Source: Yorkshire Post
In recent years, going green has become a fashion statement in its own right. But, like it or not, buying sausages from a farm shop rather than a supermarket, and carefully separating plastic and cardboard at the recycling centre may ease our conscience, but the effect hardly registers on the graph currently charting the world’s headlong rush towards environmental armageddon. No, according to one Yorkshire academic, what we need is war-time style rationing.

Dr Mark Roodhouse, a historian from the University of York, believes that while many favour green taxes, their introduction wouldn’t deliver the much needed decrease in consumption, and, instead, we should look to the past for a much-needed history lesson. “Over the past decade, politicians from all parties have acknowledged the need to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels if carbon emissions are to be cut,” he says. “At the moment, carbon taxes seem to the front-runner, but there are real doubts about how effective they would be. During World War Two, the government decided not to increase taxation, not only because it would have taken too long for the benefits to be felt, but politicians feared the move would hit the poorest members of society the hardest. Although the reasons for rationing then differ greatly from today’s reasons for carbon rationing, the aim is the same – to reduce consumption and allow the equal distribution of the remaining consumer goods and services.”

Telling people what they can and can’t spend their money on is unlikely to be popular, and its success would largely depend on the support of a public already bombarded by environmental horror stories on a daily basis. [more]