Biggest industries burn through $7.3T of natural capital a year

Cage-free chicken eggs and eco-friendly shoe/clothing brands are quickly becoming more popular than the alternative. Consumers generally care about negative externalities so they often do not stay externalities for long.

The days of the traditional corporation, i.e. an organization that has shareholders, management, and employees made sense in the period of 1600 to 1950, but since then the world has gotten smaller. Our ability to shift costs (externalities) onto our planet has been curtailed by the fact that we’ve gone from a population of millions to billions. When you try to grow wealth by extracting stuff, sometime, someone, somewhere is going to feel it and will pay for it without any benefits to them.

Regulation, has been shoehorned in as a solution. But it operates as a bandaid that no one has been happy with. Every regulation simultaneously goes too far and doesn’t go far enough. It shifts decision making power from one institution to another, (business to government) and depends on an army of bureaucrats, to implement.

The fundamental solution is simple, make corporations pay for the externalities they create. This would be done at the point of purchase and would not grow the size of government because taxation systems that do this already exist. The implementation of this idea though is inconsistent and politically perilous because of path dependence. No one wants to pay for something they got for free before. For example, Citizens Climate Lobby has been campaigning for years for a Carbon Price and despite a lobbying effort from over 200,000 volunteers the US has yet to see a carbon price implemented. To do political lobbying for every externality like this would be a Sisyphean task.

My solution, high concept, would be to make a society like Star Trek. We need to make a techno utopia, paired with social progress to sustain it. Although you can’t have Star Trek without warp drive, warp drive doesn’t make Star Trek, humanity had also evolved socially on the show. We will not travel faster than light, our warp drive will be computers. One of the keys to my approach is to have better models, models of climate, models of toxicity, models of the economy, models of human behavior, etc. That will let us have predictive capabilities to test ideas before they have consequences and model where costs are borne and bill the beneficiaries. The raw TFLOPs of our hardware will not give us this, rather human ingenuity and skepticism will. To achieve that will require giving people license to question and develop. This means giving teachers autonomy, instituting universal basic income, and creating public spaces.

Skimming the report, it doesn't do reasonable job of taking land use and water use into account, but in principle, there's nothing wrong with taking unsustainable portion of land use and water use into account.

The physical systems on which we depend for survival do not care about what we want. Our only hope for maintaining a human population is to recognize that.

A company which produces nuclear waste can pay the cost to store it, but cannot undo its existence. A company that burns oil can offset the carbon capture, but cannot put new oil in the ground.

A company that cuts a forest of 500 year old trees can't wait 500 years to verify they estimated the cost of raising such a forest again correctly (and also, the company will be gone by then anyway).

Right now, we care about CO2, but there's a lot more to natural resources than simple CO2 math will give us.

> we shouldn't outlaw useful and fundamentally positive things that emit CO2 like driving a car, but rather tax the pollution according to the cost to recapture that carbon from the shared environment

Focusing on incrementally taxing things like that is basically what the parent article complains about. That misses the old-growth forest for the CO2 in one tree.

A farmer that burns fuel to produce food gets paid for the food that burning the fuel enabled. There is no positive externality that needs to be compensated here.

If you wanted to make an argument about positive externalities you would talk about farmers leaving the soil in better condition than they arrived i.e. regenerating natural capital instead of burning it.

Citation needed.

Yes, they're a favorite. But I always thought that it was because economic models are usually simple, closed systems and that's a trivial, approachable way to show that they're wrong.

Similar to finding "bugs" with provably correct functional code. Wherever it touches the real world, it's no longer simple math and something hinky's bound to happen.

In the face of a actually having to price in externalities, entire industries may end up with fundamental changes.

Even the more complicated land value tax often just is a constant percentage of the land value (85%). The question is what the land value is but even then it is often just using some average prices based on recent transactions with small, less than 100% adjustment factors depending on local factors. The model complexity again is constrained and does not allow infinite complexity. The conclusions you can draw from a land value tax don't go beyond the money the government spends on maintaining and building new infrastructure.

40% with a ridiculously small amount of green areas. If that's the case, we'll, then, every CO2 emission is easily absorbed by the rest of the green areas in the world.

Nobody wants to live in the world envisioned by climate activists. That is why activists have made no progress in the last 50 years.