> Pricing in externalities is a part of that adaptation. It literally is "getting on with it".
> It's unclear to me what you mean by this.
I thought it was very clear:
> If your farm is on fire, maybe you lose a room. OK, so you adapt. Perhaps you'll never earn enough again to rebuild it properly. You might be a bit traumatised - maybe you buy more smoke alarms, cameras, sprinklers, stuff like that.
> What you don't do is set the whole thing alight, burn it to hell, and adapt to the changes having contributed to your life savings going up in smoke.
They're arguing against something like fining the person whose farm caught on fire.
Arguing for pricing in externalities is more akin to arguing for the fine, trying to make people change their ways so such fires are less common, while giving no thought to the people affected directly (unnecessary extra costs on top of recovering from the fire), or who couldn't avoid it (lightning strike causing fire / infrastructure not in place to avoid the cost and it getting passed to the consumer instead of dealt with).
The whole issue here is in thinking about pricing carbon as a "fine".
It represents fixing the economic incentives.
If a beef burger is 10x more environmentally damaging than a vegetable one, it should cost approximately ten times more.
As I've posted below - this is child-level logic. It's time for us to sort our shit out. There really is no option.
We need stable homes, nutrition, and a bit of entertainment. We don't need no-holds-barred competition to literally use as much of everything as we possibly can; and we _certainly_ don't need that to be apportioned essentially randomly - the more damaging activities should cost more.
If it bothers you to be confronted by that - if your first thoughts are "economic damage" and the fact your life might slightly change - I'm sorry for you. Because you really are fucked, you're coming down with all of us.
You’re not using effective arguments that will change someone’s point of view.
I believe climate change is coming but trying to convince someone they should change because they are a Bad Person if they don’t change their ways, or that some unspecified type of fuckedness is looming, is not very successful.
> It's unclear to me what you mean by this.
I thought it was very clear:
> If your farm is on fire, maybe you lose a room. OK, so you adapt. Perhaps you'll never earn enough again to rebuild it properly. You might be a bit traumatised - maybe you buy more smoke alarms, cameras, sprinklers, stuff like that.
> What you don't do is set the whole thing alight, burn it to hell, and adapt to the changes having contributed to your life savings going up in smoke.
They're arguing against something like fining the person whose farm caught on fire.
Arguing for pricing in externalities is more akin to arguing for the fine, trying to make people change their ways so such fires are less common, while giving no thought to the people affected directly (unnecessary extra costs on top of recovering from the fire), or who couldn't avoid it (lightning strike causing fire / infrastructure not in place to avoid the cost and it getting passed to the consumer instead of dealt with).