Put the global pollution tax directly on the world's wealthiest individuals. Don't put it on their serfs.

Also, put a global pollution tax on war.

Beck's moronic guest host has been attacking this for an hour already. Ugh, I can't stand the ignorance these guys exude.

Bravo!! A class-based carbon cap, which makes great sense. The USA will oppose it, of course.

We already have a class-based tax structure - see how well that's working - this carbon cap thing won't be any different. They'll find ways around it, hire lobbyists, set up the revolving door between the wealthy/polluting class and the regulatory agencies, etc. Look at what happened to the international carbon cap lottery as it stands now.

How about a huge tax on luxury items so the gov't can repair the damage they cause, force people to live intelligently again? Example - dwellings - let's say each person is entitled to a living space of 500 sq.ft tax-free. No tax at all on small homes and residences. And slap a huge tax, increasing on a sliding scale for anything over that.

Make municipal units smaller - much smaller. Put a school in every neighborhood within walking distance. Kids would get exercise, pollution would be cut, and people would relate to each other again.

Try a tax on the distance travelled to your favorite marina, again on a sliding scale. Add a tax on size of vessel, size of engine, etc.

Decide what's required to live adequately and tax the hell out of everything above that level. Set a living wage and benefits level. Enforce both.

And then - watch the wealthy class set up the revolving door between govt and biz again and sabotage everything. You'd have to disqualify WS/wealthy people from infesting those reg-y agencies. With corporate yesmen like Barry in power, it'll never happen.

You need not only separation of church and state; you need also separation of govt and biznis, separation of biznis and military. Otherwise, the whole thing is in vain, as you see now. And the next stage is corporations, who already think of themselves as entities with rights, like countries, waging urban war on dissent. Oh - that's already happening, isn't it?

My point - you can tinker with the details all you want. if you don't change the structure from the ground up, all you add is useless meetings and paperwork, as things just get worse.

The tone of this article is, as usual, sharply anti-American. Americans waste energy, drive gas-guzzlers, and live in houses that are too big and too far separated from centers of commerce.

It's always easy for Europeans to look down their noses at Americans for their wasteful ways. Of course, it's not as if they face the same problems Americans face. America is a big country. France, say, isn't. Therefore, people must spend more energy in moving around. America just doesn't have the same high population density. That fact alone will lead to increased energy consumption.

American cities grew mostly in times of cheap energy, particularly in the middle and late twentieth century. For that reason the suburbs spread out from town centers with commuting arteries connecting residences to workplaces. By contrast, Paris and London did not experience most of their growth in the twentieth century but in the nineteenth and early twentieth, times before the advent of the automobile. Consequently residents of those cities do not require as much energy for commuting as Americans.

As for the size of dwellings: Europe has a history of living in townhouses and small flats, crammed together tight as kernels on an ear of corn. Americans don't have such a history. In fact, one reason people came to America is that immigrants disliked the squalor and crowded living conditions of the Old World. So it was that they built larger houses on bigger lots.

It's easy for Europeans to thumb their noses at America, but their virtue does not come from superior intelligence and ethical sensitivity. Rather, their more efficient use of space and energy comes from historical reasons.

This plan proposed in the article to tax those that consume the most energy is flawed since it ignores history. Ordinary American citizens may consume more energy than Europeans, but they are not rich in the way non-Americans think and they cannot afford another tax. It doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of happening.

It's not fair that a single company gets to manufacture "Monopoly!".

This is an unnecessary and possibly unworkable proposal - to base "targets for emission cuts on the number of wealthy people" in a country. It's much simpler to just base it on the population in a country - and then let each country enforce its per capita limit - which should automatically (if done right, and with some fairness) target the rich people - mostly by taxing their emissions. By the time you finish counting the "number of wealthy people" in all countries, the number might have changed. First of all, you have to define "wealthy" - either based on absolute income or based on purchasing power parity. It could be argued that someone driving a gas guzzler and eats beef regularly, though technically not rich, could be responsible for a bigger share of emissions than a "rich" person in a developing country who follows a frugal lifestyle. That's why it's simpler to arrive at national targets - and let each country enforce the targets - by taxing consumption, investing in public transportation, etc.

Already time is running out and I understand that there is no real agreement in sight in time for the Copenhagen meeting later this year - which is supposed to lead to a post-Kyoto accord.

It's pretty clear that the rich people in each country are responsible for a disproportionately large amount of emissions. I have also pointed out that the rich in countries like China, Brazil and India hide behind their poor - who 'help' keep their national average emissions down.

The logic behind the Kyoto Protocol was solid - "the principle of common but differentiated responsibility". Countries that have historically had a much larger share of emissions - starting from the industrial revolution - had to start with VERY MODEST reduction targets - to reach an average of about 5% below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. Some countries have met or exceed their targets, others didn't and won't - USA and Canada among the defaulters.

It's really important to include the developing countries in the next round - while making allowances for their developmental needs. At least they could try to follow a more efficient path using cleaner technologies - with some help from the developed nations. The USA and Canada have lost their moral standing on this issue, while Australia is trying to catch up - at least on paper - and join the Europeans.

>>>The study suggests setting a uniform international cap on how much carbon dioxide each person could emit in order to limit global emissions; since rich people emit more, they are the ones likely to reach or exceed this cap, whether they live in a rich country or a poor one.

This is just common sense. Some form of carbon tax AND a cap-and-trade system will be needed to make the rich pay for their share of emissions. George Monbiot has talked about it in his book "Heat". Hervé Kempf has written an entire (though small) book on this topic: "How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth". Without making the rich to pay for their share of emissions, there is no hope for any real progress on tackling climate change - and that goes for the rich in all the countries.

There may be some validity to the historical roots of US wastefulness, but drosera should be lamenting it, not defending it.

If you go to a current day European city, you will see no squalor, you will see clean, vibrant places where a car isn't needed nor wanted. You instead spend your money on good healthy food, art, theatre, concerts and other much more fun things than driving Ford Expeditions to the generic shopping mall. There are also places in the US like this too, like the Pittsburgh neighborhood I lived in until recently, and would still be living in if my job didn't move to an outer suburban area.

The US suburban/exurban wealthy need to abandon their lifestyle, and in doing so, get a little culture at the same time. This can be done through consumption taxes that won't affect and anyone with a moderate income.

Too many USAns would like to free themselves from their car, but are trapped in car-dependent suburban wasteland. Suburbia in it's current form of planned hyper-inefficiency due to popular clamor. It arose, due to obscene influence in the planning process by a corporate triumvirate of Big Detroit, Big Real estate and Big Box.

Meanwhile, many people would like to live in a more traditional, walkable, transit-friendly, family-owned retail/restaurant friendly city neighborhoods, but due to gentrification, it is too expensive. We need to devise a way to keep housing affordable in urban areas. And employers continue to locate in the suburban sprawl with zero consideration for access by any other means but the single-occupant car. Employers and retail areas should be required to locate only in areas well-served by public transit and/or integrated into mixed, walkable residential areas. This can be done with some simple changes in zoning and building codes.

Good idea.

“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.”

Either Ms. Zabarenko doesn’t have very well-thought-out ideas, or isn’t willing or able to express the full implications, or isn’t good at explaining them to us, the ignorant masses. It seems the article is counting only so-called “personal” consumption, and only a few specific areas of it at that. But the vast majority of consumption is by industry, government and military. This is of course done in our name on our dollar and we can stop buying it and take political action and eventually, maybe, stop it. but counting only those few items will not provide an accurate picture of consumption, emissions, or other ecological destruction. It will skew action.

“For example, if world leaders agree to keep carbon emissions in 2030 at the same level they are now, no one person's emissions could exceed 11 tons of carbon each year.”

Again, ideas or expression? It doesn’t necessarily follow that limiting countries will limit individuals. Unless there’s a mechanism for making the translation (like a massive worldwide revolution against the wealthy followed by true universal-democratic rule including economic democracy?) It would most likely lead to just the opposite. Those with the interchangeable commodities of money and power will continue to accrue to themselves the right to spew evermore projected ‘stuff’ into air, water, soil and the bodies of serfs and ignore them or minimize them by calling them “externalities” while increasing energy and material consumption to protect themselves from the effects of same—personal armies, personal oxygen tanks, walled cities and captive governments. Pretty much like now, except for the oxygen…

There may be an alternative to revolting behavior. Jung talked about the psychoid, the shadowy gray area between physical and psychological. Projection of externalities takes place there, and much if not most of what we do. And it can be changed there. Belief in a system can collapse suddenly and for relatively minor-seeming reasons. But the way has to be prepared with other ideas and images, expressed well, spread widely and wisely, and with legs. Philosophy, art, politics, simple living, fiction, non-fiction, movies...anything and everything can inspire the new forms archetypes take. Everything at once.

And if this seems inadequately expressed, it is. It’s a huge, deep, complex subject that takes a lifetime to begin. We need to start now to understand it even a little and start to change both our lives and politics at once by changing our minds and bodies.

On the other hand, a lot of wealthy people invest in green technologies, can afford to go "off grid", have sufficient land to be almost self-sufficient (augmented by a little bartering and participation in local energy transfer systems) and by wisely using their wealth, can actually have a significantly smaller carbon footprint than their middle-class cousins.

I'm one of 'em and speak from experience.

What, you mean wealthy in terms of money? Ooops, my bad.

Well, the computer malfunction combined with odd submission rules to allow the second part and delete the first part of my comment above.

To reply to zmann,1:26,

It seems obvious to me that all industrial, governmental, military and utilital (?) carbon should be spread out among all of us. After splitting up all the obvious and easily quantifiable and traceable contributions, maybe the commons of the bads could be assigned by income or expenditures, or maybe more detailed analyses could assign it more fairly--to people who spent more on carbon-intensive or toxic products and processes.

In some circles, i believe this is known as a carbon tax.
Maybe this payment should be linked to other performance--you pay more of the US M1A1 tank share if you voted for pro-war candidates, didn't march against the war and didn't write letters to the editor pointing out that there was no evidence Iraq had WMD, and you pay less if you bicycle, garden, or key Hummers. (Which I don't condone, btw.) I'm sure you and I could come up with some criteria, yes?

"...basing targets for emission cuts on the number of wealthy people..."

But the wealthy, would still manage to twist the law to put their share of the burden onto the poorest people.