So then, a good step in the right direction would be to sell products and services that are whole: that is, they outline the entire impact of the product from raw materials to returning to raw materials, so that the entire impact of the product can be assessed and priced. I don't see how we can even attempt to correct climate change without addressing consumption, whether economic consumption or environmental consumption.
Well, we have rather a lot of nutrition information on food packaging and yet we have more overweight and obese people than ever, so I'm not sure that yet more information is the answer for consumers.
Following deregulation and free trade, we in the West have found our manufacturing industry disappear and go to China, with lower wages and even lower workplace safety and environmental regulation. Why? Because the stuff ends up cheaper.
Thus, information is not a very strong changer of market behaviour, but price is. So if you're looking for market solutions, then changing the price is most effective. Now, obviously there are all kinds of environmental impacts, but fossil fuel consumption is a pretty good proxy for most of them. You can't really mine, refine and enrich uranium without using fossil fuels, for example. Thus, changing the price of fossil fuels would be a strong market signal encouraging changes in consumption.
A sudden change would simply cause recessions, since many people have no options. Fossil fuels differ from tobacco and alcohol - undesireable consumption - in that while people can do entirely without tobacco and alcohol, they can't do without some form of lighting, heating/cooling and transport, and the various goods and services requiring energy inputs. In this respect, we would need a carbon tax to act like a sugar or junk food tax - encouraging people to choose something else instead.
But we must have the something else actually available. I can't shift from car to train if there are no trains running. So we'd have to introduce the tax at a low, essentially nominal level, and use the revenue to build alternatives, and gradually increase the price.
The issues are whether the revenue would actually be used for that, and whether the rate would be increased as planned, kept the same, decreased or whatever - as a political football like other forms of tax are. As well, many punitive taxes government become addicted to, and since they use the punitive tax to reduce other taxes, become reluctant to actually try to abolish the thing they're supposedly punishing. See for example alcohol, tobacco and gambling.
Of course, any consumption tax is inherently regressive, in that the poor have more of their spending as non-discretionary. Thinking of here in Australia, household on $150,000 can choose whether or not to take that overseas flight, but a household on $20,000 can't choose whether to travel to that part-time minimum wage job.
One solution to this could be a UBI of carbon. Let's say for example a country has 10t of emissions per person, everyone could be issued 10,000 carbons (equivalent to a kg of carbon dioxide). No company would be permitted to sell, import or export fossil fuels without the requisite number of carbon permits accompanying the stuff. People could sell their carbon vouchers, or hold onto them. Rio Tinto's CEO would get his 10,000 vouchers, but so would Jenny the single mum in the crappy part of town, and he'd have to buy them from her somehow if he wanted his company to keep being able to get oil out of the ground.
If we really wanted to address pollution, then rather than calculating the CO2 equivalent emissions, we'd just go by the weight of actual carbon in the fossil fuel. Suddenly coal would be much, much less attractive than natural gas.
In either case we could then reduce the amount of carbon vouchers each year, logically we would do this in a way that kept the price about the same. If for example they traded at $1 each with 10,000 per person, after 5 years we might find so much other stuff put in that people didn't need as many carbon vouchers, they were now trading at $0.50 - well, okay, drop it to 9,000 and see what happens. I'd err on the side of issuing too many to begin with, just to minimise the chances of it all causing a recession.
Tradeable carbon vouchers as a UBI would be a less regressive carbon tax than a simple 10% or whatever, and simply attaching it to fossil fuels would let the pricing effects just flow through naturally to the rest of the economy.
The vouchers would never decline to zero, because there are non-burning uses of fossil fuels such as plastics and other chemicals, and there are some areas where there are no real substitutes, like coking coal for steel manufacture. But it's reasonable to expect they could drop 90% in 50 years.
Obviously, things like land-clearing and other poor agricultural practices would still cause emissions, but those are harder to quantify, and currently are connected to fossil fuel use anyway - land-clearing isn't being done by guys with shovels and axes, after all, and taxing natural gas would flow on to nitrate fertiliser costs, and so on. That a solution is not a complete solution doesn't mean it's useless or shouldn't be tried. Start with something, see how you go.
I'm not holding my breath, though. A very limited carbon trading scheme was brought in a decade ago in Australia and quickly abolished. Governments, especially federal governments, tend to be followers rather than leaders. We need our own behaviour to be something governments can follow. For a start, climate scientists need to stop flying to international climate change conferences. "But it's urgent!" If it's so urgent, we don't need to know the details precisely, we just need to start causing less emissions
right now.
Teleconference or write a letter. But I'm not waiting for them. Because I work from home, my only necessary travel is taking the kids to school (3.5km) and going to the shops (1-4km); my wife works a place she can take the train to. I've used my car once this week, less than 10km total. We pay an extra 5.5c/kWh for wind-generated electricity, but use less than we did before so the net cost is the same. And we buy whatever's seasonal at the grocery stores - the cheaper stuff tends to be whatever's in season somewhere in the state, minimising the food miles. And so on. We've taken some years to arrange our lives so we can do this. It's not a life of miserable deprivation any more than the frugality necessary for FIRE is. You begin by reducing outright wastefulness. Our society is a wasteful industrial society - this means that we produce so much stuff we actually waste it. If you don't believe me, visit a landfill some day, as well as all the useful materials tossed away, there is working machinery, intact clothing and furniture tossed away, all of which had an energy cost, and thus a carbon cost. Anyone pursuing FIRE understands it's not good to be wasteful. I find it a bit strange that an environmental conscience isn't more common in this community. But then, I'm a camo green at heart.