A modest proposal.

According to a source on the web:

Fresh air contains less than 0.04% carbon dioxide. A human’s breath contains almost 5% carbon dioxide. Therefore, we are contributing to the problem with each breath we take. Every person’s output varies according to the amount of exercise taken, the food consumed, etc., but for the purpose at hand a reasonable figure is that each person exhales 445 liters of carbon dioxide per day (the average of 1000 samples measured by the USDA). In the course of a year this production by one average person represents 704 pounds of carbon dioxide.

That equals 0.352 tons.

Now, the average car in the US supposedly puts out ~5 tons/year. According to another source,

“Citing Ward’s Motor Vehicle Facts & Figures, 1999, this almanac reports that, in 1996, the most recent date covered, there were 485,954,000 cars registered worldwide, and 185,404,000 trucks and buses, for a total, worldwide, of 671,358,000 motor vehicles.”

For the simplicity’s sake, lets say that all of those vehicles put out an average of 6 tons/year of CO2.

671 million x = 4.026 billion tons per year.

There are 6,930,653,611 people in the world right now according to this applet.

6.93 billion x 0.352 = 2.55 billion tons of human-breathed CO2 per annum. Total human + vehicle output is 6.676 tons/annum.

It is clearly hard to get people to give up their cars. Impossible, you might say.

But if you retire someone from breathing, he or she can no longer drive a car, and the insidious expulsion of breath-borne CO2 also ceases immediately.

Rather than try to get living people to stop driving, therefore, I submit that we should randomly eliminate half the vehicle drivers on the planet.

That simple step would immediately cut the vehicle-based CO2 output to a mere 2.013 billion t/a. In addition, there would be 335.5 million fewer selfish vehicle-driving humans, a net reduction in breath-borne CO2 of 118.1 million tons, for a net reduction to 1.895 billion t/a.

In contrast, reducing our current vehicle-based CO2 output by ten percent, a goal everyone agrees is nearly impossible under present economic growth forecasts, would only reduce emissions by a paltry 402 million tons, for a total vehicle + respiration figure of 6.274 billion t/a.

Clearly, that meager reduction is not enough.

We should, therefore, immediately embark on the plan outlined above.

Of course certain problems remain to be worked out in detail. The cars and other vehicles of the scrapped drivers would have to be dismantled and recycled to make sure relatives and neighbors do not simply start driving them instead.

And the physical remains of the redundant humans would have to be sequestered to prevent the escape of their carbon content into the atmosphere.

But with a little ingenuity and a go-to attitude, we can do it!

I now open the session to comments and questions from the floor.