[_Microft]

You won't go on with business as usual if you are being monitored.

I remember something about a town that frequently reported a list of their most polluting local businesses. And the businesses started to become more environmentally friendly just to not appear on this list! There were no fines or other disadvantages, they just appeared on the list.

I'll add a link later if I can find something about it (wish me luck, it seems ogooglebar as Swedes might call it).

[00117]

Businesses becoming environmentally friendly sounds like a positive.

[_Microft]

I absolutely agree. It was an explanation why some might not even like data being collected.

[yholio]

This works in a social setting, a community, a market but it's much less likely to work against countries as a whole. The policy makers respond to local voters (at best) not other countries.

We've named and shamed China for a few years now that it produces 50% of the world's ocean plastic pollution from a single river. Little has changed.

[SECProto]

If, as someone else said, tariffs were imposed to all countries as a function of greenhouse gas output, it would disincentivise their production, and incentivize cleaning country-wide emissions.

As with most things, there is no silver bullet, but a combination of motivators will create the change we need. Independent data monitoring is the first major step to make it possible.

[Maarten88]

Politicians here like to say our country "already does so much" and we'd be stupid to lead even more. Which is simply not true: we really don't do our fair share of CO2 reductions and are not on track to meet our obligations.

Good data would spell this out to the public and help "sell" the required policies to the people.

[_Microft]

I haven't found anything yet but I'm suspecting that it is an example from the book "Trial and Error" by Tim Harford.

(I'm unsure why it should be in there and in what context but I have got the vague feeling that it is).