Today’s New York Times Magazine is a “green issue” that is full of interesting and clever ideas for reducing carbon emissions, especially at the individual level. But the issue is ultimately frustrating to read because most of the ideas (which are often complicated and difficult to implement) will never come into wide use without better incentives. For instance, there’s no way that most individual consumers will ever have the right information to make good decisions about “carbon footprints.” We just need a carbon tax, which uses the price signal to disperse information and align incentives. The whole issue should have been two sentences long.