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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

I've pitched this idea before. But instead of something like the Paris Climate Accords which were an agreement for people to self-regulate and reduce emissions. What is needed is an agreement that is a sort of cartel. Nations a,b,c agree on these policies (carbon per person, environmental regulations, etc), and any nation that wants to export services/goods to a,b,c they must enter the agreement or be subject to tariffs.

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Yeah, this is exactly the type of thing I'd support.

The UK (where I live) emits something like 0.5% of global CO2, but we're one of the largest economies in the world.

If we're going to do anything it seems we should really be doing everything we can to use our economic might to try to do something about that other 99.5%. Where as at the moment we're wasting our time obsessing about how we bring down that 0.5%, and providing an economic horror story for why no other country should replicate what we're doing.

Deindustrialization in the west is imo largely due to this. Pollution was bad. Trying to clean things up was good. But you can't increase the cost 10x, and then allow a company to set up shop across the border and ship things in doing those practices still. The local environment becomes cleaner, so you export that toxic part, but the global impacts are still bad AND you hollow out your industrial core.

I would say that the EU is edging towards this idea. I don't say that to be negative. I support it. One idea: Create per-product, per-country tarrifs based upon their average carbon footprint. If foreign manufs reduce their carbon footprint for the product, then the tarrif is reduced. This creates a good incentive to progressively reduce carbon footprint.

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