I stumbled across an interesting story while scanning my bloglines feeds. One of the blogs I read pretty infrequently, A Networked World, is written by a guy down under name Earl Mardle. I find his posts interesting and informative and this one was no exception. The idea, from this Sydney Morning Herald article is that individuals in the UK will be given a yearly allotment of carbon credit with which to purchase goods (e.g. fuel, groceries, electricity) and services. At the end of the year individuals will be either charged for more carbon credits or given the opportunity to sell their credit to others.

[Sidebar: When I followed the link to the SMH article smack dab on the middle of the articles was an ad for the new BMW 3series coupe (an amazing car BTW, but not headed for the top 10 fuel efficient list any time soon) AND to the right of the articles was a link advertisment to win $10k in free petrol (gas)!]

The idea of individuals being given carbon credits sounds like a reasonable approach to putting reponsibility where it should be. I imagine it will be very difficult to get buy-in from the average person who cannot be bothered to think about environmental footprint.