this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Generally speaking, pollution etc. is what economists call "external cost". It should be penalized in some way, and the usual tool is taxation. It's not just AI and Crypto that should pay for non-green energy, but everyone. It's massively simpler that way too, and massively simpler = harder to circumvent and manipulate.
Simplicity's bad side in this is that it's difficult to slap a "correct price" on pollution. I.e. difficult to calculate how much actual damage they're causing.
In actual world, thanks to rampant corporatism and other forms of fuckery, what we're actually doing is subsidizing these fuels, which is of course completely ass-backwards. Just removing the subsidies would already help a lot, but actually penalizing those energy forms even just a little would be huge.