While I’m in Georgia, a country that’s currently turning visibly green with the hot summer months approaching, I stumbled across this interesting article blogged about on ZDNet.

Two of the site’s bloggers report on an MIT study that claims:

‘…due to the combined effects of subsidies and rebound, the magnitude of possible reductions in energy use for people in the United States by voluntary changes in spending patterns appears limited.’

What the study basically says is that if you include equally available public services such as the police, health care, the law and other institutions in calculating your carbon footprint it is substantially increased and cannot be lowered as easily as we always thought it might be.

“‘The simple way you get people’s carbon use down is to tax it”.

If that’s true and our room for maneuver is limited on an individual scale then we require a completely new set of approaches to solving climate-change-related problems in combination with a consumer-oriented change of lifestyles.