Something to chew on from this week’s summit/tropical getaway in beautiful sunny Cancun.

They haven’t decided on anything yet, mind you. They’re just sort of kickin’ around ideas.

In one paper Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the only way to reduce global emissions enough, while allowing the poor nations to continue to grow, is to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years.

This would mean a drastic change in lifestyles for many people in countries like Britain as everyone will have to buy less ‘carbon intensive’ goods and services such as long haul flights and fuel hungry cars…

This could mean a limit on electricity so people are forced to turn the heating down, turn off the lights and replace old electrical goods like huge fridges with more efficient models. Food that has travelled from abroad may be limited and goods that require a lot of energy to manufacture…

Prof Anderson insisted that halting growth in the rich world does not necessarily mean a recession or a worse lifestyle, it just means making adjustments in everyday life such as using public transport and wearing a sweater rather than turning on the heating.

Yeah, really? Rationing electricity doesn’t necessarily mean a worse lifestyle? Every year, environmentalists organize an ambitious global warming protest that calls on people to turn their lights off for one hour. Even among eco-nuts, that’s as much as they feel safe in asking people to sacrifice. Good luck with that rationing idea, gang. Besides, assuming this dopey idea were ever attempted — which it never, ever would be — does anyone expect the world’s number one greenhouse-gas emitter to voluntarily retard its roaring economic growth with rolling blackouts for the sake of slowing global warming? That was one of the grim lessons from Copenhagen, as I recall. Ah well, at least no one’s called for population control. Yet.

Incidentally, here’s how the conferees celebrated a hard day’s worth of deliberations over shared sacrifice and learning to make do with less: With a big party.