this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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It's why all carbon should be a currency distributed to all people like an UBI. Let's say sustainable amount of CO2 emissions is 8 billion ton and there are 8 billion people, so everybody gets 1 ton per year. You want to pull oil it if the ground, pay in CO2 coin and ask the buyer to pay in turn. Rich guy wants to fly a private jet, they pay the oil producer. Not enough coin, buy with dollars from someone poor that drives a bike and has excess CO2 coins.
It seems fair to me. Everybody is equal, it keeps the market intact while keeping capitalism within sustainable emissions and distributes some wealth.
Of course no rich guy or oil producer is going to accept that, at least not until some people figuratively start building the wooden platform and sharpen the blade to a razor edge.
The environment does not take markets into account and it never will. This consumption will never be sustainable. Our entire ecosystem did not evolve with capitalism or industrial needs in mind. There will be a point where we cannot extract anymore resources without every system collapsing. You can't tie all your resources up into consumer products and military industrial complexes without major drawbacks to everything else. And we will always need more in this current system, and there is never a point where more is enough. You'll never hear "okay, everyone has a smartphone, shut the factory down."
It's fun stuff, right?? I've never been able to conceive why the ultra wealthy would want to let the peasants eventually die off.
Perhaps there are currently more peasants than they require? Was Ritchie Rich just waiting until AI drones became advanced enough to serve them properly?
My limited experience with wealthy folk (prob not even the top 15%) is that they like to feel superior by comparison. Some may be intelligent. Most are educated well even if they lack any aptitude.
My best guess is that they lack wisdom or any semblance of awareness that an aristocracy is stagnant. The things that live on our planet have had to struggle and adapt to survive. At some (small and meek) level, they fuel the forces that would oppose them.
It's not actually fun stuff. I was joshing. I doubt we get to create the United Federation of Planets in the future. I would be ecstatic if that statement was proven wrong.
How to make Carbon Taxes even more worthless.
Make it so the poorest homeless Junkie can make $5 to sell his "Carbon". Drive the price of Carbon down to nothing because rich people can always make you more desperate.
How about we don't involve the system that is actively destroying the planet - into the system meant to save it.
It's not entirely unlike my plan: No more externalities. That's the big problem with the environment and with a bunch of other things. Economists call it an "externality" when the things you're doing have side effects that you don't have to account for, such as pollution.
The thing is, we let industry and capital get away with it for a long time. And there's no doubt that fixing it would also impact people. If the cost of properly disposing of a tire was built into the price of the tire, it would be passed along to customers. But it's the only way to rehabilitate ANY system that uses currency.