High consumption without compensation is fraud on the public

We are used to pay retail prices.

But paying retail prices, we ignore the negative externalities, like pollution, overfishing and nuclear waste.

So we have been shopping at an unjustified discount all our lives

We need to factor that in, and we start with CO2 as this correlates highly with all pollution and can easily be measured. We need to factor in pollution in all products and services.

That is really not a new idea. Actually it is what most experts suggest as the only way to have impact. But CO2 taxes or trading certificates with lobby diluted prices doesn't do it.

According to a recent meta study by Jessica F. Green “…the evidence indicates that carbon pricing has a limited impact on emissions.” Green looked at carbon tax and carbon trading systems including cap-and-trade.

A common rejoinder is that carbon prices simply are not high enough to generate substantial emissions reductions. Indeed, low prices are pervasive; the vast majority of carbon prices are well below even the most conservative estimates of the ‘social cost of carbon’ (SCC). The SCC internalizes the environmental and health effects of GHG emissions. A recent study surveyed environmental experts on their estimation of SCC, which ranged between $80 and $300 ton−1 (Pindyck 2019). Another study estimates a global median price of $417, with substantial national level variation (Ricke et al 2018) A more conservative estimate puts the SCC between $50 and $100 by 2030 (Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition 2017).

“It may be the case that pricing will work better after a certain threshold is surpassed. Indeed, Aydin and Esen find that energy taxes, including CO2 taxes, only reduce emissions after surpassing 2.2% of GDP (2018). Yet after nearly four decades of experience with carbon pricing, the empirical evidence to date suggests that low prices are a feature of this policy, rather than a bug. More worrisome is the fact that even those nations with high prices have relatively modest reductions.

A second potential problem for carbon pricing concerns leakage, which occurs when economic activity subject to carbon pricing shifts to a jurisdiction without similar regulations. This problem is pervasive in environmental regulation, driven by variation in policy stringency (see, e.g. Vogel and Kagan 2004). This is particularly true when capital is highly mobile. Carbon pricing is no exception. Thus, leakage may result in a relocation of emissions, rather than a net reduction.”

What we need is a unified global compensation on CO2 of at least $250 per ton.

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Jessica F. Green, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abdae9