@lightweight I too would like to see people get rid of selfish practices like heating their homes and feeding their families. I look forward to celebrating the demise of those selfish horrible industries.
@lightweight I don't think I've misinterpreted you. Judging from the policies that make it incredibly difficult for families to heat their homes that are being implemented right now in my home country, I think I hit the nail on the head.
Poor people are very inconvenient. They should just get their butlers to pay the bills like the ruling Elite do.
Poor people are very inconvenient. They should just get their butlers to pay the bills like the ruling Elite do.
@lightweight Probably in some ways, but not others.
We're in agreement that the government when it acts generally seems to help their buddies, and I'd argue even when they're pretending to help the little guy they're only doing it to help their buddies.
I think we can agree that reducing reliance on fossil fuels is a good thing for myriad reasons. Relying on non-renewable resources that are consumed and cannot be recycled or reused is a bad long-term strategy in general.
On the topic of the environmental industrial complex, here's the context that makes me question anything done in the name of "combating climate change".
Where I live the first thing they did was specifically lobby against hydroelectricity. Thing is, hydroelectricity has an environmental impact (as does all electrical power generation at scale), but it's 100% practical to generate enough electricity that has no marginal carbon cost (there's a big up-front cost when you create a floodplain(though you don't necessarily need to create a floodplain to have hydro power) and the carbon cost of making the cement, but for each unit of power water just has to flow) and even export that power to jurisdictions that would otherwise rely on fossil fuels.
Jurisdictions powered largely by hydroelectricity tend to have low power rates such that people don't bother with fossil fuels for heating their homes. It means that large industrial users of energy have an option to use carbon neutral power. You can even use that power in a virtuous cycle to convert carbon heavy industries to carbon neutral energy sources.
But lobbyists specifically took actions to make hydroelectricity less practical. In one case, they specifically went out to find good areas to set up hydro dams and fought to make them protected regions so nothing could be constructed there.
The government backed solar and wind. They forced the electric company to massively subsidize new installations including paying 10 times the normal wholesale rate for electricity. This hasn't resulted in massive green energy reserves -- Solar produces less than 1% of total energy -- but it did quadruple electricity costs. Keep in mind, the electricity mix was largely carbon neutral before this campaign, it just added a small amount of solar and wind at a massive cost to the ratepayers.
Quadrupling electricity costs meant that households that were economical to run suddenly weren't. One guy I knew was paying $700/mo to heat his home. My little sister right now has a $500/mo electricity bill, she works at a grocery store.
One way you can make that bill go away? Switch to fossil fuels. the guy who was paying $700/mo switched to propane and his bill went down to $150/mo.
Then the government introduced a carbon tax, because when you force everyone to use fossil fuels instead of carbon neutral electricity, why not tax the decision you forced upon them?
There's other stuff that resulted from the insanity. For example, the fossil fuel generator industry has boomed in the past decade, because for commercial and industrial customers there's a different charge that charges up to over double on their power bill if they're using power at the wrong time. The cost difference was so high that many commercial and industrial plants switch from carbon neutral power during those times to local small-scale fossil fuel generators! It makes the electric company look great because it takes the fossil fuel power generation off of the electric company's books and puts it onto individual customers books.
Meanwhile, two surrounding regions are fully powered by hydroelectricity and have been for longer than most people have been alive, and have electricity rates lower than most of the world, and they export carbon neutral energy to surrounding jurisdictions. They don't have individual hydro customers shutting off their main breakers and turning on diesel generators, because that's insane!
Anyway, tl;dr, I don't trust the government to do the right thing that will help people live better lives with a smaller environmental impact. They're bought and paid for by the highest bidder, and nobody is lobbying for inexpensive low maintenance low drama electric power for generations of people, and lots of people are lobbying for sleek sexy "not quite there yet but we just need a small investment from our friends in government" future tech.
We're in agreement that the government when it acts generally seems to help their buddies, and I'd argue even when they're pretending to help the little guy they're only doing it to help their buddies.
I think we can agree that reducing reliance on fossil fuels is a good thing for myriad reasons. Relying on non-renewable resources that are consumed and cannot be recycled or reused is a bad long-term strategy in general.
On the topic of the environmental industrial complex, here's the context that makes me question anything done in the name of "combating climate change".
Where I live the first thing they did was specifically lobby against hydroelectricity. Thing is, hydroelectricity has an environmental impact (as does all electrical power generation at scale), but it's 100% practical to generate enough electricity that has no marginal carbon cost (there's a big up-front cost when you create a floodplain(though you don't necessarily need to create a floodplain to have hydro power) and the carbon cost of making the cement, but for each unit of power water just has to flow) and even export that power to jurisdictions that would otherwise rely on fossil fuels.
Jurisdictions powered largely by hydroelectricity tend to have low power rates such that people don't bother with fossil fuels for heating their homes. It means that large industrial users of energy have an option to use carbon neutral power. You can even use that power in a virtuous cycle to convert carbon heavy industries to carbon neutral energy sources.
But lobbyists specifically took actions to make hydroelectricity less practical. In one case, they specifically went out to find good areas to set up hydro dams and fought to make them protected regions so nothing could be constructed there.
The government backed solar and wind. They forced the electric company to massively subsidize new installations including paying 10 times the normal wholesale rate for electricity. This hasn't resulted in massive green energy reserves -- Solar produces less than 1% of total energy -- but it did quadruple electricity costs. Keep in mind, the electricity mix was largely carbon neutral before this campaign, it just added a small amount of solar and wind at a massive cost to the ratepayers.
Quadrupling electricity costs meant that households that were economical to run suddenly weren't. One guy I knew was paying $700/mo to heat his home. My little sister right now has a $500/mo electricity bill, she works at a grocery store.
One way you can make that bill go away? Switch to fossil fuels. the guy who was paying $700/mo switched to propane and his bill went down to $150/mo.
Then the government introduced a carbon tax, because when you force everyone to use fossil fuels instead of carbon neutral electricity, why not tax the decision you forced upon them?
There's other stuff that resulted from the insanity. For example, the fossil fuel generator industry has boomed in the past decade, because for commercial and industrial customers there's a different charge that charges up to over double on their power bill if they're using power at the wrong time. The cost difference was so high that many commercial and industrial plants switch from carbon neutral power during those times to local small-scale fossil fuel generators! It makes the electric company look great because it takes the fossil fuel power generation off of the electric company's books and puts it onto individual customers books.
Meanwhile, two surrounding regions are fully powered by hydroelectricity and have been for longer than most people have been alive, and have electricity rates lower than most of the world, and they export carbon neutral energy to surrounding jurisdictions. They don't have individual hydro customers shutting off their main breakers and turning on diesel generators, because that's insane!
Anyway, tl;dr, I don't trust the government to do the right thing that will help people live better lives with a smaller environmental impact. They're bought and paid for by the highest bidder, and nobody is lobbying for inexpensive low maintenance low drama electric power for generations of people, and lots of people are lobbying for sleek sexy "not quite there yet but we just need a small investment from our friends in government" future tech.
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@lightweight I don't fundamentally disagree, though one thing that is my biggest general policy gripe is if we're going to build public works, we need to use tax dollars and not government debt. Government debt, and in particular debt we don't intend to repay in our lifetimes, is effectively child slavery. We indenture our kids because we're unwilling to pay for what we want. If a parent did that to their child directly we would call that parent evil and selfish. Moreover, high debt burden turns into massive austerity when interest rates rise because all tax dollars go to interest payments. More on that later.
What you're talking about sounds good, and that's the problem. It sounds so good that lobbyists and politicians discovered in focus group testing that they can use the language to push for whatever policies they want, and they want policies you've described as bad.
The language being used that way to sell the opposite of what it says is painfully common. I've written about it at length with respect to several different aspects of policy, where you have to be really careful not to get sold a bill of goods. They'll say a policy is one thing when it's clearly the opposite.
The other side of the coin is when the policy is exactly what it says, but foolishly so. Think about Greta Thunberg saying we need to end all fossil fuel usage immediately. There are a lot of people who think she's right -- and that would cause a genocide. Billions would die.
Both pathologies of government rely on government as a blunt force instrument, and I think we're on the edge of that no longer being an option. Interest rates on debt instruments will need to rise fast due to inflation, and when that happens governments around the world will need to shrink or have massive debt defaults or more massive inflation than we've seen. None of the three will be conducive to using government as a blunt force instrument.
The future of governance is going to be less like a round of artillery and more like a sniper rifle shot. We're going to have to get used to thinking and calculating a lot more before we take a shot, and we won't be able to afford being frivolous.
What you're talking about sounds good, and that's the problem. It sounds so good that lobbyists and politicians discovered in focus group testing that they can use the language to push for whatever policies they want, and they want policies you've described as bad.
The language being used that way to sell the opposite of what it says is painfully common. I've written about it at length with respect to several different aspects of policy, where you have to be really careful not to get sold a bill of goods. They'll say a policy is one thing when it's clearly the opposite.
The other side of the coin is when the policy is exactly what it says, but foolishly so. Think about Greta Thunberg saying we need to end all fossil fuel usage immediately. There are a lot of people who think she's right -- and that would cause a genocide. Billions would die.
Both pathologies of government rely on government as a blunt force instrument, and I think we're on the edge of that no longer being an option. Interest rates on debt instruments will need to rise fast due to inflation, and when that happens governments around the world will need to shrink or have massive debt defaults or more massive inflation than we've seen. None of the three will be conducive to using government as a blunt force instrument.
The future of governance is going to be less like a round of artillery and more like a sniper rifle shot. We're going to have to get used to thinking and calculating a lot more before we take a shot, and we won't be able to afford being frivolous.
@lightweight And that statement brings us back to my original statement. You're acting like this is just evil and malice and foolishness, that's the only reason we've ever used fossil fuels.
Individuals, companies, and governments use fossil fuels because it's really difficult to provide for everyone without it. As an example, we require fossil fuels to feed the planet. We require fossil fuels to produce enough fertilizer, we require fossil fuels to cultivate the land, we require fossil fuels to process the crops, we require fossil fuels to get the food from the farm to the store to the table. We use a relatively small amount of fossil fuels for these purposes, but if we were to switch to renewables, we'd be using a significant portion of the renewables on the face of the earth for nothing else but this one thing that doesn't cover a fraction of what we need to have healthy lives.
There are small groups that go "Oh! We did it! We grew our own crops on a farm and it was all carbon neutral, and we bought carbon offsets to counter anything else we did!" and the problem goes back to something else I said before: All this stuff is ugly at industrial scales. You might be able to have some of the richest people on the planet become carbon neutral within their little zone, but you're going to need most people one earth to die for that to actually work.
Fossil Fuels came about because green energy wasn't going to work back in history when we had a much smaller population. The United Kingdom heated their homes with trees forever, and what happened was they deforested the entire island. Only kings had real forests left. In order to survive, they went from burning nice wood to horrible dirty burning coal. Nobody wanted to start burning coal but there wasn't a choice. Whales were nearly hunted to extinction for their whale oil, and it was a huge innovation refining crude oil into (among other things) kerosene so people didn't need to hunt whales. I'm sure they didn't really want to burn this strange chemical oil, but in the end they didn't have a choice because the natural processes that aggregated energy weren't fast enough to produce enough energy for a less modern life than we enjoy today.
Everything we might do to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels first requires fossil fuels, because we need energy and we can't produce it fast enough using most methods, and there's a lot of charlatans out there trying to get us to spend our limited resources on things that aren't going to help.
Besides the difficulty in solving the problems, there's the fact that many of the required solutions won't be popular with anyone. The left doesn't want to hear that you shouldn't be importing people from low carbon jurisdictions to high carbon jurisdictions, the right doesn't want to hear that we need to limit the number of kids we have because the population needs to shrink, neither wants to hear that we need to accept the economic harm of a shrinking population and resulting demographic shift, neither wants to accept that economic growth and quality of life can't improve forever, neither wants to accept that we will need to substantially curtail our quality of life, neither wants to say the way ahead won't be easy. Not because they're bad people, or lazy, or stupid, but because practically speaking you can't rule with a message like that. If you tried, you're going to eventually get overthrown by someone willing to say "We're going to make our lives better".
Individuals, companies, and governments use fossil fuels because it's really difficult to provide for everyone without it. As an example, we require fossil fuels to feed the planet. We require fossil fuels to produce enough fertilizer, we require fossil fuels to cultivate the land, we require fossil fuels to process the crops, we require fossil fuels to get the food from the farm to the store to the table. We use a relatively small amount of fossil fuels for these purposes, but if we were to switch to renewables, we'd be using a significant portion of the renewables on the face of the earth for nothing else but this one thing that doesn't cover a fraction of what we need to have healthy lives.
There are small groups that go "Oh! We did it! We grew our own crops on a farm and it was all carbon neutral, and we bought carbon offsets to counter anything else we did!" and the problem goes back to something else I said before: All this stuff is ugly at industrial scales. You might be able to have some of the richest people on the planet become carbon neutral within their little zone, but you're going to need most people one earth to die for that to actually work.
Fossil Fuels came about because green energy wasn't going to work back in history when we had a much smaller population. The United Kingdom heated their homes with trees forever, and what happened was they deforested the entire island. Only kings had real forests left. In order to survive, they went from burning nice wood to horrible dirty burning coal. Nobody wanted to start burning coal but there wasn't a choice. Whales were nearly hunted to extinction for their whale oil, and it was a huge innovation refining crude oil into (among other things) kerosene so people didn't need to hunt whales. I'm sure they didn't really want to burn this strange chemical oil, but in the end they didn't have a choice because the natural processes that aggregated energy weren't fast enough to produce enough energy for a less modern life than we enjoy today.
Everything we might do to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels first requires fossil fuels, because we need energy and we can't produce it fast enough using most methods, and there's a lot of charlatans out there trying to get us to spend our limited resources on things that aren't going to help.
Besides the difficulty in solving the problems, there's the fact that many of the required solutions won't be popular with anyone. The left doesn't want to hear that you shouldn't be importing people from low carbon jurisdictions to high carbon jurisdictions, the right doesn't want to hear that we need to limit the number of kids we have because the population needs to shrink, neither wants to hear that we need to accept the economic harm of a shrinking population and resulting demographic shift, neither wants to accept that economic growth and quality of life can't improve forever, neither wants to accept that we will need to substantially curtail our quality of life, neither wants to say the way ahead won't be easy. Not because they're bad people, or lazy, or stupid, but because practically speaking you can't rule with a message like that. If you tried, you're going to eventually get overthrown by someone willing to say "We're going to make our lives better".
@lightweight There are specific, achievable things that are like sniper shots rather than artillery batteries.
In Japan, there are 600cc cars and trucks that are incredibly fuel efficient. They exist in part because regulations on such vehicles are less than for fullsize vehicles. I think theres an argument to be made for re-thinking transportation. If we re-think personal city transportation, we reduce regulation on vehicles that barely look like cars. Something more like a motorized bike with a little protection from the elements. We can and do make such vehicles today with no new technologies. Instead of batteries made with rare metals that can't easily be recycled, we can use lead acid batteries that can be easily recycled and built new using materials already mined around the world, but nobody can use them. Make a legal white zone for these vehicles. Most people just need a warm vehicle to get to work in the morning, and if they could get to work in a light, small EV designed solely for use in the the city that doesn't make use of much material and doesn't need a special high current plug to charge, that's a large amount of energy for personal transportation off the list.
In places that are far poorer than western countries, there can often be great public transportation and there can be terrible public transportation in developed countries. I think part of the problem is liability and insurance. We need to reduce the regulatory burden of public transportation. In my country, the bus system between cities is gone. For the number of people who routinely rode the bus between cities there's absolutely no excuse for this. It should be incredibly profitable.
I've already discussed this, but we should be making it easier to build hydroelectric facilities. Make it so hydroelectric facilities can be built anywhere with some reasonable limitations with a greatly reduced regulatory burden. Some people argue the same with nuclear, but I don't know how the numbers pan out.
Cement is a major contributor to greenhouse gasses, so we should work to slake lime for cement in electric kilns powered by hydroelectricity to reduce that footprint. There'll still be CO2 created, but it'll be much better than burning massive amounts of oil or gas. Reduce the regulatory and tax burden on cement producers using such technology.
Homes need to be reconceptualized. Governments should work with top engineers to come up with a blueprint for a revolutionary green home(This need not be a massive program, a few million a year for a few years could likely do it). In my view, we'd need to spend much less energy heating our homes if they were mostly underground instead of mostly aboveground, and very heavily insulated very minimal aboveground footprint. It'll be warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer because of the latent temperature of the earth. Let engineers brainstorm for a bit and you can come up with a lot of ideas like that which reduce energy use and waste. Fit that blueprint specifically into regulatory frameworks such that it's easier to build low energy homes than high energy homes.
Right to repair needs to go from being a nice to have to a top priority. Lots of stuff is thrown out constantly because it's not possible to repair by design. People throw out things like cell phones which aren't obsolete because the battery is dead or the charging port is damaged or the glass on the screen is damaged and these are all things that can be designed to be serviceable and parts provided to make them serviceable.
We need to have a team sit down and reconsider how we handle waste. In particular, we need to look at how we handle stuff like cardboard or paper (it might be the best option to put cellulose in the landfill, for example). We should be looking at how to make recycled materials more available to the local community. I recently reached out to my local recycling center to reuse a certain material replacing slag in cement with ground glass, and it was like pulling teeth. Recycling needs to make it easier for local people who want the materials to get the materials. Since the recycling programs are already mandated by the government, it should be additionally mandated that they make materials available to local businesses and individuals who ask for them. There is a huge opportunity in waste that's being lost today
Electronics recycling also needs to be expanded. Business throw away perfectly good equipment every day when there's people who would buy or take that equipment and give it a new home immediately. Mandate that businesses getting rid of non-proprietary electronics must have a plan to wipe the equipment of any proprietary data and provide them to a local recycler who in turn is mandated to find a home for the equipment in the local community.
Expand shop classes with an aim of self-sufficiency. Basic home repairs for example should be something a typical high school student is exposed to early.
Food waste needs to be addressed. Commerce and industry in particular throw out all kinds of good food, that should be unacceptable. Food that is unsold but still good should be given to shelters or a "food recycler" that can sterilize and repackage waste food. The way to make this happen is a penalty on throwing out good food for commerce and industry, and a reduction of liability for food recycling.
There needs to be a "Green Economic Zone" established where nations with sustainable practices and acceptable human rights records can trade freely, and outside of which there are high import taxes. Presently, we just outsource our pollution and fossil fuel use to less developed countries which is morally wrong twice. Any further actions to reduce carbon footprints without a means to force industry to stay in the countries that have those reduced carbon footprints will just mean we burn more coal in China but it's not in my back yard so who cares?
End easy money policies at central banks. A lot of waste is caused by investments in things that aren't profitable and ensuing bubbles. If people have to put their own hard-earned cash down and they have to produce value for someone else to earn a profit, I expect a more efficient world because people will be working to build efficient businesses. We are wasting untold resources on legalized gambling.
Governments should let bad times occur. In 2008 and 2020, the federal governments around the world made sure that nobody got hurt for the bad things that were done. Massive amounts of waste occurred as a result of both these things, and instead of people hurting because a bunch of resources got wasted on bad investments, people are getting rich and buying more junk than ever before!
Might be a stretch, but abolish the limited liability corporation. Keep businesses, but the buck stops somewhere. A human person should ultimately be responsible for what a company does, and it should be the owner. I expect that doing this will cause companies to shrink to a level where the owner who is taking all the risk can oversee what's going on. Public companies will probably not be a thing in this case because each shareholder will be on the hook for the company, but the end of the global megacorp and all the commensurate waste will be worth it.
Stop "we need to grow the economy by having more people" immigration policies. Green immigration policies would consider the carbon footprint of migration since many migrants move from low carbon use jurisdictions to high carbon use jurisdictions.
Reform welfare and social policies that result in kids being born. When some people on welfare have more kids solely for the pay increase, that's a massive environmental impact that's a complete waste. When policies are laid out in such a way that it makes sense for men to have kids out of stable relationships and women to have kids out of stable relationships, that results in a huge environmental impact.
End special tax treatment for parents. You tax what you want less of and subsidize what you want more of, and the numbers are clear we need fewer people to find a sustainable way of living.
Incentivize families who take in their elders. This is one way to mitigate the demographic bomb.
Stop a lot of subsidies. Fossil fuels are one, but even farming -- If you are only able to farm because the government pays you to, maybe a more efficient farm should be there instead?
Broadly legalize and encourage small scale agriculture on residential properties. Neither city council nor your HOA should be allowed to stop you.
Research councils should be established with a broad mandate to figure out what is helpful and what isn't. If any of the above is causing waste instead of preventing it, it should be replaced with policies that help. It should act as a sort of environmental auditor general.
More local government, less federal government. Notwithstanding the big strategic things I'm talking about, in general the local government knows more about the local region and cares more about the local region than a federal government who for the most part will never have to step foot in the locations they're ruling. Maybe one representative will be there, but most won't. Therefore, most rules should be set locally instead of by a central authority.
I think this is a good start. None of these things would cost a billion dollars, some would make money, but they'd all nudge the world towards better practices that would have a long term virtuous cycle effect.
In Japan, there are 600cc cars and trucks that are incredibly fuel efficient. They exist in part because regulations on such vehicles are less than for fullsize vehicles. I think theres an argument to be made for re-thinking transportation. If we re-think personal city transportation, we reduce regulation on vehicles that barely look like cars. Something more like a motorized bike with a little protection from the elements. We can and do make such vehicles today with no new technologies. Instead of batteries made with rare metals that can't easily be recycled, we can use lead acid batteries that can be easily recycled and built new using materials already mined around the world, but nobody can use them. Make a legal white zone for these vehicles. Most people just need a warm vehicle to get to work in the morning, and if they could get to work in a light, small EV designed solely for use in the the city that doesn't make use of much material and doesn't need a special high current plug to charge, that's a large amount of energy for personal transportation off the list.
In places that are far poorer than western countries, there can often be great public transportation and there can be terrible public transportation in developed countries. I think part of the problem is liability and insurance. We need to reduce the regulatory burden of public transportation. In my country, the bus system between cities is gone. For the number of people who routinely rode the bus between cities there's absolutely no excuse for this. It should be incredibly profitable.
I've already discussed this, but we should be making it easier to build hydroelectric facilities. Make it so hydroelectric facilities can be built anywhere with some reasonable limitations with a greatly reduced regulatory burden. Some people argue the same with nuclear, but I don't know how the numbers pan out.
Cement is a major contributor to greenhouse gasses, so we should work to slake lime for cement in electric kilns powered by hydroelectricity to reduce that footprint. There'll still be CO2 created, but it'll be much better than burning massive amounts of oil or gas. Reduce the regulatory and tax burden on cement producers using such technology.
Homes need to be reconceptualized. Governments should work with top engineers to come up with a blueprint for a revolutionary green home(This need not be a massive program, a few million a year for a few years could likely do it). In my view, we'd need to spend much less energy heating our homes if they were mostly underground instead of mostly aboveground, and very heavily insulated very minimal aboveground footprint. It'll be warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer because of the latent temperature of the earth. Let engineers brainstorm for a bit and you can come up with a lot of ideas like that which reduce energy use and waste. Fit that blueprint specifically into regulatory frameworks such that it's easier to build low energy homes than high energy homes.
Right to repair needs to go from being a nice to have to a top priority. Lots of stuff is thrown out constantly because it's not possible to repair by design. People throw out things like cell phones which aren't obsolete because the battery is dead or the charging port is damaged or the glass on the screen is damaged and these are all things that can be designed to be serviceable and parts provided to make them serviceable.
We need to have a team sit down and reconsider how we handle waste. In particular, we need to look at how we handle stuff like cardboard or paper (it might be the best option to put cellulose in the landfill, for example). We should be looking at how to make recycled materials more available to the local community. I recently reached out to my local recycling center to reuse a certain material replacing slag in cement with ground glass, and it was like pulling teeth. Recycling needs to make it easier for local people who want the materials to get the materials. Since the recycling programs are already mandated by the government, it should be additionally mandated that they make materials available to local businesses and individuals who ask for them. There is a huge opportunity in waste that's being lost today
Electronics recycling also needs to be expanded. Business throw away perfectly good equipment every day when there's people who would buy or take that equipment and give it a new home immediately. Mandate that businesses getting rid of non-proprietary electronics must have a plan to wipe the equipment of any proprietary data and provide them to a local recycler who in turn is mandated to find a home for the equipment in the local community.
Expand shop classes with an aim of self-sufficiency. Basic home repairs for example should be something a typical high school student is exposed to early.
Food waste needs to be addressed. Commerce and industry in particular throw out all kinds of good food, that should be unacceptable. Food that is unsold but still good should be given to shelters or a "food recycler" that can sterilize and repackage waste food. The way to make this happen is a penalty on throwing out good food for commerce and industry, and a reduction of liability for food recycling.
There needs to be a "Green Economic Zone" established where nations with sustainable practices and acceptable human rights records can trade freely, and outside of which there are high import taxes. Presently, we just outsource our pollution and fossil fuel use to less developed countries which is morally wrong twice. Any further actions to reduce carbon footprints without a means to force industry to stay in the countries that have those reduced carbon footprints will just mean we burn more coal in China but it's not in my back yard so who cares?
End easy money policies at central banks. A lot of waste is caused by investments in things that aren't profitable and ensuing bubbles. If people have to put their own hard-earned cash down and they have to produce value for someone else to earn a profit, I expect a more efficient world because people will be working to build efficient businesses. We are wasting untold resources on legalized gambling.
Governments should let bad times occur. In 2008 and 2020, the federal governments around the world made sure that nobody got hurt for the bad things that were done. Massive amounts of waste occurred as a result of both these things, and instead of people hurting because a bunch of resources got wasted on bad investments, people are getting rich and buying more junk than ever before!
Might be a stretch, but abolish the limited liability corporation. Keep businesses, but the buck stops somewhere. A human person should ultimately be responsible for what a company does, and it should be the owner. I expect that doing this will cause companies to shrink to a level where the owner who is taking all the risk can oversee what's going on. Public companies will probably not be a thing in this case because each shareholder will be on the hook for the company, but the end of the global megacorp and all the commensurate waste will be worth it.
Stop "we need to grow the economy by having more people" immigration policies. Green immigration policies would consider the carbon footprint of migration since many migrants move from low carbon use jurisdictions to high carbon use jurisdictions.
Reform welfare and social policies that result in kids being born. When some people on welfare have more kids solely for the pay increase, that's a massive environmental impact that's a complete waste. When policies are laid out in such a way that it makes sense for men to have kids out of stable relationships and women to have kids out of stable relationships, that results in a huge environmental impact.
End special tax treatment for parents. You tax what you want less of and subsidize what you want more of, and the numbers are clear we need fewer people to find a sustainable way of living.
Incentivize families who take in their elders. This is one way to mitigate the demographic bomb.
Stop a lot of subsidies. Fossil fuels are one, but even farming -- If you are only able to farm because the government pays you to, maybe a more efficient farm should be there instead?
Broadly legalize and encourage small scale agriculture on residential properties. Neither city council nor your HOA should be allowed to stop you.
Research councils should be established with a broad mandate to figure out what is helpful and what isn't. If any of the above is causing waste instead of preventing it, it should be replaced with policies that help. It should act as a sort of environmental auditor general.
More local government, less federal government. Notwithstanding the big strategic things I'm talking about, in general the local government knows more about the local region and cares more about the local region than a federal government who for the most part will never have to step foot in the locations they're ruling. Maybe one representative will be there, but most won't. Therefore, most rules should be set locally instead of by a central authority.
I think this is a good start. None of these things would cost a billion dollars, some would make money, but they'd all nudge the world towards better practices that would have a long term virtuous cycle effect.