One of the roles government can play is to take the negative externalities of an activity (e.g., pollution) and internalize it so that those costs are paid by those who are profiting. The way to do that is to create taxes, fee structures, etc. so that those making money on activities contribute to the overall societal cost.

That's assuming the money made by internalizing the externalities is used to benefit those who would otherwhise be negatively affected by them.

It'd be a worse situation if the money is spent, for example, running campaigns for the next elections.

A better arragement would be for the affected people to receive the tax payments directly.

Effective regulation could actually have made clean coal plants. In principle that junk can be filtered, but it was cheaper to lobby for rules exemptions than to pay for filters.

Sometimes damage can be prevented instead of remediated. Sometimes it isn't about victims getting paid, but preventing people from being victimized.

Effective regulation was not achieved, so it makes sense to demand the next most beneficial action for users. I wouldn't trust the people in charge though.

Not necessarily. Often the incumbent technology remains that way simply because it’s cheaper. If the taxes cause the price to go up enough that it has a similar cost to an alternative, the alternative has a chance of becoming the preferred option. It doesn’t matter where the extra tax money goes for this to be effective.

Sure it would be nice if it helped victims, etc, but getting that part figured out would be a prime target for the incumbents to derail the whole process.

That's right. I think taxes are not the right solution for this.

Victims most be compensated, but adding tax to a certain technology is just a failing band-aid as you exemplify.

The fundamental problem is people being out of the picture in all of this. The solution must necessarily have common people involved.

I completely agree.

But villifying the companies that sell "oil" is getting ridiculous at this point. Not to mention, the "Big, bad oil companies" are some of the biggest investors in clean energy. They look at themselves as energy companies... the keyboard warriors here seem to thank that their entire marketing budget is going towards denying climate change... Comparing oil to drugs is a prime example of that line of thinking.

I'm not clear why this is true?

> But that's on the end user, no?

Pollution is a tragedy of commons scenario, so our best tools for solving it are laws and policy that force behaviour.

I'd be surprised if it's completely impossible to do the resource extraction without minimising impact, we just don't tend to have much pressure to innovate in that direction.

The end user on the other hand, has the least power to change any of the dynamics you're describing and is usually least able to choose to do without.

I think you underestimate both the value and importance of individual action by users.

The best tools for preventing tragedies of the commons are collective and individual desire to do so. Taking action and paying personal costs are incredibly important.

On the flip side, it is extremely difficult to force change top down without people willing to lead by example.

Looks at any place with nice commons and they are maintained though widespread desire to do so by individuals. Japan isn't free a litter due to harsh fines, regulatory action, and policing.

One method of individuals coming together as a collective is called forming a government.

One method of individuals expressing their collective desire in that structure is called making laws.

I dont disagree, both are meaningless without broad support for those laws.

Murder is extremely easy and has a 50% closure rate. Most enforcement rates are much lower.

If you dont convince the vast majority of people to do something, you wont be able to set meaningful policy, and you wont be able to enforce it.

My point is to put the primary emphasis on people doing something about it, and not hypocritically telling other people to do something about it.

Except the commons in this case is a shared atmosphere. Unless we get other countries to agree to equally punitive actions, all we end up doing is giving them the license to accelerate their economies at our expense.

Its a shared atmosphere, so they will suffer the effects of it equally. This isn't a "just the US" type of thing. if you suffer from hurricanes or monsoons, earthquakes, and so on, it is in your best interest to reduce the effects of pollution. China was the biggest polluter, they still are, but they are taking measures.

We also haven't agreed to punitive actions, tax credits incentivize cleaning, but there is barely any punishment or accounting of it. Else coal which is probably the worst form of energy production would not exist.

Sometimes you need to lead by example and bear costs if you want change.

The end users have been lied to for half a century as the fossil fuel companies spent billions on PR campaigns, buying politicians, setting up think tanks and fake research groups, etc. claiming that something their own scientists were confident was happening was not happening.

Imagine the alternative where they’d gone to Nixon with their research and worked with governments to gracefully transition, support rather than oppose efficiency improvements, etc. The difference in deaths will be measured in millions, and the cost to the global economy would have been trillions of dollars less.

Fundamentally speaking, government decisions are based on the individual egocentric needs of each member, not the needs of the population at large. This is why you can't trust governments to do the good thing: to make sure they do good you must coerce them as you would a private company.

I’m not sure what connection that has to the topic - it sound tautological to say that good oversight will lead to better outcomes than poor oversight.

I'm saying that "good oversight" is fundamentally impossible, at least in a humanistic sense. Because individual people have individual ideas about what "good oversight" is.

This includes government officials. Your views will certainly collide with a politician's views on what's "good oversight".

Classic example of "Privatize the gains and socialize the losses".

There's a history of oil companies lying about the consequences of production and consumption...

A single exploratory ocean oil well costs as much as a Mars rover with design, launch and operations. There are thousands of them.

We owe our modern world to O&G, but by now they could be producing oil & gas from CO2 -> Methane using solar / wind (/ nuclear?) and the CO2 in the air around us.

The infrastructure to do so sounds enormous, but we gloss over all the diplomacy, wars, foreign & domestic wells, tankers, refineries, ports, trucks, pipes, gas stations, etc etc we had to build in the last 100 years to actually make O&G the everyday industry it is. How many trillions? The ROI was totally worth it, but maybe it's time for more I and less R.

It's not that the industry or even oil itself is evil, it's that we can do better.

Who conceal the truth and lobby against any change so they can force society to continue to depend upon them despite that dependency destroying the planet.

>But that's on the end user, no?

Most users don't spend billions of dollars on climate-denial propaganda, so no.

It's a way to large responsibility to put on the individual end user.

If there are many lawsuits like these, and the oil companies loose some of them, the result is that some of the exernalities are partially compensated by some of the ones earning the most on the original fault. It makes the world a slightly more fair place. The best would have been if the cost was baked in from the beginning, but alas.

Oil and gass is unfortunately still important for our economy, that's true. But it's also an existential threat to our modern way of life. Given what we now know about the absolute massive external costs, we need drastic change. We should extract as little as we can, and every single penny of surplus should go towards green energy and mitigating actions.

I agree mostly.

However, I think we need to add that being one of "the most productive engines of society" comes with great responsibility. The record profits for share holders and executives may not be enough incentive to maintain appropriate levels of that responsibility.

This is why selling opium should be legal. The consequences of use are on the user not the seller. Sellers never should have culpability assigned to them. Ditto for lenders.

The problem is not about just pollution, it’s about their commitment to use their profits to drive the lobbying and bullying anything or anyone that comes across as a threatening to their business. Not just that, they publish “research” which is essentially disinformation campaign against anything. And many more..

Overall, they deserve the hate.

Actually, emissions does not make life go round:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-and-gdp

They actively stifled alternatives that could do all of that.

No, it's not "on the end user", in my not-so-humble opinion. We should have been much more heavily investing in renewables & carbon neutrality (factories to make batteries and solar, nuclear, anything) by the time the fracking boom happened. Fossil fuel companies were investing in misleading the public about global warming instead, in the same way that tobacco companies invested in misleading the public about the health issues caused by smoking. To this day they are still working to undermine efforts to transition to cleaner energy, for the sake of greater profits, even while their public relations efforts pretend they are pro-"green". The country/world was steered toward a cliff by self-interested people without sound judgement or morals pulling financial levers to enrich themselves.

First they came for the meth cooks and i did not speak up, for i was not a meth cook.

I'm all for users taking action to regulate their behavior, and then for governments to also regulate behavior where appropriate.

I see it a lot like cigarettes, in that individuals can make very restrictive choices, governments apply looser restrictions, and manufacturers provide supply.

Like cigarettes, there was likely some legally actionable misinformation long ago that should be addressed, but nobody today can honestly claim they are tricked into thinking smoking is healthy.

Oh give me a break. Renewable energy advocates are "authoritarian" now? Lmao. What will you guys come up with next.