That priced-in externalities are mostly missing from the current economic system, (and that bankruptcies of important organizations are bailed instead of fully played out), are two things that when fixed would make our markets so much more "free", that I can not really understand why this doesn't get more political support.

What would happen if we put the externalities to the level they need to be is that the local economy would be more efficient that the global economy. The important organizations are not "too big to fail" they are "to big to succeed". It's physically impossible to continue buying stuff from the other side of the world that could be done near where we live. Also we need to consume less useless stuff, invest in repairing and maintaining what we have and implement measure to greatly reduce planned obsolescence

I generally agree, but I think it's important to mention that factoring in externalities yields some surprising results on the local/shipped goods dimension. For example, in California, Chilean wines perform slightly better than local wines when it comes to CO2 emissions, and Austrialian wines are almost equivalent to Californian wines. This is due to transport in bulk by ship being much much better that by truck over land.

> Reproduction permit auctions are incompatible with the current release of ethics.

Care to expand on that? I haven't thought it through very deeply, but are there some options that could be ethically acceptable? Reproducing until we run out of resources doesn't seem like a great alternative and I struggle to see that as more ethical.

Personally I think that monetary incentives not to reproduce could be a good option.

Well, rich parents for everyone! Mostly kidding, but it would be a side effect of "reproduction permit auctions" (until banks invent the parenting loan, then it would become a race to the bottom, poor parents for almost everyone)

Deciding who can reproduce and who cannot is generally seen as the most evil thing next to outright killing. Because it can be used (and was used!) as a form of soft genocide and because it goes completely against the individualism that derives from a non-collectivist reading of equality. That's like giving the finger to 300 years of progressive history. But reproduction controls are not uncommon in other/earlier societies. Strict marriage requirements don't put a cap on children per marriage, but marriage was often a privilege, requiring land, some lord's permission or just a hefty bride price. Of course those where all in the context of seemingly unconstrained growth headroom and the motivation was mostly child welfare (or just a show of power). Nonetheless, once progressive individualism had liberated is from those limits, the number of childless individuals has fallen quite a bit I think. (I'm not an historical anthropologist or whatever field would actually research that, this is just my personal impression)

So much for why the topic is such a hot potato. Particularly principled persons might actually prefer to knowingly condemn everyone to heroic starvation than ever allowing reproduction controls.

A look at Chinese 1CP (an outside, uninformed look but still a look, ok?): it tried to be fair, in a socialistic way. Everyone can have one child! But the most notorious side effects, like the mysterious case of the gender imbalance and the loss of siblinghood are not generally inherent to reproduction control, they are specific to their method of making it fair. But 1CP was an extreme measure anyways, 2CP and the fair way becomes perfectly fine I guess. Except for the issue of enforcement of course, basically unsolved.

This is where incentives come into the picture. But they will forever be at odds with the desire to avoid child poverty, it's difficult.

It's not hard to figure out how to price them in. It's hard to get such taxes put into law. A CO2 tax is very simple. Just add a tax to a fossil fuel as they're extracted that matches the cost of pulling the CO2 they release from the atmosphere. Now you only need a global consensus to actually do it.

I agree 100%. I live in Finland; our neighbour, Sweden, was early with carbon tax. Our tax/govt structures are otherwise very similar. Sweden's carbon footprint per capita is roughly 50% of ours.

You could place the externalities directly on an UBI (universal basic income). This would address a problem of redistribution of the tariffs income. France had the yellow jackets because people are tired of not knowing were taxes income go (normally to the very rich.) If we implement externalities to level of what IPPC advices there will be unemployment, but work like the economy is just another mean to an end. Right now the big problem is ecological.

Well, in the long term externalities wouldn't yield much money, and instead move allocation of capital to methods of production with minimal external costs.

It would promote the local economy (the one with less externalities). That would created meaningful jobs, jobs that you know have a propose. Yes we could not buy cheap clothing every weekend or go to a 3 day holiday in the south of Europe 4 times a year but we don't need to. What we need to live within the boundaries of the planet.

I'm sympathetic but we have been trying this approach for a couple decades and it's not working. I mean you're not wrong, but we're almost at the point of being overtaken by events so you might want to think in more dynamic terms.

Markets and liberalism have been failing so drastically for decades that fascism is rising across the globe. What evidence do you see that this is going to change in time to prevent unimaginable catastrophe? We all need to sprint lefter and greener before it's too late.

The evidence is to the contrary as you said. I just think that the only way to get people to actually do this is to let the markets work it out.

I'm not saying, at all, that the "invisible hand" will sort it out by itself. Agreed: that's ridicilously naive, or worse (bad faith).

I mean that if regulators force the costs of externalities into the market, things could work out.

When I'm shopping for milk, my local grocery has options like organic, and locally produced (within county). Which is the green choice? Soy milk is likely less co2 intensive, but then again it's shipped from across the globe. I do not know. And this is just milk.

I'd prefer the govt to tax greenhouse gases to oblivion. Then it becomes easy for me and others.