Summary: if it doesn't hit the bottom line of the polluter, then there is no reason for them to change their behavior.
That's pretty obvious, but the message needs to be hammered in over and over. The bigger issue is that game theory gets in the way - if pollution is taxed here, it will be exported to places where it is not.
For carbon pricing specifically, border carbon adjustments are being developed as an analogue to duties to blunt the effectiveness of "pollution exports."
The nice thing about being a massive market like the US is that you can impose regulations that producers in other countries need to follow to be able to participate in the market. It does make enforcement harder, but as long as you have the political will its definitely feasible. O/c having the political will is an entirely different thing.
Example: The US has banned lots of Chinese stuff. The stuff now sneaks across the border into southeast Asia, or goes to a final assembly plant there and becomes Vietnamese or Cambodian. There are _supposed to_ be supply chain records and audits in many cases, though reality often doesn't match paperwork...
Probably should work on catching a few murderers and figuring out an even moderately effective enforcement mechanism before pretending you can make more stuff illegal. Otherwise people just laugh at you as you further undermine any perceived authority you once had.
We have done close to nothing to enforce the current tariffs and such, allowing blatant country of origin laundering to go the whole time with next to zero enforcement action. You can bring a ready to prosecute case to regulators and they do utterly nothing.
Adding more to this regime would just be yet more performative nonsense to make some people feel good about themselves. We need far less of that in this world.
Now if you're just arguing the penalties need to be stiffer: sure!
But on a cursory search, I don't believe it's fair at all to say we've done "close to nothing" or there's "next to zero enforcement action" or regulators "do utterly nothing" or it's "performative nonsense".
What evidence do you have to back up your claims? It seems like perhaps you've actually brought a ready-to-prosecute case forward? Curious to learn!
I quickly scanned all those examples, and it doesn't appear a single one had to do with laundering country of origin? That's specifically what I mean - not just fining US companies for trying to under report custom values, which seems to be the bulk of those cases and is nothing new.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197961495 I think is the best quick example of the problem I am talking about here. Outright actual fraud by foreign companies laundering country of origin through intermediary countries. There is next to zero enforcement on this considering how rampant it is. There seems to be very little interest in doing any sort of "hard" prosecution on this problem - likely because it is complex and difficult to investigate appropriately.
I consider it rampant and enforcement a joke since I have spoken to vendors about past and future potentially tariffs and they are completely unconcerned by them. Minor cost of doing business increase to have products shipped through an intermediary company and relabeled. Maybe some quick final assembly if they really are trying to play the game.
I think current enforcement works okayish for folks trying to push the limits. It seems to fall over on outright fraud imposed by bad actors.
This is a great and thoughtful response! Thank you for writing it up. I imagine it is fairly hard to catch (and/or prove) the origin laundering you’re talking about
Another way to look at is the USA is overdeveloped that we have a duty to make everything as advanced as possible. Which raises the sophistication of other nations.
I wonder if the biggest hindrance to good corporate behavior might be the fiduciary responsibility to the investor that was established with Dodge vs Ford.
It is very interesting when capitalists confess that capitalism itself will never solve these issues. It throws away delusional thinking by the uninformed. Any hope of solving environmental issues rests in having a government that is powerful enough compared to the market and willing to work against businesses main financial interests.
We're just seeing the example of tech companies, which for years paraded around as earth saviors with pledges of "carbon neutrality", just to discard any such plans when competition for AI supremacy makes them spend as much energy as they possibly can, as quickly as possible, the environment be damned.
Okay, so I agree with many leftist critiques of capitalism, but we can also tell that communism also caused environmental destruction, particularly in the soviet block. Mixed economies are not doing that much better - see the Norwegian sovereign fund as but one example. Further, I'd argue that the opposite of a weak state is a totalitarian one, not a socialist one.
And I'm arguing that the problem is you need over 200 governments to agree on both it and its enforcement, and that the wealth disparity between countries in and of itself will cause game theory issues for these sorts of agreements to break down, even if each government was enlightened socialist.
Capitalism is making it worse, to be sure, but socialism is not a solution here in and of itself.
I mean that line of thought has been core to capitalism from the start though. The originators of capitalism argued that it needed strong governments to stop/prevent the negative aspects of capitalism (such as stopping collusion and monopolistic behavior). By it's nature and from the beginning one of capitalism's core requirements is that capitalism cannot function without a framework of rules and enforcement mechanisms that only a strong government can provide.
He has a lot of good points but I can't help but find irony in companies like Aspen and Patagonia being part of the problem. How many people travel to a tourist destination without flying or driving a car? How many of Patagonia's rain jackets are covered in forever chemicals like PFAS?
The world will have to be drastically different to solve these problems. A carbon tax is the way to do it since offsets are often plainly fraudulent. We have a long way to go. Cars should be as efficient as possible if not replaced by rail. Food packaging ought to be reusable and standardized like shipping containers or milk bottles way back in the day. People would have to give up on their manicured chemical water intensive artificially green lawns and how embarrassing that would be. All appliances, devices and vehicles should be repairable. The way to drive this would be a prepaid tax to account for the costs of the pollution. It would have to be a high enough tax that people get angry about their standard of living changing so it won't happen under democratic politics in such an individualistic society. Everyone has to have their over sized car to signal wealth to their neighbour. But at least if there were regulations we would all be in it together and find more efficient ways to peacock to our neighbours.
> How many people travel to a tourist destination without flying or driving a car?
That point was acknowledged in the second paragraph of the article. "His career led him to a tough lesson about his field: it’s a failure that perpetuates the very systems driving global warming".
> How many of Patagonia's rain jackets are covered in forever chemicals like PFAS?
From this year on, none of them (as linked in the policy above).
I agree, but most of us here live in a democracy, and people get mad when their short term standard of living is impacted without a basic understanding of how their long term standard of living is improved. So this is a pipe dream until people are mad about climate change. And people are by and large not mad about it.
The real question is why is so little of our media about climate change? Even reporting on extreme weather typically fails to mention climate change as a contributing factor in most news outlets.
I've spent years as an auditor. The thing I always tried to figure out was the "root cause". The root cause for global warming is not that company XYZ doesn't plant trees, so "let's <find some solution> to offset the <insert problem>", but find the root cause, and stop/limit/correct/<verb> that cause.
Now this is literally a hydra. Consumerism? Yes! Plastics and the lies of oil industry that 'plastic(s) is/are recyclable? Yes! Politics? Yes! Greed? Yes! Big bubble global economy that nobody wants it to bust/rightsize? Yes!
Musk has said many things about many topics. One that I admired one thing he said some years back was (along the lines of..) "for humans going to inhabit Mars it is better that they make up their own laws, and I (he) hopes they will do a better job than what we did on earth".
I don't feel/believe that Earth will ever be repaired/become pristine while it has humans on it. Perhaps we will wipe ourselves out and 1000 years later, once all signs of civilization will be consumed by floods, earthquakes, nature, the planet will be pristine. It's just a Arrow Paradox (Zeno's paradoxes).
Earth cannot be pristine. In fact global warming isn't bad (or good) for earth. It's bad for humans. And what you describe as pristine is a state that is from the perspective of humanity.
What I mean is earth doesn't "care" in what state it is in. It will just simply continue in whatever state it will be in. With or without humans.
People create value for shareholders because doing so creates value for themselves and their households. Humans brains are wired to hog resources at the expense of others. We generally share with our neighbor to the extent that helps us have more in the future. You can't weasel your way out of human nature.
Also thinking we can write better laws if we start from scratch is typical hubris from someone who's never really studied Law. Just another variant of the most common SV syndrome.
Sure, but in light of recent events I am not going to be too quick to say shallow lip service to a cause is that bad compared to actively running away from it, which I would not be surprised to be the next move whenever people feel like they've done enough on the ending diversity front.
Examine why people use fossil fuels and then prioritize development of reasonable and affordable alternatives.
> what if I just dumped the trash on the street and hoped and waited for my community to pick it up, or to just suffer from my trash?
What if you asked how much fossil fuel is burned transporting people and goods into the Aspen ski resort? Or what the impact of your mostly seasonal labor is? Or why their housing is a 25 minute drive from the resort?
> Leave us with what “Terrible Beauty” is
The projecting recognition that you are, in fact, one of the largest parts of the problem?
Instead of “suing ExxonMobil” (what a joke, basically just blank checks to lawyers), why don’t these billionaire assholes invest in green energy to compete in areas where O&G / coal is dominant - Great Appalachia, Permian Basin, and other areas.
Give people in these areas higher paying jobs, retrain them as necessary, promote highly safe working environments (compared to dangerous oil fields). Then over time the sentiment regarding climate change shifts - politicians taking the cut from O&G will get replaced, laws can change, policies can be placed to push progressive initiatives.
The inconvenient truth is that there isn't enough pie to go around. Sometimes the wind or solar isn't generating. A carbon tax would force people to cut down their footprint and be more selective about how they use carbon and at the same time it would encourage investment into green energy storage solutions since they are now worth the same as taxed carbon. It's pretty difficult to get competitive profit driven companies to care when the best option right now is to buy fake carbon credits and keep on polluting for cheap.
There are some 'billionaire assholes' investing in new 'nukkular', coz iz got wunderbar EROI.
And could be really clean, if handled right, from cradle to cradle.
But that's another matter to discuss, with endless chatter, about externalisation, drawing sankeys until exterminaton, succumbing to the offer of the cheapest bidder, just another dirty shitter.
> invest in green energy to compete in areas where O&G / coal is dominant - Great Appalachia, Permian Basin, and other areas
You ain't building a solar array or a mega windmill farm in Appalachia - it is a significant upfront cost and very challenging.
> Give people in these areas higher paying jobs, retrain them as necessary, promote highly safe working environments
Easier said than done. One of the great things about renewable energy sources like Solar Arrays and Wind Turbines is that there isn't that much labor needed.
The manufacturing is largely automated and maintenance doesn't need hundreds of people - maybe a dozen well paid Technicians at most.
More critically, these are very technical power systems and the technicians managing these arrays often have a College Education in Electrical or Mechanical Engineering and a decent amount of professional experience.
The regions disproportionately affected by your proposal are those with some of the weakest human capital in the US (Appalachia, Permian Basin, the Gulf coast, rural Alaska).
----------
Green Technology adoption is critical to ensure we can remain on Earth sustainably, but handwaving fears about job sustainability is a disservice, and plays a major roll in the arising backlash to green technology.
> You ain't building a solar array or a mega windmill farm in Appalachia - it is a significant upfront cost and very challenging.
Why is it only limited to solar or wind? Nuclear is a viable option and requires a shit ton of people to operate and pollution is nil compared to coal and O&G.
There are plenty of ways to get this done. However our shitty economic policies based on neo-liberalism economics of the 1970s to 2010s have put us in a place where we are powerless to do anything about it. Decades of deregulation, tax cuts for billionaires and multibillion dollar companies, stock buybacks, subsequent cutting of public services, corporate glazing, hyper capitalistic culture have left us with very little to tackle this issue.
> The sites remain incredibly, invisibly toxic far longer than we have had people around, into the future.
That's BS. There are some NPP's already decommissioned, and there is nothing toxic there anymore.
The little bits that were, have been transported away, to be stored elsewhere.
How that happened, or not so far, varies by region and is often delayed or sabotaged by stupid regulations, shizophrenic neglect and NIMBYism.
In similar ways some regions have no, or little battery backup for the grid.
Which wouldn't be necessary in the first place, if we hadn't stopped development and refinement of 'nukkular' in the first place about half a century ago.
It really isn't that much volume.
The most dangerous parts decay the fastest, that's what's making them dangerous.
And they could be used in advanced breeder 'nukkularz', FUCK YEAH!
The rest is rather harmless, and if our descendents are too stupid to stay away from that stuff, and don't make glowing toys for their mutated brats out of it, they don't deserve better.
Or maybe 'hormesis' kicks in another evolutionary step, and they develop true psionics!1!!
> Nuclear is a viable option and requires a shit ton of people to operate and pollution is nil compared to coal and O&G.
How are you getting uranium at scale? Mining.
What do you need to mine at scale? O&G.
Nuclear also has extremely high upfront costs with significant opposition from society, making land acquisition and maintenance costs extremely high.
Nuclear Plants also tend to require significant education with some amount of college education.
> There are plenty of ways to get this done. However our shitty economic policies based on neo-liberalism economics of the 1970s to 2010s have put us in a place where we are powerless to do anything about it. Decades of deregulation, tax cuts for billionaires and multibillion dollar companies, stock buybacks, subsequent cutting of public services, corporate glazing, hyper capitalistic culture have left us with very little to tackle this issue
Maybe, but a major reason why a lot of green energy is viable today is precisely because most of the inputs and maintenance are largely automated, making it much more cost effective at scale.
It's difficult to make a case to unionized employees at in the O&G industry to say goodbye to SWE level salaries. The amount of retraining is very high (as these are complex systems) and often require a college education.
So existing workforce in mines and O&G can transition to new green economy. Gotcha…
> Nuclear also has extremely high upfront costs with significant opposition from society, making land acquisition and maintenance costs extremely high.
So let’s stop giving (profitable) O&G billions of dollars in subsidies at the state, federal levels. Redirect subsidies towards acquiring land and maintenance (again more jobs…)
> It's difficult to make a case to unionized employees at in the O&G industry to say goodbye to SWE level salaries.
Unlike SWEs, those “SWE level salaries” come at the price of high risk of dismemberment, death, and injury. Offshore oil rigs and domestic oil fields are dangerous working environments.
Plus is working 12 hr days really worth whatever 6 figures they pay you? Sure you _may_ have a shit ton of money towards the end of your tenure. But lose out on watching your kids grow up.
> So existing workforce in mines and O&G can transition to new green economy. Gotcha
~90% of global uranium produced comes from 4 countries - Kazakhstan, Canada, Namibia, and Australia - not the US.
> Unlike SWEs, those “SWE level salaries” come at the price of high risk of dismemberment, death, and injury. Offshore oil rigs and domestic oil fields are dangerous working environments
These are dangerous jobs, but clearly the only jobs available in a lot of these areas.
As I noted previously, most renewable energy jobs (including nuclear) require some form of college education or significant retraining.
It's going to be tough convincing someone to leave a well paid and well benefited job, when the alternative industry is heavily automated and thus doesn't require the same amount of employment.
Let's be brutally honest - you aren't going to convince a PV fab to invest in manufacturing in Odessa TX or build a nuclear power plant in Nenana AK. The human capital just doesn't exist AND it is a fairly specialized engineering discipline that cannot be taught on the fly.
------------
I fully agree with you about the need to prioritize renewables, but you are doing a massive disservice to the cause if you are ignoring the very real concerns tens of thousands of employees in the O&G industry have.
These are hard questions, and hand waving them away with platitudes like "retraining" is just setting the movement up for failure.
People generally invest where returns are attractive. If it doesn't make financial sense to invest in those regions, then private investors aren't going to do it.
One common argument against green energy projects is that they only have attractive returns when they come with sizeable subsidies attached, which really just means taxpayers are footing the bill.
I appreciate those same taxpayers are also footing the climate bill, but people tend to care more about the dollars in their pocket today than some future risk which may or may not affect them directly.
> One common argument against green energy projects is that they only have attractive returns when they come with sizeable subsidies attached, which really just means taxpayers are footing the bill.
That argument has been out of date for at least five years.
This man's heart is clearly in the right place, so maybe this isn't fair. Nevertheless:
> The book is trying to get at this question of the gap between what people say they care about and what they do in response to a threat to all of it. If you ask the average American, “What do you love? What do you care about?” They'd say, “My family, my partner, my children, the natural world that I visit and recreate in– those things are important to me, my community.” And then you say “Climate change is a threat to all of those things. An existential threat. What are you doing about it?” And the reality on the ground from the last election is people barely even vote. And when they take action, those actions tend to be token recycling, and they don't take the next step of saying “what would really matter?” So the takeaway from the book is that the beauty of the world, our families, the stories we tell about ourselves, these are so precious that they're worth protecting. I'm hoping that that love and that caring will propel people to do really meaningful work on climate change.
You know, I think a different book needs to be written. The focus is always on the people who aren't doing much. I see it on HN all the time; hundreds of comments like "We aren't willing to make real sacrifices", "Everyone has a price", "No one truly cares", and so on.
On the contrary, I never see positive highlighting of the who is actually making sacrifices to do things that have an impact. Those get handwaved away in the above quotes, as if they don't exist.
They need to be put up on a pestedal, we need to highlight them and talk about how awesome they are. I've never seen any book do that. Tell people that you too can be one of them. Even when there's reporting on them, it's all very flat, matter of fact.
It's super harmful to wave them away, to not mention their existance, because in people's minds 1. it reinforces the idea that there's no choice 2. it makes people inadvertently feel good about themselves because oh well, we're all like that.
Spreading this exact sentiment is also such a well known strategy that bad actors have been using on a variety of topics for decades.
> I mean, if a company is publicly traded, it has to turn a profit for shareholders.
Real shame on CPR for implicitly supporting the myth of fiduciary duty, which too is incredibly harmful for the exact same reasons but for corporations - providing a cover as if there's no other option. As long as a company isn't intentionally, actively being run into the ground, there is absolutely zero risk of getting in trouble for not upholding fiduciary duty. It does not happen, it's a convenient myth to excuse companies offloading their negative externalities onto society in chase of shortterm greed. This is a real factor on this exact topic and it's really unfortunate this implication is being reinforced in such an article. Yes, they're not technically saying it, but it very much has that effect.
Sadly we didn't evolve our mammalian ancestor/monkey brains in a world surrounded by love. It evolved to process a world filled with danger. I think the average monkey brain will key on danger signals over love every time.
I think that is the reason why historical 'see the world with love' figures withdrew from the world rather than engage with it.
I think concepts of politics of love and hope are vastly different between cultures/socio economic classes as well, where as monkey brain fear/hate are an easier, more universal sell.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages”
I would compare it to seeing a nutrition team at Frito-Lay. Sure, it's always better to be marginally more healthy, but their primary output is almost surely going to be manufactured excuses for health-conscious people to justify eating potato chips.
No, I do not question all mitigations. I just think that they could probably have more efficacy by looking in the mirror vs. targeting oil. I am no fan of climate change, used to ski, but also drive an electric car.
> One of the ideas that came to us, it wasn't our idea, was that a private corporation nor even a public corporation had sued a fossil fuel company for hiding science and preventing society from taking action on climate.
I never understood the point of suing oil companies. (Edit: I mean insofar as "fixing the climate" goes. If the goal is something else, ignore my comment.)
So let's say they don't even show up to court, and just lose by default, and the companies get destroyed. OK, congratulations... now what? Consumers aren't going to go "oh my gosh I'm such a fool... if Exxon hadn't fooled me about global warming I would've gone grocery shopping with my carriage horse." They're still going to drive everywhere like they were yesterday, they're going to want bottom-of-the-barrel (pardon the pun) oil prices, and they're going to vote for the leaders that give them that. Whether they're in denial or actively outraged at everyone else for unsustainable living, it's not like most people have enough disposable income, free time, or a bright outlook on the future to invest in more costly methods of living.
People want low oil prices, that's our way of life. The oil companies are there because of consumer demand. How does suing them greedy oil companies address that?
I think people incorrectly assume that if it had been 100% clear in 1980 that we were on a course to dramatically change the global climate that we could or would have made key technological advances earlier. I personally doubt this and think that there were a lot of unknowns. There has been plenty of investment and research into batteries and photovoltaics for decades and they both needed advances in other areas to get to where they are today. A lot of what makes PV so useful now relies on technology developed for microchips.
If somehow we had managed to figure out climate models before we stopped building nuclear plants, then maybe we could have ended up on a different trajectory but it just seems so unlikely.
I'd be maybe willing to buy this if we were still in the '80s, but this is 40 years later. I'm not sure what the point of suing them now is, at least as far as actually attacking climate change goes. For justice-serving purposes, OK, sue them out of existence. But how is that going to fix the climate?
Immediate reduction in emissions, preservation of ecosystems, boost to renewable energy, setting a good legal precedent, funding for climate restoration (not just monies recovered from murderous executives, but also a huge windfall from not paying them massive subsidies any longer).
Not to mention other benefits, like better public health and awareness.
Wild how this question was framed like some sort of gotcha; as if all of this is in any way radical and not a matter of necessity at this point.
But OPs point is that people are not willing to give up modern life for these gains.
If you win and the legal system shuts down the modern lifestyle, you are going to have people anti the legal system, not saying 'wow, good on your for removing the oil companies and our way of living'. If you weaponize government against people and their lifestyle choices too much it's possible people break the government instead of the government breaking people's will to live as they currently do.
> But OPs point is that people are not willing to give up modern life for these gains.
Because for decades fossil fuel companies used tobacco lobby style tactics to sow doubt about the real cost of that lifestyle.
And yet somehow suing them into oblivion 'won't solve anything'? Suing tobacco companies into oblivion did wonders for us. I think it's worth a try.
> If you win and the legal system shuts down the modern lifestyle, you are going to have people anti the legal system
The modern lifestyle is driving us off a cliff. No one - no one - has argued that suing fossil fuel companies is a one and done complete solution. That's a straw man.
How is it a strawman to say 'if you win via lawsuits and remove oil companies from modern life, thus driving down the quality of life, you are going to have very heavy pushback from the average person'?
> How is it a strawman to say 'if you win via lawsuits and remove oil companies from modern life, thus driving down the quality of life, you are going to have very heavy pushback from the average person'?
What I said was: "No one - no one - has argued that suing fossil fuel companies is a one and done complete solution. That's a straw man." Why are you changing the argument, acting as if I said something quite different, and then asking me how the different argument is a strawman? ... That's literally a strawman. You gonna strawman all the way down?
And, how do you think the collapse of global ecosystems will affect quality of life? How do you think a billion or two climate refugees will affect quality of life? How are the 83% of extreme weather events which climate change is impacting affecting quality of life? How is the pollution of our air, water, soil and food from oil companies affecting our quality of life?
The reason "average people" aren't pushing back even more on all this is directly due to decades of FUD pushed and funded by ... oil companies. And people are arguing that they shouldn't be sued??
Annual fossil fuel subsidies are in the trillions. They're not likely to be sued 'out of existence' any time soon; it would be admitting that our governments have been complicit. Environmental protesters are being treated as terrorists, ffs.
If we continue business as usual, then we are in for outcomes far beyond horror.
How would suing ExxonMobil lead to an immediate reduction in emissions or preservation of ecosystems? This isn't a gotcha, I genuinely don't understand. Is your expectation that a judge would rule producing too much fossil fuel is illegal?
> How would suing ExxonMobil lead to an immediate reduction in emissions or preservation of ecosystems?
... Did you read my comment? Did you read the original question? I'm really not sure where you got lost. Yes, if "greedy oil companies" were sued "out of existence" there would be an immediate reduction in emissions.
If you want to start a different question that limits the scenario to ExxonMobil and a realistic judge in the actual system that we have, then go ahead.
I’m not trying to limit the scenario, but the large and highly inflexible demand for oil is a real constraint. If greedy oil companies disappeared tomorrow, the public would demand (and the government would provide) a massive effort to restart their wells and resume production ASAP.
I consider it more real because it’s more immediate. If we keep burning oil, we’ll be fine until we’re not, and we can hope someone invents a clever fix. If we stop burning oil, most of the country can’t function today.
What would be possible, certainly, is an increasingly harsh sequence of taxes and mandates to force the economy to decarbonize. I think we should do that, but it’s not something that a lawsuit against oil companies could impose.
What ever happened to 'you do the crime, you do the time'?
For 50+ years Exxon et al knowingly did everything they could to prevent a better world.
Every year the world gets hotter, and they just keep getting richer.
You want to give them a pass because people like and use the stuff that's killing them? We didn't use that logic for tobacco companies, and it worked out. We used it for banks, and it didn't. We use it for military spending, and it's another decision that could kill the planet.
The 'too big to fail' argument is a cop-out, just kicking the can. It's astounding that in a world 1.5C above what it should be there are people arguing against holding the people responsible to account by legal means. Just because we use their product to drive life on earth off a cliff faster than we could without them? That makes no sense to me; I don't buy it. Can you explain it to me?
I don't particularly care about the ExxonMobil corporation. I don't think they're too big to fail, and it wouldn't bother me at all if they were held accountable or driven into bankruptcy.
What I don't agree with is the idea in the source article, where this is something we have to do instead of small-scale fixes. Emissions come from oil consumption, so emissions reduction simply cannot happen without small scale fixes from every company which depends on fossil fuels today. Perhaps suing Exxon will help incentivize that, but I worry when it's framed as a silver bullet, as though Exxon has some Department of Increased Emissions and if we shut it down we can fix the climate without disrupting other businesses.
That's pretty obvious, but the message needs to be hammered in over and over. The bigger issue is that game theory gets in the way - if pollution is taxed here, it will be exported to places where it is not.