McMegan's post here gets at a big chunk of the reason why regulatory action is the only sensible way to oppose climate change. Even if we were all fairly committed environmentalists, there'd really be no way to effectively evaluate the amount of carbon our various activities generate. And more to the point, we don't want to. I have enough to fret over in a day without worrying whether this organic Tibetan rice was really spirited over to my local Whole Foods in a hydrogen powered rickshaw, and whether that took more or less carbon than all the miniscule bits of electricity and storage space used in the writing, publishing, accessing, and Google archiving of that joke. Carbon consumption should be in the price of my goods, and then I can do what I often do as a consumer and make decisions based on price signals. The government needs to fix the market failure wherein the price of carbon is not assessed in the cost of products, but we actually do need a high-functioning market to accurately translate carbon information into a form we can easily and quickly work with.
