has a number. We drove out to see it and it is shorter than him.” The offset would be valid for ninety years, after which the name would revert to Kon.

Registrars would be issued a laminated card of approved short forms. Alexander would be recorded as Alex, Elizabeth as Liz, and Bartholomew as Bart, which the guidance would concede “carries associations.” A parent who insisted on the full form could pay, offset, or accept the name under what the scheme would call deferred registration, whereby the child would be Bart on paper until the age of eighteen and could then apply to be Bartholomew using their own allowance. Most eighteen-year-olds, the modelling would assume, would rather spend the carbon on a flight.

In Court 4, the appeals would turn on a single question: whether a name is consumption. Counsel for the registrar would argue that a name is written more often than a car is driven, and by more people. Counsel for the parents would argue that a child does not choose to be typed. The judge, who under the list would have three more infants before lunch, would ask whether anyone had considered the carbon cost of the hearing itself. Nobody would have. The clerk would be sent to find out, and would come back with a figure larger than the name.

A secondary market would appear within weeks. Grandparents with short names would be approached to transfer their unused characters to grandchildren, a procedure the scheme would allow on production of a death certificate or, for the living, a signed waiver and a witness. Géza Tar, a retired signalman with three letters to spare, would sign his over to a granddaughter named Zsófia-Klementina. “I never used them,” he would say. “Nobody ever wrote to me anyway.” The transfer would be logged in a database, which would be backed up nightly, and which would count.

Hospitals would adapt fastest. Maternity wards would print the allowance on the wristband beside the weight, and midwives would learn to say “fourteen” in the same tone they used for “healthy.” A pilot ward would report that parents, given the figure early, chose shorter names without being asked, and that the average newborn's name would fall to five letters by spring. The ward would record a single exception: a boy whose parents spent the entire allowance on the forename and left the surname blank. The registrar would enter him as Maximilian, no fixed family, and the file would close.