Bans can work and Pigouvian taxation can work. Horses for courses. In Seattle we've banned the cheap plastic bags that blow around and get stuck in trees. Th

Bans can work and Pigouvian taxation can work. Horses for courses. In Seattle we've banned the cheap plastic bags that blow around and get stuck in trees. There are many, many fewer tree-stuck-plastic-bag-ghosts to be seen around now. We've also put a mandatory 5c fee (not a tax, sadly) on paper bags; there are many, many more people bringing reusable bags to the supermarket. (Ignores, of course, whether these reusable bags are better for the environment holistically -- having lots of yuppies buying synthetic shopping bags made in China and shipped to Amazon DCs, then having them individually shipped out in Prime boxes, etc. before being used is probably worse than just having pulp grown in America made into bags trucked en masse to the grocery and generally recycled or composted.) Regarding carbon credits -- soon that will be not only feasible but tokenized and sub-divisible. See http://sparkchange.io/ http://sparkchange.io/