Should We Make People's Carbon Footprints Public?

It's a fact that public condemnation will discourage people from doing certain things. Once all your friends stop smoking and you're seen as a troglodyte for lighting up, it gets that much harder to breezily carry on puffing. It's hard to quit, all right, but somehow a lot of smokers managed it, right?

This is the same principle a new article in the New Scientist called "How reputation could save the Earth" suggests we apply to our environmental problem. Let's shame people into embracing greener habits, write David Rand and Martin Nowak, by publicizing their carbon footprints.

"Cars could be forced to display large stickers indicating average distance traveled, with inefficient cars labeled similarly to cigarettes," they write. The cars' bumper stickers, they suggest, could say something like "Environmentalist's warning: this car is highly inefficient. Its emissions contribute to climate change and cause lung cancer and other diseases." Another of their brilliant ideas? Energy companies could publicize people's energy usage in searchable databases, so we could all condemn each other for being too gluttonous about our heat and lighting.

While they have the sense to admit that "laws of this kind raise possible privacy issues," the fascist tinge of their solution to our environmental crisis leaves the reader with one solid insight: this is why they don't let mathematical biologists make policy. One of the authors is a postdoctoral fellow in the subject at Harvard and the other is a professor of mathematics and biology, also at Harvard.

Not only would the society they envision be hell to live in, it might not even work. If they had done their homework they would have seen that a new report from the CDC reveals that all that social pressure hasn't driven smoking rates down more than 0.5 percent in the last five years.

Photo courtesy of Simone Ramella via flickr