A bunch of environmentalists are idiots. But that doesn’t mean there’s no sensible plan or that it’s all speculative. In economics carbon’s costs have a name: they impose an externality on others.

The standard remedy for an externality is a tax. So, to address climate change you would:

1. Institute a tax on carbon

2. Work through an international framework like the UN or WTO to have other countries also institute this tax, and to levy tariffs on any countries that don’t.

3. Since carbon is taxed, you can lower other, less efficient taxes such as the income tax, which is a drag on productivity.

4. You can also redistribute some of the money to compensate the poor for the effective tax increase. For instance this is how canada deals with its sales tax.

There are other coherent plans but that’s a big one. Had we implemented thus tax 50 years ago, the effects would have been:

* energy efficiency is encouraged in production as there is a higher cost

* other forms of energy such as nuclear and hydro gain an advantage

* There would have been more capital available for researching other alternatives such as solar

* The economy would have remained good due to the benefits of a sharply lower income tax

Environmentalists tend to be rather bad at math and not good at thinking through economics or evaluating tradeoffs. Because everyone else abandoned the field, they produced the most prominent (and wrong headed) solutions.

But with gradual economically sensible action 50 years ago, we could have been in for a very soft landing. We could have still used fossil fuels too! They were pretty necessary, but the system I outlined would have nudged us towards a different energy base.