A Brave New Green World!!

Oh, boy! Hang on to your wallets! Wait till you get a load of this. Currently, in the U.K., there is legislation to ration personal CO2 emissions: When you gas up, or when you buy that airline ticket to visit grandma, the government will track all of your CO2 use. When you overuse your allotment of personal CO2, you will have to buy some credits from someone who has them. Imagine that! This is where modern environmentalism is taking us, folks--a massive leviathan of a bureaucracy with ever more control of our lives and our freedom in the name of “saving” the planet.

It would cost a country like Britain billions of dollars a year to run a personal cap-and-trade system nationwide, but set that aside. War-time-like energy rations are a clear illustration of the extent to which environmentalists hope to control every aspect of modern life. Do you really want to blow much of your annual "ration" on that long carbon-spewing jet flight to Florida, or should you swap that summer AC for weekend drives in the country?

The global warmists want you to sacrifice for their cause. And the duration of their war on carbon will make the decade-and-a-half of British rationing during and after World War II seem like a fleeting moment. The pending climate-change bill calls for a 60% cut in carbon emissions from their 1990 levels by 2050. Once 2050 rolls around, who exactly will declare the end of hostilities?

The prospect of personal CO2 rations should debunk the idea that the cost of curbing carbon emissions would fall on the owners of dirty old factories. That notion was always a green herring: Like corporate taxes, the business costs of carbon reduction will be passed on to consumers. In that sense, we should be grateful to the Brits for showing us where this anticarbon crusade really ends up.

Can you imagine what this sort of personal cap-and-trade would cost if it were implemented in the U.S.? My only hope is that this sort of bureaucracy would frustrate Americans to no end and any politician that suggested it would be sent packing. I can only hope.