Ideally what we’d do is shift from polluting to non-polluting forms of consumption - such as by switching from coal and natural gas to renewables. Some would claim this is “economy shrinking” because we’d be pushing people away from one and towards the other by artificial means like taxes and subsidies.
But what these arguments fail to recognize is that we’re already doing that. We can’t pretend that the government has nothing to do with setting incentives when it lets coal plants pollute for free, and also gives them free police and military protection to stop any citizens or foreign countries that may be on the less beneficial end of that pollution from doing anything about it. So in essence discouraging and eventually ending the burning of fossil fuels is putting an end to the tax we all already pay in the form of bad health outcomes and lost current and future land value from pollution.
![The US is Politically to the Right of [Other] Democracies](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/21301eb3-0348-4db4-9f02-82fd35987e02.jpeg){kind=link}
Ideally what we’d do is shift from polluting to non-polluting forms of consumption - such as by switching from coal and natural gas to renewables. Some would claim this is “economy shrinking” because we’d be pushing people away from one and towards the other by artificial means like taxes and subsidies.
But what these arguments fail to recognize is that we’re already doing that. We can’t pretend that the government has nothing to do with setting incentives when it lets coal plants pollute for free, and also gives them free police and military protection to stop any citizens or foreign countries that may be on the less beneficial end of that pollution from doing anything about it. So in essence discouraging and eventually ending the burning of fossil fuels is putting an end to the tax we all already pay in the form of bad health outcomes and lost current and future land value from pollution.