The inclusion of "land use" and "water use" immediately makes this suspect to me. What's wrong with using land for agriculture or using rainfall and water?
With the article calling out wheat farming as one of their top concerns, what do they want as an alternative? Starving people? Depopulation?
You can make strong environmental arguments without reaching to such extremes. It actually undercuts the position.
Theoretically speaking, not all water use is renewable like rainfall, you can in fact deplete aquifers, and ancient near east in fact desertified due to unsustainable water use. Ditto for land use, you can in fact erode and degrade topsoil, ancient near east etc.
Skimming the report, it doesn't do reasonable job of taking land use and water use into account, but in principle, there's nothing wrong with taking unsustainable portion of land use and water use into account.
Freshwater and fertile topsoil are easily exhaustible resources. There are rivers (e.g. Colorado River) that are drying up due to overuse, and much of human waste gets either polluted with chemicals or ends up flushed into the ocean, never to be reclaimed. Once you dry up one river too many, you'll have both starvation and depopulation, but also daily shellings.
I like people, and eating meat, and lots of other things...but I and just about all of us are burning through the infrastructure that makes humans possible. And when humans aren't possible, there won't be any more humans. That's reality.
The physical systems on which we depend for survival do not care about what we want. Our only hope for maintaining a human population is to recognize that.
The greatest idea corporations ever came up with was to convince us all that we can individually stop what’s happening. Remember the fantasy that many of us grew up on that recycling would save the planet? Turns out things like plastic recycling is a joke.
Or how about when the oil companies invented the idea of “carbon footprint” to convince the public it was their responsibility to curb emissions, even though the vast majority of pollution isn’t from consumers?
Externalities are the activists’ favorite technical-sounding economic concept because they introduce a fudge factor into every single economic process that can be abused to support almost any conclusion.
The article essentially claims that nearly all major industries would be unprofitable is forced to pay their externalities. Great! Let’s shut it all down, let everyone gradually die off and then we’ll finally reach the sustainable utopia these people seek.
Climate activists would be better off developing a compelling vision. Look at how much progress Tesla has made by offering cars that people actually want.
Nobody wants to live in the world envisioned by climate activists. That is why activists have made no progress in the last 50 years.
Your comment ignores that these industries, corporations and governments driving climate change for profit have gone to extreme lengths to make sure activists make no progress that would affect earnings.
It’s also a strange argument to make that activists need to convince you that drinking contaminated water, breathing polluted air and ruining the natural world for profit isn’t a sustainable vision for the future.
Activists aren’t trying to sell you a product they are trying to warn you. Holding them to the showmanship antics of any given CEO seems misguided.
Tesla's cars (and private automobiles in general) are not a compelling vision, they're toys for rich people. I looked it up. About a million Teslas have ever been manufactured. Round the population to a power of 10... 10 billion people. So one human in 10k gets a Tesla. The main thing most climate activists that I talk to want is for billions of people to not have to die off due to resource mismanagement. People don't believe that it's even possible for our civilization to collapse, even though entire civilizations have collapsed numerous times over the course of history. This is not a world we're envisioning, is a world we're ~visioning. With our eyeballs.
Tesla produced about 1.3 million cars just last year (2022)[1]. It has been successfully meeting its goal of an annual production rate increase of 50% per year for around a decade and is on track to continue this until they reach their goal of producing 20 million cars annually in 2030. The outcome is uncertain but the track record is there. This plus fusion power gives a much different vision of the future. The world you envision depends where you are looking.
Was just reading a magazine from Columbia (uni). They showcase research claiming 40% of CO2 emitted in NYC is absorbed by Central Park and its green areas. Lmao, obviously this caused some cognitive dissonance in the writers as immediately they claim but that does not mean we should stop climate change efforts. The article had religious controvers vibes I swear.
40% with a ridiculously small amount of green areas. If that's the case, we'll, then, every CO2 emission is easily absorbed by the rest of the green areas in the world.
If by "real solutions" you mean "anything that allows us to keep emitting as much CO2 as we want" there might not be any. And you might be right, and we might be boned.
Which is why we see rock steady concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. We have been keeping records for seventy years now and have seen no increase in atmospheric CO2 whatsoever. It is the tree-huggers who have their heads in the sand, not you.
(Less sarcastically, please share the source of your claims. Obviously they're wrong, but I'd like to know how they're wrong.)
So is your point that externalities are non-existent, or is that even if they do exist they are irrelevant because jobs trump everything else, including the future existence of the human race?
There is no rigorous, objective methodology to account for externalities. It’s a bit like the ideal thermodynamic “closed system” which cannot actually be realized—it is simply not possible to draw a clean line between the various costs of economic activity and assign them to responsible parties because the economic activity itself is embedded in a cyclical environment.
My point is that we should not delude ourselves into thinking that we can arrive at “rational” decisions about resource use by reducing everything to accounting.
> My point is that we should not delude ourselves into thinking that we can arrive at “rational” decisions about resource use by reducing everything to accounting.
Have you any idea what should replace rational decisions and reducing everything to accounting? I cannot imagine what the other way may be, but I would like to know.
> Externalities are the activists’ favorite technical-sounding economic concept because they introduce a fudge factor into every single economic process that can be abused to support almost any conclusion.
Citation needed.
Yes, they're a favorite. But I always thought that it was because economic models are usually simple, closed systems and that's a trivial, approachable way to show that they're wrong.
Similar to finding "bugs" with provably correct functional code. Wherever it touches the real world, it's no longer simple math and something hinky's bound to happen.
You're being sarcastic, but it sounds like you agree with the authors about the situation we're in, and the desirability of building the sustainable utopia ~before we're forced to shut down our civilization and die off.
There's a whole body of economic literature by figures like Pigou and Coase on the definition, valuation, and allocation of externalities, as well as a mass of legal analysis. Perhaps you should consult that before dismissing it as 'technical sounding economic concept.'
The conclusion isn't that all industries would be unprofitable if they ignored externalities. The conclusion is that they are unprofitable as they are currently designed.
In the face of a actually having to price in externalities, entire industries may end up with fundamental changes.
Externalities imply economic inefficiency. That some goods will be supplied in greater quantities than optimal or less quantities than optimal. You can't derive much more from externalities. Most externality models aren't complex functions that try to start from some conclusion and try to create an inverse function of the conclusion to support the conclusion. They are often just a simple linear cost model. For example carbon taxes are just a constant price with a transition period to allow adjustments over time. It doesn't get simpler than that.
Even the more complicated land value tax often just is a constant percentage of the land value (85%). The question is what the land value is but even then it is often just using some average prices based on recent transactions with small, less than 100% adjustment factors depending on local factors. The model complexity again is constrained and does not allow infinite complexity. The conclusions you can draw from a land value tax don't go beyond the money the government spends on maintaining and building new infrastructure.
Noam Chomsky, an American linguist, philosopher, and political activist, once said, "If you're in a system where you must make profit in order to survive, you are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others".
Stephen Hawking criticized the economy for ignoring externalities, particularly in the context of climate change. In his book "Brief Answers to the Big Questions," Hawking wrote, "We are now learning that climate change is bringing with it not only changes to the physical environment but also to the way we think about economics. It is forcing us to recognize that many of the ways we have been measuring economic progress, based on the idea of unlimited growth, have been deeply flawed"
Noam Chomsky is a socialist in spite of all available evidence of the atrocities committed by most socialist states against their people. His career as a linguist is respected. His career as an economist or as a political commentator is of no worth at all.
Science and math are in practice virtually inseparable. Math can be studied independently of science, but science can't be studied independently of math. Similarly economics can be studied independently of politics, but good luck understanding politics without mentioning economics.
Ah, yes, he's one of those famous authoritarian anarchists.
I'm all for criticizing Chomsky, but let's do it with a little more sophistication. He would agree with you wholeheartedly that the USSR, China, and so forth are repressive dictatorships. He rejects the use of violent revolution.
Noam Chomsky is so anti-US intervensionist that he is willing to give anyone who is opposed to the US the benefit of the doubt. This alone is not a criticism but a fact.
The criticism comes when we look at who falls into that category. Famously starting with the Khmer Rouge, he claimed that we shouldn’t believe the refugees escaping the killing fields. After evidence emerged he also famously never admitted he was wrong. He denies the Bosnian genocide, and most recently he has said such charming things as: “we should give Putin the benefit of the doubt” (regarding the Ukraine war).
Should the opposite should also hold true then, we should dismiss staunch capitalists that continue to believe in that economic theory in spite of the atrocities perpetuated by most capitalist societies against people in adverse conditions? Seems a bit knee jerk to dismiss things wholesale.
Except that the most successful companies have paid close attention to negative externalities. Ford Motors shortened the work week and paid workers a high wage at the cost of short-term profit.
Cage-free chicken eggs and eco-friendly shoe/clothing brands are quickly becoming more popular than the alternative. Consumers generally care about negative externalities so they often do not stay externalities for long.
Whoa, it's fairy tale time. The idea that successful companies pay attention to in order to address what from an economic perspective are negative externalities is a complete fiction. Every single industry- energy, food, real estate, entertainment, finance, tech, clothing- exists, and the economics work- because the "costs" to nature are not accounted for. That's what an externality is.
It’s been a century since that period of Ford, where are those high-paying U.S. factory jobs now?
Greenwashing fads come and go, it’s all built on dumb technicalities. Try navigating your way through “cage free” vs “pasture raised” vs “certified humane” and thinking about what negative externalities those actually mitigate, how they’re enforced, what that amounts to in the grand scheme of things. Restaurant and fast food and your average grocer/shopper are still picking the cheapest Tyson cut. “Organic grass fed” milk is still drawn from the exhausted teat of 24/7 artificially inseminated veal-factories. It’s all marketing campaigns built on dumb technicalities.
I think the title is amusing. People in the comment section responded not based the content but on the title asking "why do you want to make the oil industry go bust?" The entire point of the post is that nobody has to do anything to achieve that outcome. It already is bankrupt.
> Except that the most successful companies have paid close attention to negative externalities. Ford Motors shortened the work week and paid workers a high wage ...
The length of the work week and worker wages are not external to the Ford motor company. Paying for cancer treatments for people who live near roads, and to reduce the noise pollution from cars in cities would be examples of remediating externalities.
> Of the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment: None of the world's top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying their full freight.
This is non sequitur. You can't go from "industries ranked by environmental impacts" to "biggest industries". This is so ridiculous I double checked whether I missed something, and no, I haven't missed anything. The logic really is that bad.
One problem (among many) is that even the current minimal attempts to pay for externalities in the form of carbon credits is mostly a perverse system of offsets taking the form of, for just one example, paying a logging company to not cut down trees that they wouldn’t cut down anyway.
And even the initiative to plant more trees in the millions. For all its noble purpose and good will— which I don’t fault and thing should continue— will have only the barest and most minimal impact on carbon capture.
And this is just o e of many externalities unpaid by corporations, subsidizing the cost of products we all use every day.
But no— I have no solution here, at least nothing plausibly likely to happen until the impacts of our actions becoming so obvious that they cannot be ignored. I am hopeful the human race will survive it, but only with enormous sacrifice.
I remember reading in another thread about Tesler’s law, which says that in software you can neither create nor destroy complexity, you can only move where it exists. Costs in society are similar.
The days of the traditional corporation, i.e. an organization that has shareholders, management, and employees made sense in the period of 1600 to 1950, but since then the world has gotten smaller. Our ability to shift costs (externalities) onto our planet has been curtailed by the fact that we’ve gone from a population of millions to billions. When you try to grow wealth by extracting stuff, sometime, someone, somewhere is going to feel it and will pay for it without any benefits to them.
Regulation, has been shoehorned in as a solution. But it operates as a bandaid that no one has been happy with. Every regulation simultaneously goes too far and doesn’t go far enough. It shifts decision making power from one institution to another, (business to government) and depends on an army of bureaucrats, to implement.
The fundamental solution is simple, make corporations pay for the externalities they create. This would be done at the point of purchase and would not grow the size of government because taxation systems that do this already exist. The implementation of this idea though is inconsistent and politically perilous because of path dependence. No one wants to pay for something they got for free before. For example, Citizens Climate Lobby has been campaigning for years for a Carbon Price and despite a lobbying effort from over 200,000 volunteers the US has yet to see a carbon price implemented. To do political lobbying for every externality like this would be a Sisyphean task.
My solution, high concept, would be to make a society like Star Trek. We need to make a techno utopia, paired with social progress to sustain it. Although you can’t have Star Trek without warp drive, warp drive doesn’t make Star Trek, humanity had also evolved socially on the show. We will not travel faster than light, our warp drive will be computers. One of the keys to my approach is to have better models, models of climate, models of toxicity, models of the economy, models of human behavior, etc. That will let us have predictive capabilities to test ideas before they have consequences and model where costs are borne and bill the beneficiaries. The raw TFLOPs of our hardware will not give us this, rather human ingenuity and skepticism will. To achieve that will require giving people license to question and develop. This means giving teachers autonomy, instituting universal basic income, and creating public spaces.
It would be more interesting to phrase this in terms of how much of the planet's production of renewable resources is being used/exceeded.
It's my understanding that not too long ago, when this last came up in an online discussion I partipated in, our modern lifestyle is burning through some 2.5 earth's annual renewable generation worth of resources each year by using non-renewable resources.
Consider that we burn up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get a single food calorie for some crops --- we need to transition to some sort of sustainable lifestyle and energy usage in the near future --- the sooner the better.
A phrasing which I think would make sense, and which should at least be considered in such discussions is: Under what circumstances does a person have the right to generate more heat energy than 1/current human population portion of the amount of energy which the planet is able to radiate off into space overnight?
This already is done to some degree (at local scales), but there's the issue that both the cost and the density are pretty prohibitive for large populations.
Whether large populations should exist or not, they do today, and this makes us pretty reliant on high-yield low-cost food production.
When accounting for negative externalities such as "unpriced natural capital consumption", it seems only fair to also include positive externalities, such as "food/energy availability"
How are those positive externalities? The person who burns the fuel gets the benefits, everyone else has to live with the pollution without benefitting.
A farmer that burns fuel to produce food gets paid for the food that burning the fuel enabled. There is no positive externality that needs to be compensated here.
If you wanted to make an argument about positive externalities you would talk about farmers leaving the soil in better condition than they arrived i.e. regenerating natural capital instead of burning it.
Externality taxes would solve many of today's pressing problems, implemented such that the externality tax is equal to the cost to "undo" whatever externality is imposed (and assuming the government actually spends the money to do so). I.e. we should recognize that we shouldn't outlaw useful and fundamentally positive things that emit CO2 like driving a car, but rather tax the pollution according to the cost to recapture that carbon from the shared environment.
It is fundamentally impossible to completely undo things, trivially so from the second law of thermodynamics.
A company which produces nuclear waste can pay the cost to store it, but cannot undo its existence. A company that burns oil can offset the carbon capture, but cannot put new oil in the ground.
A company that cuts a forest of 500 year old trees can't wait 500 years to verify they estimated the cost of raising such a forest again correctly (and also, the company will be gone by then anyway).
Right now, we care about CO2, but there's a lot more to natural resources than simple CO2 math will give us.
> we shouldn't outlaw useful and fundamentally positive things that emit CO2 like driving a car, but rather tax the pollution according to the cost to recapture that carbon from the shared environment
Focusing on incrementally taxing things like that is basically what the parent article complains about. That misses the old-growth forest for the CO2 in one tree.
Originally all forests were all growth forests, so should we have never violated the land and stayed in the stone age? At some point we need to compromise.
> It is fundamentally impossible to completely undo things, trivially so from the second law of thermodynamics.
As in, undo things as a reasonable person would define them. Undoing burning gasoline could indeed involve taxing such that we produce more hydrocarbons (which is possible to do), but what good does burying oil do? I don't agree with much of the article; I think we should benefit from the bounty of the universe and I believe in property rights and the ability to own land. However, more reasonable externalities are still relevant (such as putting pollution into a shared atmosphere or body of water) or potentially even some economic or social externalities. And as the article hints at, addressing the externality of who gets access to the free bounty of the universe.
But its premise: "none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated" is flawed, because the prices would just rise and consumption would decrease if externalities were incorporated.
It is kind of ironic how market economies and planned economies both succumb to the economic calculation problem. The people who used it to antagonize planned economies only had price discovery and supply and demand in mind. They didn't consider that money and prices will never capture all real economic variables like pollution. There is no "objective" level of pollution tax, it is purely subjective and since we don't have two earths between which people can migrate to choose the planet with the optimal carbon tax, you are going to have to rely on governments to just guess the right amount of tax and there is no way around it.
My point is actually that it can be done more or less objectively in the most relevant cases, especially where the atmosphere is concerned. Tax the polluting activity and use the taxes to exactly offset the pollution. If it can't be undone, or there wasn't any of that type of pollution in the atmosphere to start with, then it shouldn't be taxed--it should be banned. Sure, there's subjectivity in how we define which things are considered harmful enough to address as an externality or outlaw in the first place, but greenhouse gases, for example, are pretty cut and dry, and either way, it's a huge improvement over the current system (don't address externalities directly, create new big political programs that sort of address symptoms once they become big problems).
Apart from exhausting natural resources, industry also makes our lives miserable in other, more subtle ways. Compared to 150 years ago, the air we breathe is foul, the water we drink is contaminated by plastics and other chemicals, the food we eat is less flavorful and is low on nutrients. We've had clothing, running water and warm homes for ages, what we have now compared to then doesn't seem worth the effort.
Is that a big number compared to global population? And if it was not spend, how much lower would standard of living be? Straight up division would be less than 1000 per person alive. Not actually that much, 3 a day...
74 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadWith the article calling out wheat farming as one of their top concerns, what do they want as an alternative? Starving people? Depopulation?
You can make strong environmental arguments without reaching to such extremes. It actually undercuts the position.
Skimming the report, it doesn't do reasonable job of taking land use and water use into account, but in principle, there's nothing wrong with taking unsustainable portion of land use and water use into account.
How much does the Mississippi spill into the ocean and why don't you consider that a massive waste of freshwater?
The physical systems on which we depend for survival do not care about what we want. Our only hope for maintaining a human population is to recognize that.
Or how about when the oil companies invented the idea of “carbon footprint” to convince the public it was their responsibility to curb emissions, even though the vast majority of pollution isn’t from consumers?
The article essentially claims that nearly all major industries would be unprofitable is forced to pay their externalities. Great! Let’s shut it all down, let everyone gradually die off and then we’ll finally reach the sustainable utopia these people seek.
Nobody wants to live in the world envisioned by climate activists. That is why activists have made no progress in the last 50 years.
It’s also a strange argument to make that activists need to convince you that drinking contaminated water, breathing polluted air and ruining the natural world for profit isn’t a sustainable vision for the future.
Activists aren’t trying to sell you a product they are trying to warn you. Holding them to the showmanship antics of any given CEO seems misguided.
- OK but what's your vision for this issue
- I'm going to spray water on it, also you should stand farther away
- Aren't you just being reflexively contrarian?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/02/tesla-tsla-q4-2022-vehicle-d...
40% with a ridiculously small amount of green areas. If that's the case, we'll, then, every CO2 emission is easily absorbed by the rest of the green areas in the world.
(Less sarcastically, please share the source of your claims. Obviously they're wrong, but I'd like to know how they're wrong.)
My point is that we should not delude ourselves into thinking that we can arrive at “rational” decisions about resource use by reducing everything to accounting.
Have you any idea what should replace rational decisions and reducing everything to accounting? I cannot imagine what the other way may be, but I would like to know.
Citation needed.
Yes, they're a favorite. But I always thought that it was because economic models are usually simple, closed systems and that's a trivial, approachable way to show that they're wrong.
Similar to finding "bugs" with provably correct functional code. Wherever it touches the real world, it's no longer simple math and something hinky's bound to happen.
In the face of a actually having to price in externalities, entire industries may end up with fundamental changes.
Even the more complicated land value tax often just is a constant percentage of the land value (85%). The question is what the land value is but even then it is often just using some average prices based on recent transactions with small, less than 100% adjustment factors depending on local factors. The model complexity again is constrained and does not allow infinite complexity. The conclusions you can draw from a land value tax don't go beyond the money the government spends on maintaining and building new infrastructure.
https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/externa...
Stephen Hawking criticized the economy for ignoring externalities, particularly in the context of climate change. In his book "Brief Answers to the Big Questions," Hawking wrote, "We are now learning that climate change is bringing with it not only changes to the physical environment but also to the way we think about economics. It is forcing us to recognize that many of the ways we have been measuring economic progress, based on the idea of unlimited growth, have been deeply flawed"
I'm all for criticizing Chomsky, but let's do it with a little more sophistication. He would agree with you wholeheartedly that the USSR, China, and so forth are repressive dictatorships. He rejects the use of violent revolution.
The criticism comes when we look at who falls into that category. Famously starting with the Khmer Rouge, he claimed that we shouldn’t believe the refugees escaping the killing fields. After evidence emerged he also famously never admitted he was wrong. He denies the Bosnian genocide, and most recently he has said such charming things as: “we should give Putin the benefit of the doubt” (regarding the Ukraine war).
Cage-free chicken eggs and eco-friendly shoe/clothing brands are quickly becoming more popular than the alternative. Consumers generally care about negative externalities so they often do not stay externalities for long.
please.
Greenwashing fads come and go, it’s all built on dumb technicalities. Try navigating your way through “cage free” vs “pasture raised” vs “certified humane” and thinking about what negative externalities those actually mitigate, how they’re enforced, what that amounts to in the grand scheme of things. Restaurant and fast food and your average grocer/shopper are still picking the cheapest Tyson cut. “Organic grass fed” milk is still drawn from the exhausted teat of 24/7 artificially inseminated veal-factories. It’s all marketing campaigns built on dumb technicalities.
I think the title is amusing. People in the comment section responded not based the content but on the title asking "why do you want to make the oil industry go bust?" The entire point of the post is that nobody has to do anything to achieve that outcome. It already is bankrupt.
The length of the work week and worker wages are not external to the Ford motor company. Paying for cancer treatments for people who live near roads, and to reduce the noise pollution from cars in cities would be examples of remediating externalities.
The author, David Roberts subsequently wrote for Vox (https://www.vox.com/authors/david-roberts) and is now publishing a really terrific podcast via his Substack at http://volts.wtf
This is non sequitur. You can't go from "industries ranked by environmental impacts" to "biggest industries". This is so ridiculous I double checked whether I missed something, and no, I haven't missed anything. The logic really is that bad.
And even the initiative to plant more trees in the millions. For all its noble purpose and good will— which I don’t fault and thing should continue— will have only the barest and most minimal impact on carbon capture.
And this is just o e of many externalities unpaid by corporations, subsidizing the cost of products we all use every day.
But no— I have no solution here, at least nothing plausibly likely to happen until the impacts of our actions becoming so obvious that they cannot be ignored. I am hopeful the human race will survive it, but only with enormous sacrifice.
The days of the traditional corporation, i.e. an organization that has shareholders, management, and employees made sense in the period of 1600 to 1950, but since then the world has gotten smaller. Our ability to shift costs (externalities) onto our planet has been curtailed by the fact that we’ve gone from a population of millions to billions. When you try to grow wealth by extracting stuff, sometime, someone, somewhere is going to feel it and will pay for it without any benefits to them.
Regulation, has been shoehorned in as a solution. But it operates as a bandaid that no one has been happy with. Every regulation simultaneously goes too far and doesn’t go far enough. It shifts decision making power from one institution to another, (business to government) and depends on an army of bureaucrats, to implement.
The fundamental solution is simple, make corporations pay for the externalities they create. This would be done at the point of purchase and would not grow the size of government because taxation systems that do this already exist. The implementation of this idea though is inconsistent and politically perilous because of path dependence. No one wants to pay for something they got for free before. For example, Citizens Climate Lobby has been campaigning for years for a Carbon Price and despite a lobbying effort from over 200,000 volunteers the US has yet to see a carbon price implemented. To do political lobbying for every externality like this would be a Sisyphean task.
My solution, high concept, would be to make a society like Star Trek. We need to make a techno utopia, paired with social progress to sustain it. Although you can’t have Star Trek without warp drive, warp drive doesn’t make Star Trek, humanity had also evolved socially on the show. We will not travel faster than light, our warp drive will be computers. One of the keys to my approach is to have better models, models of climate, models of toxicity, models of the economy, models of human behavior, etc. That will let us have predictive capabilities to test ideas before they have consequences and model where costs are borne and bill the beneficiaries. The raw TFLOPs of our hardware will not give us this, rather human ingenuity and skepticism will. To achieve that will require giving people license to question and develop. This means giving teachers autonomy, instituting universal basic income, and creating public spaces.
It's my understanding that not too long ago, when this last came up in an online discussion I partipated in, our modern lifestyle is burning through some 2.5 earth's annual renewable generation worth of resources each year by using non-renewable resources.
Consider that we burn up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get a single food calorie for some crops --- we need to transition to some sort of sustainable lifestyle and energy usage in the near future --- the sooner the better.
A phrasing which I think would make sense, and which should at least be considered in such discussions is: Under what circumstances does a person have the right to generate more heat energy than 1/current human population portion of the amount of energy which the planet is able to radiate off into space overnight?
One good blog post discussing this sort of thing:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
Whether large populations should exist or not, they do today, and this makes us pretty reliant on high-yield low-cost food production.
https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
A farmer that burns fuel to produce food gets paid for the food that burning the fuel enabled. There is no positive externality that needs to be compensated here.
If you wanted to make an argument about positive externalities you would talk about farmers leaving the soil in better condition than they arrived i.e. regenerating natural capital instead of burning it.
A company which produces nuclear waste can pay the cost to store it, but cannot undo its existence. A company that burns oil can offset the carbon capture, but cannot put new oil in the ground.
A company that cuts a forest of 500 year old trees can't wait 500 years to verify they estimated the cost of raising such a forest again correctly (and also, the company will be gone by then anyway).
Right now, we care about CO2, but there's a lot more to natural resources than simple CO2 math will give us.
> we shouldn't outlaw useful and fundamentally positive things that emit CO2 like driving a car, but rather tax the pollution according to the cost to recapture that carbon from the shared environment
Focusing on incrementally taxing things like that is basically what the parent article complains about. That misses the old-growth forest for the CO2 in one tree.
> It is fundamentally impossible to completely undo things, trivially so from the second law of thermodynamics.
As in, undo things as a reasonable person would define them. Undoing burning gasoline could indeed involve taxing such that we produce more hydrocarbons (which is possible to do), but what good does burying oil do? I don't agree with much of the article; I think we should benefit from the bounty of the universe and I believe in property rights and the ability to own land. However, more reasonable externalities are still relevant (such as putting pollution into a shared atmosphere or body of water) or potentially even some economic or social externalities. And as the article hints at, addressing the externality of who gets access to the free bounty of the universe.
But its premise: "none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated" is flawed, because the prices would just rise and consumption would decrease if externalities were incorporated.