Make saving the planet profitable

"Making oil is more profitable than saving the planet ..."

...says the headline, accurately. There are many other activities that are more profitable than saving the planet: fomenting conflict, manufacturing, office work, mining...etc. We try to curb some of their most obvious environmentally destructive by-products with taxes and regulation, but we also support activities that destroy the environment - to the tune of $1.8 trillion, annually.

I don't know whether making oil will destroy the planet: there are many negative externalities that accompany oil production and consumption, but there are also many positive externalities. Thus, Alex Epstein writes:

There are many other positive externalities of fossil fuels that are almost never discussed—including ... clear benefits [arising from] warmer temperatures in many places where cold-related deaths far, far exceed heat-related deaths. To not consider these is pure benefit denial, regardless of whether you use a word like “externalities.” Fossil Future, Alex Epstein, 2022

Whether the benefits of oil production and consumption outweigh all its costs to society, to the environment and to the long-term future of the planet can never be calculated in a meaningful way. With such urgent, hugely important and complex issues, I suggest that we set in place a range of acceptable outcomes and reward people for achieving them. These outcomes could be expressed, to take those relevant to oil, in terms of atmospheric composition and human, animal and plant well-being. That means that we should target reductions in polluting gases (not only greenhouse gases) while maintaining acceptable levels of human welfare and indicators of environmental well-being.

Doing that would recognise that there are trade-offs; that rapidly reducing oil production and consumption could drastically reduce the quality of life for millions of people. That is one reason why there's been no discernible progress in actually cutting greenhouse gas emissions:

'Climate activism became a big public cause about halfway along this graph. Notice any effect?' From Riding the Climate Toboggan, John Michael Greer, 6 September

Targeting atmospheric composition and, simultaneously, indicators of planetary well-being would, I think, be less unpopular and more attainable than the current efforts supposedly aimed at reducing climate change. My suggestion is that we achieve our aims by issuing bonds that would be redeemed only when all our targets have been achieved and sustained for some decades. This we could do by applying the Social Policy Bond concept to our targets. We do need, though, some clarity about what we are trying to achieve: do we want to target the Earth's climate, or the impacts of adverse climatic events or  - to take the current focus - the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? At this late stage it's probably best to aim for more immediately verifiable goals, so I suggest that it might be preferable to target atmospheric composition rather than the stability of the climate, which has been the focus of my previous work. If such an application of the Social Policy Bond concept were ever implemented then we'd go some way to making saving the planet more profitable than activities that have, as a by-product, accelerating its destruction.

To be frank, I don't think anything like this will happen. Our political systems are incapable of solving global problems, even if our leaders had the will to do so. The Social Policy Bond concept has, to my knowledge, never been tried, and there are few incentives and commensurately few resources that are channelled into saving the planet. It's sad.