>>952607(2/2)
The libertarians have a different approach-- also using the gubbmint. That's that the consumers of the polluted air sue after the fact for the consequences of pollution, thus encouraging companies to work today to prevent costs from emerging tomorrow. That's got its own problems. Cato and Reason talk about this kind of stuff at length. Carbon trading was their idea, for example.
Conservatives these days support some environmental regulation, but never as much as the Left. In theory, the environmental disasters really should have been worse in the first world than under socialism, for reasons people provide above. And yet conservatives can point to every historical example and say "See???" because once you concentrate power in the hands of a political system, it stops mattering why you did that in the first place because at that point everything is a contest of who can lobby harder.
>>952569Say instead that we solve the cheap problems now, and put off the expensive problems until we've grown our economy enough that those problems become cheap to fix.
And, if that sounds ridiculous, then why do the Paris and Tokyo accords largely exempt India, China, and other developing economies from carbon limits? Answer: because they're not even as far along as we are and the costs are so high that it's just completely ludicrous for them to clean up to the extent that we're at even now. So they do their best to grow to the point where they can afford to do things that are impossible now.
The thing is, we're "developing" as well. We're richer than we were 20 years ago (25% richer) and able to afford a cleaner environment. In 20 years, we'll be richer still, and able to afford to get even cleaner. The faster we grow, the sooner we'll be able to afford even projects that seem ludicrously expensive now.
But if you want to put it in the most incendiary rhetorical way possible (
>>952569) then go ahead. You're not wrong.
