Huh? Even with extremely important life-saving goals, you still want to use a cost-effective method to get there.

Also if it was actually expensive enough, we'd simply be doomed. Economics can't be ignored. They're a proxy for how much we can accomplish.

I agree in principle, but my question to you, is how do we make something economic i.e. CO2 pollution, which in principle provides no value?

The same goes for fossil fuel consumption. There's nothing economic about not using fossil fuels.

Understandably it's a compromise, but the first reaction shouldn't be "it costs too much, so don't do it". This attitude is the reason why nothing ends up getting done. I would much rather an uneconomic solution, than no solution at all, which seemingly is the status quo.

Taxes are one straightforward way. But no matter how you're paying for it, if you have method A and method B, and they'd both do the job, you don't pick the one that costs 5x as much because you think economic arguments are a bad thing.

That's an extremely sad point of view. Of course humans can accomplish things that are not economically viable.

Perhaps it's become harder in our current society, but many great projects of man were economic folly.

To give one admittedly a little cliche example, landing on the moon never made any economic sense.

That's not what I'm talking about. Pretend getting to the moon would have cost a quadrillion dollars. We wouldn't have been able to do it.

> Pretend getting to the moon would have cost a quadrillion dollars. We wouldn't have been able to do it.

This is a statement of reality, not economic system. A society that decided to divert resources, today, to building a Dyson sphere on Alpha Centauri would fail, irrespective of economic system, because the goal demands more resources than it can sustainably divert.

> This is a statement of reality, not economic system.

Yes, that's my point. The worry about "economically feasible" in the ancestor comment is a question of what plans are realistic with unlimited motivation. It's not about economic systems holding us back.

That's silly. That's like condemning logic or mathematics.

If you want future viability, you can ask if there is a cheap way or an expensive way to get what you want. That's economics. It says nothing about what your goal is.

You're forgetting a key factor though: politics.

What you're arguing is a rational idea of economics that doesn't exist. Instead, we have this bastard version influenced by politics, which in practice, cares nothing of the key objectives which concern future viability.

Instead, we get this thing that demands infinite growth and consumption. That's modern economics and it's destroying us.

> we get this thing that demands infinite growth and consumption. That's modern economics

This is a stylised misinterpretation of economics.

so you are just saying that you dont like a particular brand of politics.