Climate capitalists have serious money in climate-friendly investments

If people decide to not invest to clean energy/climate-neutrality/reducing waste, it might be fear of freeloading, but it can be billions of other reasons. But most reasons will have something in common.

And it is not fear of freeloading.

It is a list of priorities. When something is really important for people, they do it, they invest time and money into it.

If people don't invest their time nor money, it is in fact not important for them.

So why tax something that isn't important for people (because if it was important, they everybody would buy clean energy, would stop using plastic & other things)?

I used to think like this, but I'm fed up of taking "economic maxims" that I read on the Internet as being actually true.

I don't believe this to be the case. I think that taking action, being public about taking action, and ultimately standing behind what you think is right, taxes and others be damned, is the way to go.

Yes, there will be free riders. That's inevitable in anything you do. People "free ride" on software I write all the time. I can shoulder it.

Notice you have to assume that most people agree on what's good and that you know what that is. It's a solved problem, it's just a matter of implementing it.

> If I invest $100 in protecting a public good....So I'll only invest if everyone else chips in, too.

Public goods are non-rivalrous, another person consuming the good has no effect on you. So out of spite you're going to go against your own best interest because you think it's better to punish other people than to purchase a good that you would purchase if you could just figure out how to exclude them from using it. That's valuing the suffering of others over your own well-being. Going back to how hard it is to figure out what people think is "good".....

There are legitimate concerns about conflicts on interest for people who have large investments in green companies while also lobbying strongly for particular "green" public policies. The risk is that if we uncritically accept these people at their word, we may end up with policies that do less to protect the environment and climate and more to line the pockets of the advocates.

Of course, these issues are endemic to our current political/economic systems and don't just apply to investment in climate friendly companies.

I would be much more inclined to trust the motivations of environment advocates with large investments in environmental companies if those investments were purchased and administered through some sort of blind trust to alleviate conflict on interest concerns.

Doesn't look like that program accomplished its objectives: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=lMDT

Why work on climate change while poverty, cancer or illiteracy still exists?

By that logic, we should have never have had space exploration at all (and never should). I seriously doubt this would have improved our progress on the "bigger issues "

Ultimately what is purposed isn't even a solution to the problem. Small reductions here and there that in total only manage to delay the inevitable. The only solution is mass scale terraforming projects and genetic modification of existing species to increase resiliency. If the coral reefs are dying we need to build reefs that are more resilient. If polar bears are overheating we need to breed ones who are more temperature tolerant. If the fish of the sea do not breed quickly enough for us to consume them at the rate that we currently do, we need to increase yields.

To pick one as I happen to remember it. 500 days before climate chaos. IIRC that was some French minister, or delegate 500 and something days before the Paris 2015 climate summit. It got a fair bit of press, and was making a reasonable point. 500 days to make adequate agreement in the summit or lock in the train to chaos as the plan to reduce won't work. Not that chaos arrives on day 501.

All those Arctic ice free probably miss the second half of the sentence that's "in summer", or in the coming fifty years etc.

If they're going to cherry pick that disingenuously they can "prove" black is white.

Of course not, markets don't work without property rights. But there is money on banning high-sea fishing so you can sell more of your farmed fish (and help the environment as a side-effect), and some companies are pushing for that.

This is a very well known phenomenon and gets used to make a business case for doing the right thing out of enlightened self interest: Don't do it for some nebulous sense of virtue. Do it to fatten your bottom line.

In restaurants and catering businesses, profit margins are so slim that upgrading to lightbulbs and appliances that use less energy can put a business in the black that has been struggling.

How about adding concrete (coal) and asphalt [0] to that list? A world without fossil fuels would indeed look dramatically different.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphalt

We have alternatives for far, far more than 0.1% of the world's plastic though. We could probably get rid of most of it without a change in our quality of life, or effectiveness of products. Keep the oil for the few uses that can't be easily replaced by other more sustainable sources. Which almost certainly means contact lenses, and assorted medical uses, specialised equipment, some chemicals etc.