4 ms·

I normally don't vote in threads I comment in, but in your case I just had to upvote. Too many people don't understand that you cannot really "save" money. But

• nostrademons 11y ago
  I'd upvoted devinhelton's post as well, because it had been at zero when I saw it and makes an important point. But I do understand the idea, and I'll go one further. The purpose of "money" is a form of claim check on the labor of other people, one that can be spent according to the preferences of each individual. When I say "save up to fund the inevitable devastation", I mean "it is probably more efficient to redirect the labor of people into fixing the problem after it happens than it is to invest it in changing production processes to speculatively prevent it from happening." I propose one possibility for this in a sibling thread: a carbon tax used to fund an insurance subsidy and additional federal disaster planning and possible infrastructure improvements. The financial & insurance industry can handle the administration; this is after all what the financial industry is for, arranging for a store of these "claim checks" so that you still have a claim on them in the future and yet they can be used for productive work in the meantime. The government's only role here is to rectify an externality. Carbon emissions are causing harm to people not party to their production, so redistribute this back into the economy at the point that's being harmed, and let the market do the rest.