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by Nextgrid 1181 days ago
You can offset environmental impact by excise-style taxes on the polluting activity that are used to subsidize environmentally-friendly processes elsewhere that would've otherwise used fossil fuels due to cost.

It's not perfect (as fossil fuels are still being burned) but it's better than nothing and a much more realistic solution than some extremist ideas such as stopping using fossil fuels overnight and effectively shutting down the economy as a result.

2 comments

You could, but you could also maintain the status quo. Not everything needs a market based solution.
You can tax enough to remove 150% of the pollution. I'd call that much better than the status quo. And that's before we talk about the usefulness of funneling rich people money into technology research.
IIRC, with aviation fuel it's kind of complicated due to international treaties on taxation of fuel.
Yeah and those are necessary to avoid airlines filling all the way up at the cheapest location and thus wasting more energy carrying unneeded fuel around