Environuts: Let’s track the world’s wealthiest to control global warming

The enviro-nuts of the world have come up with a new plan: track the world’s wealthiest individuals to control carbon emissions.

By counting the emissions of all the individuals likely to exceed this level, world leaders could provide target emissions cuts for each country. Currently, the world average for individual annual carbon emissions is about 5 tons; each European produces 10 tons and each American produces 20 tons.

With international climate talks set to start this week in Italy among the countries that pollute the most, the authors hope policymakers will look at the strong link between how rich people are and how much carbon dioxide they emit.

“You’re distributing the task of doing something about emissions reduction based on the proportion of the population in the country that’s actually doing the most damage,” said Shoibal Chakravarty of the Princeton Environment Institute, one of the study’s authors.

Rich people’s lives tend to give off more greenhouse gases because they drive more fossil-fueled vehicles, travel frequently by air and live in big houses that take more fuel to heat and cool.

By focusing on rich people everywhere, rather than rich countries and poor ones, the system of setting carbon-cutting targets based on the number of wealthy individuals in various countries would ease developing countries into any new climate change framework, Chakravarty said by telephone.

While tracking Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi and Gwenyth Paltrow’s energy usage might sound like a hoot, this really isn’t funny. Some of America’s poorest citizens are considered rich when compared to much of the rest of the world. They may like American class warfare, but when it comes to global class warfare they’re going to find themselves on the losing side in this fight.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.