How do you stop it? I don't think the greed of the super rich is per say the problem. Perhaps there needs to be a shift in economic incentive
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We need to make it profitable to do the good things and not profitable to do the bad things. This way people will do the good things and not the bad things.
The most straight forward way to do this would be to make doing the bad things more expensive, which means taxing carbon emissions.
Alongside this would be to create alternatives that are cheaper and easier to use.
Unfortunately this would mean actually spending money, making investments in public works, and changing things away from the status quo, and apparently this is impossible.
So we're going to sleep walk into our doom rather than do basic things like making gas more expensive and building public transit.
> The most straight forward way to do this would be to make doing the bad things more expensive, which means taxing carbon emissions.
Yes. This is the solution starting in 1990. It is too late now, for this to be the solution. It is a good idea, but.
We are going to have to shut down hole industries, and the owners will loose their investment. We are going to have to make a lot of very rich people, ordinarily rich.
This is very hard to do in a democracy.
Yes. A revenue-neutral carbon tax (often called "Carbon Fee & Dividend") is a politically feasible, fast, efficient way to reduce carbon emissions.
To drive emissions down to zero, without massive economic disruption, start small and increase the tax gradually every year.
Coupled with a "border adjustment" (a tariff on goods coming from countries to compensate if they have less aggressive climate policies) you can solve the problem of industries being outsourced to countries where GHG pollution is cheaper, and simultaneously put pressure on those countries to implement similar policies.
Easier to blame the 1% for 99% of the problems.
It certainly is when they're to blame.