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At what cost to others?

The climate morality debate is complicated because it's all statistical. "Drown Bangladesh and Florida" is obviously a wrong outcome, but there's no one individual wrong action that leads there. You could come up with an approximation like "each gallon of jet fuel consumed raises the sea level by one femtometre"; each action is individually trivial, but combined they are not trivial.



The statistical part is the easy part. You can handle the femtometres by estimating how much it'll cost to mitigate the damage, and taxing jet fuel per gallon in proportion (among with other COâ‚‚ emitters). Put tax money to mitigation, and you'll even get a negative feedback loop that'll settle something reasonable.

No, the hard part is that we just can't do the obvious, because there is no one global government that could mandate it. Instead, everyone at every level - individual, corporate, governmental - is better off short-term by not doing any climate mitigation, because those who do will lose business to those who don't.


> At what cost to others? ...

I think nobody disagrees. Your entire comment is rhetoric handcuffing. Nobody proposed to let "Bangladesh and Florida drown".

We are discussing ways to avoid current path of climate change which can involve other means than reducing mobility.

Unfortunately a lot of people are set on an extremely narrow path, which is a moral issue. How are you going to explain to third world countries that you do not think they have the right to prosper like the US did?

In the end, it is morally wrong to be single minded on the solution to the issues. We need to consider other means. Let the means compete and pick the best way.




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