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It's impossible to nicely ask people to limit their consumption of resources to which they have unfettered access; it's very feasible to seriously limit their a
by porb121 6y ago
It's impossible to nicely ask people to limit their consumption of resources to which they have unfettered access; it's very feasible to seriously limit their access to them. If meat (and other polluting products) were priced according to their emissions externalities, a lot more people would be vegetarians.
- chr1 6y agoReducing meat consumption and other similar measures will have vanishingly small effect, especially compared to the amount of CO2 that is going to be released from Siberian permafrost, which is already melting, and has more carbon stored in it than all the carbon we have added and will burn in the near future.
- lotyrin 6y agoIt doesn't seem politically possible to even ask people to limit their consumption, and enforcement would be suicidal to governance. We've seen what it looks like when you try: that it was not possible to ask people just to be polite and responsible regarding the epidemic -- they were practically ready to revolt instead of observe simple precautionary measures. Can you imagine if there were across-the-board actual enforcement in place for any of those measures, what it would have looked like? And that was an acute event, not something that's slowly boiling the frog.
- lanternfish 6y agoWe already tax things that we don't want people to buy, this isn't fundamentally different.
- lotyrin 6y agoYeah, but on that front, the parts of the market we need to tax have regulatory capture.