[triviatise]

the only thing that has to happen is that each country that believes in climate change just needs to tax oil (and coal) at a slow, but ever increasing rate. It will incentivize a shift to alternate energy.

Instead govts love to ban, control, mandate, and penalize.

[IAmEveryone]

I don quite see you distinction between “control, mandate, penalize”, and “tax”.

[triviatise]

In one case you ban something and penalize people for the behavior in the other case you tax it, which lets people decide whether they want to continue the behavior.

For example in austin they banned bags. They then spent 3 million in marketing to let people know about the ban. If they taxed it they would have generated revenue and reduced bag usage. Yet people or stores that really needed to use bags could still do it.

Another example, we had a drought. The city restricted use of water. They hired a ton of people to enforce the bans and gave out fines to those who got caught. Water use dropped, but then the water utility started losing money so they had to raise prices. If they had instead just taxed the higher tiers of usage, water use would have dropped. People that had a need to use more water could still do it. People could make tradeoffs, like Im not going to wash my clothes but I am going to wash my car. Instead the city decided for us which water using behaviors were acceptable and which were not.