By regulating what's available on markets here we can pressure maufacturers elsewhere.
What is the alternative you would suggest? We have no direct regulatory power over anyone but ourselves.
That said, what the west is currently doing to address climate change - analogous to cheering for the people trying to push a derailed 130-ton freight car back onto the rail tracks with unassisted manpower alone - is not a solution either.
The first step towards a real solution is recognizing that what we are currently doing is a categorically pointless waste of time, so we can stop wasting energy and thought on that and start diverting it to actual solutions.
I think R&D on the scale of what the US spent relative to GDP during WW2 might be a place to start. That's economically likely to require severe and heavy cuts across the board and may require a transformation of what are seen as the traditional roles of government. Half of all spending in the US goes to social security, medicare, and medicaid. These three programs combined take up almost triple US military spending. What's worse, they're mathematically unsustainable. Social security and medicare are effectively pyramid schemes that are running out of new people to recruit (result of low birthrates, dramatic improvements in life expectancy, and the lowest rates of net immigration into the country, as a % of existing population, in this country's history). These programs are going to die sooner or later anyway, why not rip off the band-aid now and start putting that enormous spending towards solutions for problems that can save billions rather than millions?
At the same time, there probably needs to be major overhauls to the US tax system. Even when top marginal rates were close to 90% last century, large corporations effectively bought politicians to create enormous tax write offs for them. As a result, total federal government receipts as a percent of GDP have never left the range of 16%-26%. Let's consider a flat federal tax rate of 27% across the board, with only one category of write-offs: R&D for carbon-negative / climate-healing solutions (as opposed to carbon neutral / climate-unaffecting solutions). We're going to need to be capable of removing other countries' carbon emissions if we fail to get them on the same page diplomatically or militarily, and I will never support military intervention (read: mass murder of innocent civilians) as a solution.
Imagine the sheer power of the US government being deployed full-force, with such overwhelming financial backing that we strive to go so deeply carbon negative that it doesn't even matter whether India and China are on board or not.
Yes we would be giving up the fights on a lot of problems, but IMO, no problems other than climate change and nuclear conflict between superpowers threatens the whole of humanity. While not perfect, the nuclear superpower problem is not getting worse as quickly as climate change, so on some level it makes sense to go full-steam-ahead on resource allocation to the largest issue first, and then work our way down the chain to smaller ones, rather than overextending ourselves and failing to solve problem #1, like we're doing now.
These are obviously some pretty radical proposals and I don't think there is political will to even have anything remotely like this seriously considered, so our corrupt, money-influenced political system probably needs to be changed first.
Just like how FTP separates the data plane (political outcomes) from the control plane (political process), we too need to protect the control plane from adversarial influence (big corporation lobbyists, citizens united, etc) before we can ever hope to achieve meaningful political outcomes.
Accordingly, whatever solves the political corruption ("lobbying") problem first should probably be our first step.
Tens or hundreds of millions of people would die as a direct consequence of this economic malpractice, including a decent portion of the US citizens who voted for the persons responsible. Reelection would be tricky, although it would not be difficult to imagine the US democratic process being suspended as a reaction to the catastrophe (legal precedent is not relevant, see history).
Don't get me wrong: climate change is a problem! But this would create a much bigger and more acute problem.
If there were better "actual solutions", stupid moonshots wouldn't get funded in the first place. I don't think your framing of this situation is very accurate.
> stop wasting energy and thought on that and start diverting it to actual solutions
I thought you didn't have any actual solutions and admitted as much?
These things appear to us a "pointless" and a waste of time because there are overriding economic principles we just don't want to touch, it is a willful pointlessness that is quite apparent in the big picture. It's not China, it's capitalism, (of which, granted, China is a huge agent within).
If we lived in a world where the problems were simply about the distribution itself of food and shelter and power, we could point to the complexity of the systems, and understand the risks of wrongheadedness in the face of them, but we live in a world plagued by bad faith and non-human incentives that certainly muddy these waters, but it doesn't mean there aren't some simple solutions to a few things people haven't thought of...
To create this dichotomy between the West and China is to deny the Anthropocene we are all in! One that is defined necessarily by the literally geological forces of a world-dominating economic order.
The work the west(and China) is doing to develop non-fossil fuel based tech cheap is directly applicable to those growing economies, and not a pointless waste of time.
The hard part of this is it requires consumers to be educated and act. This almost never happens unless the costs for not acting are built into the prices of goods. Doing that requires political will. It's going to make a lot of people very angry; and we're not talking indulgences in the form of cap & trade, either.
Agreed 100%.
>Doing that requires political will. It's going to make a lot of people very angry; and we're not talking indulgences in the form of cap & trade, either.
Also an astute observation. It may be the case that this is ultimately a problem with our political system first and foremost.
But economic sanctions alone will not halt the manufacturing base of an economy the size of China's.
China and India need to get on board for real. Asking politely is not working. I'll never advocate for the initiation of force, but something is going to need to change in a big way to convince these countries to join us in a fight that will strip all of us of a little short-term prosperity, if we want to leave a planet that our great grandchildren can safely habitate.
The price ceilings should be set based on some amount of maximum profit margin companies should be allowed to make. If they want to make bigger margins they're going to have to move manufacturing to cleaner countries and then they can apply their insane markups.
It's an incredibly easy way to close a whole bunch of tax loopholes at once.
Seems like a monumentally bad idea
> It’s an incredibly easy way to close a whole bunch of tax loopholes at once.
I don’t think it closes any tax loopholes.
Why spend money shipping laptops to Bermuda so you can put a sticker on them there if you aren't saving any money?
1. There's a positive incentive here, if you work and live in country A and are considering working in country B either country B can craft their tax system so that you won't end up paying the same taxes to both country A or country B... or they can not do that. If they fail to make their tax law compatible they lose out on your tax income (it instead all goes to country A) since nobody wants to be double taxed - if they make their tax laws compatible then they essentially get some free income and another earner. Digital nomads pulling down six digit salaries in low cost of living countries also injects a whole lot of money into the local economy and generally just makes things better - and the country retains the right to limit visas if they ever have any issues with it.
Tax compatibility with VAT only is a sensible concept where the destination country has a VAT itself, which the US does not. Otherwise, a minimum VAT on imports is just a global punitive import tariff, and has nothing to do with compatibility.
Even where its sensible, it still has potential problems that can be introduced through other parts of the tax system, but…we don’t really need to consider that in this case.
To me the answer is a pretty easy one:
Take the CO2 emissions of a country and divide by its GDP. That gives you a CO2 per dollar. Then decide on a CO2 cost per unit for your country. Now apply that as a tariff per dollar of imports from said country.
It's imperfect, of course. But I think it is close enough to estimate what we want it to do.