A Personal Carbon Budget Will Clip Our Wings (from Sunday Herald)

I once interviewed Dr Sean Carrington, a professer at the University of the West Indies in Barbados. He was adamant that his island's environment could not cope with Costa del Sol or Cancun-style mass tourism. Only rich people's tourism, he said, was beneficial to countries like his. If you are loaded enough to check into the famous Sandy Lane Hotel, where some 800 staff service the high-spending occupants of 112 rooms, then you're helping the local economy by way of employment.

The same is not true of canny, retired second-home owners getting by on depleting pensions, or frugal backpackers who make a virtue out of spending as little as possible. Brutal though it may be to hear it, the world's most fragile spots need small numbers of rich tourists, not plane-loads of canny middle-class bargain-hunters arriving on budget flights, ticking off countries on some "must-see" list as they go.

Ed Miliband says that making air travel more expensive would see Britain reverting to "1974 levels of flying", which is probably what needs to happen if we are serious about tackling this fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions. And if we care about social equity, then giving every citizen a carbon budget is the obvious way to achieve that. Like other bad habits, addiction to cheap flights is hard to give up, so we need to be saved from ourselves.

Carbon-Neutral Prince Charles Gets Driven Around on Old Cooking Fat : Gas 2.0

So Prince Charles had his Aston Martin converted to run on bio-ethanol made from aged English wine, and his Audi, Jaguar, and Range Rover all run on what the English call old cooking fat.
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So now Prince Charles is driven in the royal Jaguar that runs on homemade biodiesel and, for a little variety; in the Land Rover or the Audi, in a carbon conscious fashion.
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Last year he spent $60,000 to offset the carbon miles he racked up with his 86 essential airplane trips last year alone.
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The report; which was printed on recycled paper in vegetable-based ink - -said the prince’s households; the Highgrove estate in western England, where he farms organically, as well as Clarence House in London and Birkhall in Scotland — and the activities of Charles and his wife Camilla were now carbon neutral.

Leave it to the kids ... a parable

Rehobama’s homies also told him to appoint dozens of unaccountable czars to serve as cruel taskmasters. And as long as they were at it, they could ultimately control the entire kingdom with a ridiculous cap-and-trade flimflam scam to address a crisis that they would manufacture out of thin air.

“Let’s tell the people that we are going to harness the sun so that we can control the climate,” they exclaimed. “Surely the people will swallow that. They are too ignorant to realize that they are paying us for something we can do absolutely nothing about.”