Remove Universities, Tax People Outside Cities (and Other Extreme Ideas For 2010)

The new issue of Wired features a great collection of short radical manifestos from different authors for new policies in 2010 Britain. However, they are so extremely great, that they could be easily applied anywhere else. I strongly recommend you to read all of them, but below I made a review of my favorite ones.

1. Tax People Who Live Outside Cities, because it's not sustainable - rural households have much higher CO2 emission per person (larger houses, more cars per houshold, etc.). If we tax cigarettes to reflect the harm, we should also tax lifestyles that are damaging health of our planet (by PD Smith).
2. Turn Cities Into Self-Sufficient and Carbon Neutral Jungles, with eliminating using cars (walking, cycling and public transport is sufficient to move in the cities) and applying genetically modified (GM) crops everywhere, with making vertical farms on buildings (thick plantings of trees would absorb CO2 and extra luminescence genes would remove the requirement for city lights). Office building should be turned to high-tech beehives, shopping malls into bazaars and majority of buildings refurbished using bioarchitectural solutions, without building a new ones to save space and decrease the carbon footprint (by Paul McAuley).
3. Promote Another Credit Crunch, our economy is based too much on financial services, which consume themselves. Let is collapse. (by John Lanchester).
4. Slash Universities and Go Virtual, because it's too expensive and irrational to maintain the current system of higher education. Only 99 universities in England and Wales cost £8 billion of UK public money. Students graduate with an average debt of £20,000. To cut the costs we should revise and eliminate the pointless, non-vocational courses, make as much as we can online based, create more options for skill trainings. National service should be restored to promote social cohesion and civicmindedness in youngsters to get them out of negative circulation - we don't need university for this (by Glen Newey).
5. Recycle dead and introduce them back into the food production :-) (by Dinos Chapman).

[photo credits: Wired]