[beeflet]

cities are made of concrete and steel, both of which emit carbon in their production. nearly everything from pharmaceuticals to clothes to computers is made with petrochemicals. It's not just a matter of civil design, and we don't have the answers.

[EGreg]

We do have the answers. Pigovian taxes. Government and industry work together to distract people so they don’t organize to demand the actual answers be implemented.

1) Universal basic income funded by taxes at the point of extraction or emission. See: Alaska (Permanent Fund)

2) Use the taxes to pay down the debt, give UBI since you’ll have to print money anyway.

3) Also raise taxes on non biodegradeable plastics and forever chemicals.

UBI can shift the Overton window from people protesting raising taxes on fossil fuels (eg Yellow Vest protests) to actually embracing them.

Rather than telling individuals they cant have a bag or a straw, the government should put the pressure on bottling companies and clothing companies which continue to use plastics and PFAS everywhere… “recycling” is just another scam to keep individuals distracted. It turns out they were just shipping it all to China for decades.

[beeflet]

Any nation that implements a carbon tax will be at an competitive disadvantage, since you're compensating to reduce a global externality. It's a tragedy of the commons.

[tim333]

You could work out a global carbon tax system. Non cooperating nations would get trade sanctions costing them more than implementing the tax.

[khalic]

Just because the US doesn’t recycle/upcycle doesn’t mean the rest of the world doesn’t…

[spwa4]

However, there's 2 huge problems with that. First, stopping CO2 additions at this point will just cause a marginal delay in the progress of global warming.

Second adding CO2 will stop. Fossil fuels are finite and will stop this century. All regulation can hope to do is stop it a bit faster. A few decades at best. Which just doesn't matter. Plus oil producing countries, the only ones that have any hope of doing this will never cooperate.

Even nuclear winter will pause global warming, but it won't work to prevent it's consequences, because of water. So will any other mechanism that lowers temperatures.

I'm not saying there aren't other advantages to ecological policy, but stopping global warming just isn't one of them.

Global warming cannot be stopped by regulation. It cannot be stopped by humans at all. That's what the IPCC models say. We need to adapt to it. That means moving billions of people, frankly, out of the way. At an extremely high level what needs to happen is that billions of people need to be moved a LOT closer to a coastline.

[khalic]

Oh I agree with the rest of your assertion, but recycling would be a great idea even without global warming

[khalic]

We don’t have the answers to what?

[beeflet]

The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.

[khalic]

Ok… what about the question I just asked you?