Reply #20: Very Good Point.

[dcfirefighter]

People rally against V8 cars, etc. but fail to recognize it's not the MPG necessarily, but rather the total fuel (carbon?) use.

I notice it often:

Drive's a Prius.
Drives it 20,000 miles a year, commuting from their 3500 s.f. exurban home to their job in the city.
Complains about the guy driving the SUV who drives 5,000 miles a year.

As far as I'm concerned, the ONLY way to reduce GHG's is to tax them, more heavily every year.
The ONLY way to make this absolutely fair across incomes & wealth brackets is to return that tax revenue, in equal amounts, to each and every person in this country. (Even more fair: enact it worldwide. How much GHG does a peasant farmer emit, and how much would his share of the revenue improve his living conditions?)

It would take a Carbon tax roughly equivalent to $1/gallon of gas to return $1 a day to every person on earth. There are more than a Billion people who live on less than $1/day.

Unfortunately, if we gave these people $1/day, the people who 'own' the resources - land and water most likely - would just charge more for them.