[bumby]

I think the difficulty here is getting a consensus on #1.

If it's an international effort, there's going to be disagreement on how to set a budget. Does a country with an emerging economy get a higher budget because they're behind more advanced economies who benefited from fossil fuels in their past growth? Getting advanced economies to make a disproportionate sacrifice will be a hard sell. And what is the accountability/oversight mechanism at the international level?

If instead the budget was set at the national level, you're going to have a hard time getting countries on-board if they see other countries not doing the same. "Why should we hamper our economy when country X isn't making a sacrifice?"

[FrojoS]

Sure. The Citizens need to be very willing to take sacrifices despite other countries not being onboard (yet). But they can if they want to!

In principal this already works in many cases, eg California/US subsidies on electric vehicles or Germany’s subsidies for solar. Both are very expensive with little benefit for the countries citizens compared to all other earthlings. To everyone else. They are just not aggressive enough.

Again, we don’t need an international consensus yet. The interesting part is putting financial pressure on foreign companies to reduce their CO2 footprint.

[bumby]

> But they can if they want to!

Agreed. Most every problem is solvable if there's the will to do it. The problem in this case is that there doesn't seem to be the political/social will to make the changes and sacrifices necessary for this scale.

It's unfortunate, but most people are very present-biased. It's a tough sell to convince them to adopt a forward thinking policy when it causes pain now. Maybe I'm cynical, but if you offered people to vote on whether to double the price of gasoline in order to subsidize renewables because it will be better in the long-run, I doubt that would pass.