Waiting to Exhale

A few days ago I jokingly suggested to a friend that we work on a satirical public service announcement that would urge people to stop exhaling to save the planet. Since carbon dioxide is given off when human beings exhale, and since carbon dioxide is considered a greenhouse gas, every time a person exhales, he or she is polluting the environment.

It was a joke. It was satire. It wasn’t supposed to be a prediction. But it was.

Reuters’ Deborah Zabarenko reports:

To fairly divide the climate change fight between rich and poor, a new study suggests basing targets for emission cuts on the number of wealthy people, who are also the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, in a country.

Since about half the planet’s climate-warming emissions come from less than a billion of its people, it makes sense to follow these rich folks when setting national targets to cut carbon dioxide emissions, the authors wrote on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[...]

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.

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. That means there would be about a billion “high emitters” in 2030 out of a projected world population of 8.1 billion.

By counting the emissions of all the individuals likely to exceed this level, world leaders could provide target emissions cuts for each country. Currently, the world average for individual annual carbon emissions is about 5 tons; each European produces 10 tons and each American produces 20 tons.

The emphasis above is mine. It’s to show that this study is pushing the idea of monitoring every single person in the country for how much carbon dioxide they give off.

For those of you who don’t want the government in your lives, no matter your ideology—for instance, conservatives want government out of the schools and liberals want the government out of the bedroom—you haven’t seen anything yet if this study’s proposals are adopted.

You haven’t seen government intrusion until you consider the possibility of your government tracking and monitoring how much carbon dioxide you emit.

What’s even better is that throughout this story they talk about the “rich” but they conveniently don’t define “rich.” Hell, depending on how this group defines “rich,” every person in the United States might be “rich”—and every person just might end up paying a massive carbon emissions tax simply for exhaling.

ReferenceZabarenko, Deborah. “New Climate Strategy: Track the World’s Wealthiest.” Reuters AlertNet. 6 July 2009.

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