> In the most polluting (directly and indirectly) wealthy democracies, the blame can mostly be placed on us as individuals.
It's a philosophical argument but I reckon if negative externalities were fairly priced into the choices available to us, we'd make much different decisions, even with the same wants and needs and values.
It might be an improvement but (1) I expect it would be political suicide for the government to try and implement, (2) if it is just a pricing exercise it wouldn’t change CO2 emissions (edit: if the government just spends taxes then that uses CO2), (3) the examples of the failures of carbon-credits indicates pricing externalities is a complex problem.
Let’s use a mental model that externalities should double the price. Existing NZ petrol taxes per litre double the price (about 50% at pump is excise and GST [1]). Using that model we can see that the existing pricing in of externalities doesn’t actually fix anything for petrol.
See comment edit above for direct action you can do to marginally fix the problem for yourself (obviously it doesn’t fix the problem, but it is one of the few direct actions you could do that is difficult to be cheated).
Edit: alternatively, global oil risks (rather than raw costs) act similarly to externalities in driving adoption of greener technologies: https://energypost.eu/russias-war-is-accelerating-the-clean-... Presumably because those risks are causing political costs to politicians?
I think we can call a lot of this tragedy of the commons. If a business is able to capitalize on common resources (e.g. using air or water as a means of dumping pollutants) and pay nothing for degradation of those shared resources, then they will. But often we have no choice in the matter, and that's even before we get into the complications of even understanding the consequences and nuances of our purchases. Before we consider long term stressors and problems vs short term. Our brains were clearly not designed for solving these problems and it is rather amazing that we can actually do it at all. So I agree, we probably would make different decisions if these externalities were priced in (e.g. carbon tax, pollution/waste tax). But also the market would also likely simply change prior to choices being made simply because we know that we need to adapt to match said new market or be over taken by new players (i.e. if a carbon tax was instituted or seen as likely, oil companies would start investing into researching alternative clean energy solutions to maximize future (<10 years) profits).
It's a philosophical argument but I reckon if negative externalities were fairly priced into the choices available to us, we'd make much different decisions, even with the same wants and needs and values.