A general shift in mentality and therefore law has started and needs to be pushed through in the next years:

Price externalized costs.

The world was treates like an infinite resource that it isnt. Emit carbon? It has its price to emit that that someone needs to pay. Same should go with noise etc. Reving that Car at midnight waking up hundrets of people? That does an economic health damage of thousands of dollars too.

How do you price the externalities?

As an externality, the price of emitting 1kg of carbon should be a little greater than the cost of capturing and storing 1kg of carbon.

That's too expensive a target to be realistic right now, so the real question is what's a level of taxation that won't cause social unrest, but that will change behaviour?

There are thousands of quite intelligent people studying this and they are writing studies and reports which can be googled. CO2 for example should probably cost in the high double/low three figures, depending on your assumptions on economic growth, the time frame, etc.: https://www.cen.uni-hamburg.de/en/about-cen/news/09-news-202...

Aka no one currently knows, let alone has any sort of defensible formula right now?

No, if you had read the source I linked you'd find out that there are decent models that put firm prices on CO2 based on assumptions of how quickly you want to decarbonize the economy. The assumed externality is the need to decarbonize and thus the cost of achieving this of course scales on the time horizon you want to achieve this in and your assumptions on technical developments in the meantime. Good models usually come with some complexity of this sort.

So what is the positive externality of emitting CO2?

sorry, wrong thread.

The problem is that none of those intelligent people factor in the positive externalities.

That statement makes no sense at all. "Positive externalities" is the benefit someone derives from consuming a product/service so this is usually quite well reflected in the actual price you pay for it. I.e. the "positive externality" of electricity is light, warmth, power, etc. This is why you pay your electricity provider and that price is based on market factors already.

Things that are reflected in the price is by definition not externalities. Which is why we are even talking about negative externalities. To that that all positive externalities are already factored in while the negatives ones aren't is either misinformed or disingenuous.

Externalities are emergent.

So what is the positive externality of emitting CO2?

All the time that gets freed up for more people to create new things instead of being forced to do manual labor.

The benefit of computers, AI, medicin, the ability to save life by being able to drive patients to hospitals and keep babies alive in incubators and I could go on. The ability to produce fertilizers which is why we can keep 3-4billion people alive and who wouldn't be around if it wasn't for that.

The ability to produce steel, concrete and plastic and the resillience that provides us.

The world is greener, we can produce food more places.

Moden life is 100% depending on the burning of fossile fuel and while it creates it's own problems, these are better problems to have than those it solved.

For CO2 at least the average price that it costs to pump the CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Are you going to discount it up against externalized benefits? Cause if that's how we want to think about it, you need to make an actual P&L analysis not just take one side. (And no the positive externalities are not priced in or they wouldn't be externalities)

Interesting aspect I wasnt aware of. What could a positive externality of e.g. co2 emission be? What of "fun" hobby noise? Do you have other examples?

It wouldnt work to make a net calculation with its costs?

First of all CO2 is plant feed and the world is 14% greener today. But even if we were to say CO2 was purely bad that's missing the point.

Burning Fossile fuel isn't just producing CO2 it's also allowing us to create fertilizers that keep 3B people alive, it's allowing us to produce cement, steel and plastic all of them the foundation of modern civilisation. Many of us wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for that.

On top of that it's what allow us to have machine do heavy work instead of humans, freeing more people up to do other things than working in the fields, which among other things gave us the internet which we are currently using, or many types of medicine, hell you can can't even do wind and solar without using fossil fuels.

So if we want to start counting externalities lets do that. But let do it fairly and it should be pretty clear that the positive externalities far outweigh the negative ones, which is why it's 80% of our energy consumption to this day.

Your text is overly emotional instead of being what I asked for. Its about numbers. The positive things have a value X, the negatives (that so long no one has to pay för) also, lets call it Y. If X > Y so be it, but limit the Profit at |X-Y|. Its not anyones decision what X and Y are, but facts that can be empiricaly derived. I dont care how many uses substance Z has, I only care about Y not being dispersed without liability, which happens today. If Y is too high, the Market shall regulate itself and will provide alternatives.

I already explained why the positive outweigh the negative.

But there is a simple experiment you can do.

List all the things you can't live without. List if they are possible without CO2 For those that aren't list if it's possible with current technologies, and current economics and current knowledge to create alternatives that are matching.

You will quickly realize you can't do that unless you are contempt with living like natives in some far remote jungle or with inferior or much more expensive solutions ( which then create its own set of externalities)

Taxation may help in reducing the attractiveness of carbon fuels, but essentially we need to stop carbon atoms getting into the atmosphere (as CO2). It doesn't matter how much tax is collected, there is not (currently) much that can be done about the CO2 released.

Simplest solution is to leave it in the ground. Just reduce the amount of oil/coal/gas dug up and burnt - we (or the corporations) know exactly how much is being dug up, so stop the digging.

Increasing the cost of burning carbon will, in a market economy, drive less use of burning carbon without need of regulation, bans, mandates, etc.