this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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People create the demand, but it is up to the manufacturers to decide how the product is manufactured.
They are the ones that decide to increase pollution by 10% in order to save a couple of cents per product.
The free market is never going to address Climate Change. We need to force corporations to see pollution as a bad thing. By heavily taxing any sort of pollution created.
This would inevitably make things more expensive. But rather a bad economy than humanity going extinct. Since there is no point to an economy if there aren't any humans to enjoy it.
I'll just start by saying we're in agreement on this. The market doesn't price in externalities. But to your first point, it's literally the market (i.e. people) deciding they aren't willing to pay 10% more for manufacturing that costs more but reduces pollution.
If there are two competitors in a market, company A and company B:
Company A produces a product using the cheapest legal manufacturing that pollutes more, and company B does the same thing but cleans up their act for a 10% increase in cost, company B's market share will shrink, and they will eventually fail or be absorbed by a wildly successful company A. This is people voting with their wallets, and the companies are behaving rationally. We're essentially vilifing companies for responding to consumer behavior in aggregate. Obviously this is addressed through legislation and regulation which creates a level playing field for all competitors with environmental regulations everyone adheres to equally.