- did I emit a ton of CO2 when I cut down a tree?
- what happens to the cost of medical plastics, etc? Did you just kill millions in poor countries because the cost of care went up so much?
This stuff is hard. Pretending it is simple stops us from working on the hard parts.
Plastic production is an insanely small part of oil and gas usage, 4%. Anyone bringing up plastic as a reason to not stop using oil isn't being intellectually honest. We could literally decimate the oil industry and still produce way more oil than the plastic industry needs. It's just not a concern.
Recycling can absorb much of that, but medical plastics cannot be made through recycling today.
Considering the price of medical devices in the US, there is certainly room for a few extra cents.
In the US, this cost will get absorbed. But if you are in subsaharan Africa, 6x more expensive IV tubes and syringes is extremely consequential.
That's definitely not a complete solution (if one exists), but that could be implemented over night if we wanted to do it.
And it would not change anything at planet scale, because on the other side of the world China is going to "pick up any slack" of CO2 generation we may not do.
It shouldn't stop us from trying to increase efficiency, but panic and insane ideas of the sort of "no one can emit a ton of CO2 without paying $1k" are not the way to improve things. The biggest fight in the world today is not for "the climate", but for the freedom to live in a non-autocratic country. We would have to win the second to have the slightest shot at cooperating well enough to have a shot at mitigating the first for those of us in places that will be hit the worst.
Do you think a communist-by-name party of China (or Russian mafia-state) gives a damn about the climate and how it affects people in places like subsaharan Africa, Bangladesh etc? Not in the slightest, but they'll gladly use every bit of it to promote panic and industry killing policies in places like the US, EU while pretending to "be green". If we win the fight not to be ruled by corrupt dictators we can have a shot of improving the lives of people who will suffer due to climate change.
Even if that was true in the short term (and reducing global supply by shutting down oil wells makes ir unlikely) the relative incentive for alternatives created here would lead to global improvements over the medium and longer term.
(That said, the time to apply solutions with medium-to-longer term payoff was 50 years ago.)
We're still far better off decarbonising because (rest of the world CO2 + China CO2) > China CO2.
The problem is that it requires the US to be on board with it. Each one alone couldn't, but the EU and US together would have the economic force required to solve this problem, if they acted with decisiveness.
The EU on the other hand has virtually no ability to produce oil and gas and is dependent on outside suppliers. So of course they have a lot of incentive to move off of it and that’s much easier if everyone else does too.
American hegemony is at stake if oil demand is dramatically reduced quickly. Where as the EU stands to gain influence. So again, why would the USA weaken herself to the benefit of the EU?
Perhaps it would make economic sense to squeeze the market to the last drop? This is also why peak oil is an important concept. The price will certainly increase over the long term and this is a tempting opportunity.
However, this is also how empires fall. There will be technological change, and it will decrease our dependency on oil, not increase it. The economic impetus for this change is clear. Companies resisting change will be irrelevant in the future and the same is true for whole countries. Economies which isn't dominated by oil will be the first to change and master the next economic era. Countries like Russia are not likely to keep up with the technological change, they are much too invested in the old system.
So the answer is that given a long enough outlook, economies gain from this transformation. The US specifically also should have every incentive to keep trade with China under control, given that geopolitical situation. Aligning with the EU would be a strategical move against China, while keeping the European trade partners close. It's a move that would make both economic and political sense.
That's separate from the moral reasons. We know what carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere leads to. Over geological time scales it is abundantly clear. We may not want that for our children, but that's unfortunately too late to change now. Economic and political reasons are what remains.
Asking people to eat less might never win... But when there is a famine, people have no choice but to eat less. It's not that there is no food available in a famine - it's just that prices go sky high.
Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 emitted.".
The population may revolt, like they do during famines. But with those oil wells blocked up, they probably wouldn't get what they were looking for.