We need to urgently reduce carbon emissions across the world. Individuals can reduce their own impact slightly but for large scale change government needs to support this by creating a fair and transparent market so that our overall carbon use is dramatically reduced.

Carbon rationing would mean that we all have to do our bit, and would create a market so that companies can pass some of the true environmental cost on to their consumers, who create the demand for their activities.  

The numbers need exploring but an example would be:

Each UK citizen is allowed 5000 Carbon Rations (CR) a year.

1 flight costs 1500 CR.

1 full car fuel tank costs 5 CR.

A food item with air miles on it costs 1 CR.

Household energy use costs 1 CR per unit.

An item that is resource intensive to produce (eg a car or phone) has a CR cost to reflect this.

Public transport and locally produced goods are CR free.

Businesses would need to label their products accordingly, and be supported to do so by government. There could be additional rations for business travel, although the environmental production and transport costs of a product would be passed to the consumer in the above model.

Carbon rationing has been around as an idea for several years, but needs government action urgently if we want our children to be able to live in a world anything like the one we have enjoyed.