> It's pointing out that there is no realistic scenario in which western countries can prevent CO2 from getting to dangerous levels.
There is one scenario, which isn’t probable. That is for western countries to pay a retrospective “sin” tax that gets distributed to other countries to fund climate action programs with better oversight. After all, if some countries benefited a lot from polluting in the past, it would be fair to expect them to pay up too.
>After all, if some countries benefited a lot from polluting in the past, it would be fair to expect them to pay up too.
Largely the entire globe has benefited from the industrial revolution. If the west is obligated to pay a retrospective sin tax, does the west also then jack up the prices on every technology that comes from that development when exporting to developing countries? For example, should students from developing countries get to come to the US and learn the latest knowledge and take that home and then jumping their country forward through decades of technology research? Should every immigrant into western countries pay huge fees to buy into the modern world, since they are not descended from those who are paying the sin taxes?
Also, do these sin taxes require that developing countries that receive these fund then guarantee not to emit CO2?
I disagree. Imagine everything that goes into the manufacture of an Apple M1 SoC. You have to get the raw materials, the design tools, the invention of the transistor, likely hundreds of thousands of hours, if not millions of hours, of engineering time to go from vacuum tubes, to transistors, to fab design, to computer science, to chip design, etc. Sure, if you isolate just the inventions along the path from the invention of fire to Apple selling their M1 based systems, it seems modest. But you can't just arbitrarily claim that X invention happened in the absence of the world in which it was invented.
During the industrial revolution there were no clean alternatives and there wasn't a clear understanding of the consequences. While indirect, modern developing nations greatly benefit from the existence of modern technologies developed by those who have already gone through this, and they are capable of learning from the mistakes of the west.
I really think the idea, that as a species, we need to redo the entirety of the industrial revolution individually for every nation is completely ridiculous. It would be one thing if it was contextualized as just infrastructure ramp up, but that's not the reality of this. (also why is China, the worlds second largest economy, always bundled in with developing nations?)
> That is for western countries to pay a retrospective “sin” tax that gets distributed to other countries to fund climate action programs with better oversight
This line of thought is doomed for failure, geopolitical "oversight" doesn't mean anything, that money won't go to productive climate action programs, no matter how much people want them too. In my mind the only pragmatic way the west can influence developing nations CO2 output is by subsidizing clean energy technologies to be more competitive in an international market, or at least something to that effect.
There is one scenario, which isn’t probable. That is for western countries to pay a retrospective “sin” tax that gets distributed to other countries to fund climate action programs with better oversight. After all, if some countries benefited a lot from polluting in the past, it would be fair to expect them to pay up too.