[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.