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This would be a great idea. I think it’s also interesting to trace how much all of it come from really good, simple and forward thinking principles, to slowly
by makeitdouble 5y ago
This would be a great idea.
I think it’s also interesting to trace how much all of it come from really good, simple and forward thinking principles, to slowly become the state we are in now.
For instance, following your idea, there will be the issue with countries that produce more CO2 than they can afford, but we can’t make them pay as it would literally be a matter life or death to them. So they get an exception.
They then become a beacon of CO2 relocation. We start to pass more laws to limit that trend, but the existing companies will be grandfathered. They then have a monopoly on the scheme, and also find other loopholes, progressively expanding the amount of CO2 they can get away with.
During that time, these countries will be more and more CO2 swamped, degrade beyond belief, and someone will be pesting against the demon that thought about taxing countries in the first place.
To put my naive ideas out as well, I kinda see economic tricks the same way we say “don’t try to solve social problems through technology”. We should straight get the bigger economies to shoulder infra construction in weaker economies no strings attached. No loan, no debt, no nothing. We’re all extinct anyway if we don’t do it.
- PeterisP 5y ago> "We should straight get the bigger economies to shoulder infra construction in weaker economies no strings attached" Who is meant by "we" in this sentence? And in what ways do you consider that it's plausible to "get them to shoulder it" in excess of whatever they freely choose to do? > We’re all extinct anyway if we don’t do it. Citation needed - the IPCC published worst case scenarios are far from extinction, and especially in the countries which would shoulder the burden the expected damage the local consequences are "very bad" in the sense that a few percent decrease in GDP growth is an enormously large economic damage. It's not clear if spending 5% of GDP on that (or much more, if you expect them to "shoulder the burden" as well) would be worth it for them, since they'll have to invest in local mitigations anyway due to the already accumulated greenhouse gases. 5% of global gross product is a lot. For example, it's more than what the world affords to spend on all kinds of education together. It's far more than what would cost to truly eliminate world hunger and most major diseases. It's an order of magnitude more than what the world has devoted for charitable purposes. It's literally the equivalent of mobilizing 400 million people to work only on that thing - if the expected bad consequences of climate change are e.g. 200 million displaced people, then that's very bad, but it's not worth to have 400 million people devote their lives to prevent 200 million from needing to migrate.