Calculate the hidden cost. Tell the companies that you'll either vote for a tax or accept a lucrative post in their board of directors after your term is over. Profit!

Calculate the hidden cost. Spend half of the cost on a marketing campaign to sway public opinion against a tax. Profit!

Maybe one way to mitigate is to have a separate branch of the political system dedicated to calculating the costs. Then make the methods for calculating as publicly available as possible so that they can be reproduced by non-profits.

We have managed judicial systems. We can manage this too.

I don't see how that helps. For example there are many publications available that calculate the cost of CO2, eg [1] from the German government. Yet global warming is still a problem.

[1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/14...

Dictatorships are still a problem too. But it's not because we don't know what the alternative looks like.

Figuring out what the alternative should look like is a big challenge but let's not pretend that that is the main issue here.

You used to be able to trust the GAO and NIST to calculate these things.

I mean it's hard in the same way as converting from a dictatorship to a democracy is hard. There's a huge political transaction cost. And then you'll wonder what took you so long.

Calculating the hidden cost isn't simple "hard", it's nigh impossible. We've spent billions trying to calculate the externalities of a single gas (CO2) and we're still incredibly uncertain with giant error bars even with a ton of assumptions.

We have some idea. That's monumentally better than having no idea. And not acting on flawed data is still worse than acting.

Money is just a proxy here for the harm it does. Some people would rather not get a check for having lost body parts, a la that scene from Erin Brockovich. They would rather not endure the harm to begin with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C029muI7bFw