See this telling exposure of the absurdity of the prohibitionist agenda: To Fly or Not to Fly (to California): That is the Question.

[C]arbon offsets only really work if you assume that people in the developed world can pollute proportionally more than people in the developing world. If you give everyone on earth an equal share of a sustainable carbon footprint, then a single transatlantic round-trip flight is about 2 years worth of your allowable carbon output. . .

I'm worse than most, flying a ridiculous amount so I can live in Manhattan and work for IFTF in Palo Alto (I fly out here about every six weeks, spewing approximately 4 tons of CO2 into the stratosphere per trip). Plus all the trips to client sites.

So seeing that buying a TerraPass isn't going to be enough, I've been toying with the idea of taking the train out to California from New York for this year's Ten Year Forecast summit in April instead of flying, blogging about the whole experience and possibly turning into a book about the unsustainability of aviation and energy-intensive global mobility.

This is truly stuck on stupid. Prohibition can't possibly work, and won't be seriously attempted. A few S.O.S. nutters will obsess about it - while exploiting it to advance their careers: buy my book - but they will be a tiny yet shrill minority.

When you consider that the people in the developing world would dearly like to develop, intend to do so, and will then emit like best of us, the miniscule carbon savings of the prohibitionists will not be detectable.

Over the coming decades we must, so we will, develop less carbon intensive energy systems. To manage our atmosphere and climate, assuming the climatologists haven't bungled again, we must, so we will, scrub out the smokes and stinks created in what will then be the past.

The energy being expended now on prohibition is a waste. That energy should be directed to useful enterprises that advance the longer term goals rather than being squandered on dead ends.

One of the best indications that the prohibitionist agenda is intellectually, ethically and aesthetically bankrupt is that proponents have taken refuge in moral arguments. They skip right over debate of what is right and wrong, assume that their views are right, and claim a moral duty to do what they claim is right. Those who dispute the rightness of these behaviors can then be demonized as immoral heretics.

This is just one more bit of insane behavior in a world that seems ever more insane, but humanity has some resilience. Before too long it will notice how silly the prohibitionist agenda truly is, shrug, and switch to less futile behavior. This does not mean that they will come to wisdom. There will be a new agenda and the ever popular prohibition tic will be part of it, but something else will be prohibited by those latter day moralizers.