Climate change could be tackled with the help of a World War II-style rationing of petrol, meat and the energy people use in their homes, UK scientists say.
They claim that this would help countries to slash their greenhouse gas emissions ‘rapidly and fairly’.
Researchers from the University of Leeds also said that governments could restrict the number of long-haul flights people make in a year or ‘limit the amount of petrol one can buy in a month’.
They said that previous schemes put forward as a way to fight global warming – such as carbon taxes or carbon trading schemes – would not work because they favoured the wealthy, who would effectively be able to buy the right to pollute.
The experts also made a comparison with the need to limit certain goods as they grew scarce in the 1940s, adding that trying to achieve this by raising taxes was rejected at the time because ‘the impact of tax rises would be slow and inequitable’.