The underlying cause of climate change, air pollution and waterways full of plastic waste is the Tragedy of the Commons.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/climate-ch...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Yep. We should have forced mining and oil companies to pay opportunity costs to our future self whenever they extract finite resources from the planet.

The challenge is that those costs were not understood when these extractive heavy industries were stood up, and large parts of our legal and governance systems were set up to ensure that those industries could exist, presumably to enrich all of us (e.g., the mineral rights system). By the time the costs were understood, the owners of those industries had accrued enough capital from their operation to actively fight off challenges to them for decades.

The tragedy is obvious, but I think it's an important example as we move forward with other dramatic and potentially disastrous technological changes. What happens if we discover conclusively in 15 years that observing recommendation-algorithm driven social media for more than an hour a day causes dementia? Would we move quickly to ban it, or would we endure a protracted fight with Meta, TikTok et. al. about our "right to scroll" while the damages accrue?

Are you not guilty for all the times you filled up your petrol powered car spewed all that carbon and air pollution into the air?

Embedded in the tragedy of the commons is a Nash equilibrium where it is in the interest of individual parties to not cooperate - where cooperation would be mutually beneficial.

So, at country scale, implementing a carbon tax on any set of countries immediately reduces their competitiveness against tax-free countries. Over time, this difference will lead to wide divergences in outcomes.

It's kind of interesting how we, as carbon based lifeforms, have been spewing carbon products into every part of our environment en-mass and they all seem to have negative influences on our well being.

> burning gigantic storages of carbohydrate fuels

Fossil fuels are hydrocarbons - they're made up of carbon and hydrogen (and very little oxygen). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocarbon

Carbohydrate is C + H + oxygen, and generally refers to biological molecules derived from glucose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate