Green recovery must end the reign of GDP, argue Cambridge and UN economists
Do we really need radical economic changes to deal with pollution versus just plain properly using the effective systems we&#x27;ve got by internalizing the cost? One of the fundamental foundations of Free Markets as tools is to have pricing at each step include costs, and I don&#x27;t agree that failure to do that means the entire thing must be tossed. On the contrary, I suspect it&#x27;s a lowest common barrier scenario, that if such a relatively simple thing can&#x27;t be accomplished by societies why would vastly more difficult and ambitious efforts be successful?<p>Really, global warming at least is a pretty much perfect scenario for market solutions, because it&#x27;s simultaneously a vastly distributed problem and also can be attacked from anywhere in the world (since greenhouse gases naturally disperse evenly worldwide). Just set the price of emitting&#x2F;extracting a ton of CO2&#x2F;equivalent at the price of industrially removing it plus some minimum margin (5-7%). Make the latter a ratcheting auction system, completely revenue-neutral to the government, and countries that don&#x27;t comply internally can have conservative worst case carbon internalization tariffs applied. Then just leave the markets to sort out the best ways to meet that goal. Everything almost instantly becomes carbon neutral, no need for any sort of moralizing about what luxuries are more important, everyone can just see the real prices and decide accordingly where they want to allocate their resources. And as carbon capture becomes large scale and mature, it&#x27;ll be cheaper to then go negative carbon and reverse the problem.<p>I&#x27;m worried a lot of the feelings-based efforts and attempts to mix in huge revolutions are extremely counter productive to dealing with AGW specifically. Yes, there are lots of other major inequalities and systemic problems that desperately need addressing. But AGW is such a huge controversial deal riders should really, really be minimized. Fundamentally asking that economics be honest and properly account for costs shouldn&#x27;t be as big an ask as a lot of other things, and it genuinely is for all of our benefit too. If measures like &quot;GDP&quot; are distorted based on externalities, the first thing to do should be <i>un-distort</i> them shouldn&#x27;t it?