[stinkbeetle]

The problem is regulations like these rarely "pay for externalities".

They impose compliance costs or costs to skirt the regulations.

CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes, quite the opposite they keep increasing and will continue to do so for a long time before even thinking about coming down. In large part because production was moved off shore to countries which have less regulation and higher emission intensity of production, which actually has the opposite effect.

Workers rights were not solved, the abuses were just off-shored to countries that still enslave people and abuse workers and allow child labor.

Tax evasion has not been solved, it's just permitted under complicated legal structures.

All these things are a godsend for bloated multinational corporations who can pay the compliance costs without blinking, and have little to worry about organic competition.

Space regulation and taxes won't solve anything. If the government had any kind of track record you might be a little open minded about it, but at this point the burden of proof would be on the people claiming that this time, taxes won't be used for corruption and graft. If there is money to be had in it, the government will take their cut and in exchange allow multinational corporations to offshore the problem to other countries.

[Teever]

Maybe CO2 emissions haven't been regulated successfully because attempts to regulate the came far too late, and the attempts to regulate similar issues in space are coming right on time?

It's a lot harder to stop a very, very large group of people from doing something that they've been doing for generations. It's much easier to stop a much smaller group of people from starting something new.

[Chu4eeno]

How would starting earlier have stopped industries from outsourcing CO2 emissions to other/exempt countries? If you look at graphs of global emissions it's like they didn't skip a beat once legislation and treaties in the west kicked in.

[Teever]

If we hadn’t designed our economy around carbon emitting processes from the beginning there would be no incentive to continue to do this by exporting industrial capacity to authoritarian states.

But because of that original sin we see exactly what you describe — a system with too much inertia to change easily.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

[stinkbeetle]

Seems like a reach. Not that economies were particularly ever designed, at that level, but they were also "designed" around sailing ships, horses, rail locomotives, steam power, hand harvesting wheat, weaving fabric by hand, mail for communication. Lots of things that rapidly melted away and changed entire economies and even structures of society in much shorter time than governments have been pretending to fail to address carbon pollution.

[Dylan16807]

> CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes

All the?

We barely regulate CO2 at all.

If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.

And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.

[stinkbeetle]

> All the?

All the.

> We barely regulate CO2 at all.

Not sure who the "we" is, but many jurisdictions do regulate CO2 heavily. Not only immediate direct taxes, but subsidies to competitors, increased regulatory impositions and effective moratoriums on approvals, sovereign risk factors with many countries legislating and committing to CO2 phase out.

> If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.

Again not sure which we you are talking about, but lots of places have carbon taxes. They do make massive changes when they are priced to do so -- see, the EU. That was the point of my comment. I didn't argue markets don't respond to economic incentives, I clearly was agreeing they do. The effect has not been to solve climate change, it has been to move production offshore to markets that have much higher carbon emission intensity of production!

> And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.

And the fact that these not-hard-to-stop loopholes are not stopped still doesn't make you stop to think? The taxes aren't going to solve problems or pay for externalities, they are funding graft and corruption and stifling competition.