A German Call for "Planetary Guardrails"

From the WBGU, Germany's climate advisory council, a call for environmental/ecological guardrails. It's about more than slashing carbon emissions. It's about defining limits of mankind's ecological footprint on everything from ocean acidification, soil degradation, biodiversity collapse and, yes, global warming.



My impression is that this horse has already left the barn. This would have been a grand notion if the nations of the developed world had embraced it twenty or thirty years ago. That, of course, didn't happen.

They're right about the need for these guardrails but, I fear, it's wishful thinking. What they envision would require some sharp limits on the developed nations' economies and what legislature, what parliament, what congress would impose that today?