It's really complicated to accurately estimate the carbon emissions of your lifestyle. Trading your 1998 Taurus for a 2008 Prius sounds like a good idea, but for the amount of energy that goes into creating the Taurus. Eating food grown in the states rather than Chile seems wise, but for the fact that shipping is far more efficient than trucking. Which vegetables are the most energy intensive? Are shoes made from sustainable ingredients really better than shoes that are mass produced in startlingly efficient factories? Who knows? That's why we need a system for pricing carbon upstream, so a product's environmental cost is right there in the price tag. Individuals aren't equipped to figure out how much carbon is a candy bar. What they are equipped to do is buy more of things that aren't that expensive, and buy less of things that are pretty expensive. If carbon is priced, and carbon-intensive products become pricey, folks will gravitate away from them naturally. And that's what you want: You want a low-carbon lifestyle to be effortless, even natural. It can't be a complicated, virtue-based project. Emissions will start going down when we convince companies to change their price tags, not when we convince a fraction of Americans to change their lifestyles.
