Ecologically sustainable changes will happen when it's cheap and/or comfortable to do, period.
Increasing the costs of carbon-based choices will just lead to civil unrest. I think this is already part of where recent problems in the US are coming from.
Carbon taxes and similar solutions implicitly assume that the individual making the carbon-positive choice is the one who should bear the cost. I feel a bit like it's you have decades of individuals and groups insulating themselves from real costs, through deception and ignorance, and then us deciding to pass those costs onto those who can't or don't want it anyway. Socialized risk, capitalized gain all over again.
You might say that nature is going to extract those costs one way or another, but this is one case where I think the moral responsibility is in spreading those costs out in ways that can be borne realistically.
Better for the average person worldwide to make the sustainable choices cheaper rather than increase the costs of the unsustainable choices, because then that's implicitly just increasing costs for everything in many situations.
Increasing the costs of carbon-based choices will just lead to civil unrest. I think this is already part of where recent problems in the US are coming from.
Carbon taxes and similar solutions implicitly assume that the individual making the carbon-positive choice is the one who should bear the cost. I feel a bit like it's you have decades of individuals and groups insulating themselves from real costs, through deception and ignorance, and then us deciding to pass those costs onto those who can't or don't want it anyway. Socialized risk, capitalized gain all over again.
You might say that nature is going to extract those costs one way or another, but this is one case where I think the moral responsibility is in spreading those costs out in ways that can be borne realistically.
Better for the average person worldwide to make the sustainable choices cheaper rather than increase the costs of the unsustainable choices, because then that's implicitly just increasing costs for everything in many situations.