Hawkeye wrote: ↑Tue Jun 28, 2022 8:31 pm
If Europe's environmental regulations are going to save the planet, what does our carbon footprint matter?
You know that what you are saying here is ridiculous don't you? Europe's environmental regulations, if carried through as they should be, cannot possibly "save the planet" on their own, and nobody is saying that they can or will. They will however amount to a contribution to doing that appropriate to the geographical and economic size of the European Union. Also, as an added benefit, they will in the long-term be beneficial to the European economy, by supplying European consumers with cheap renewable energy.
The only way to "save the planet" is for each region of the world to do as much as it can do towards that end, in a way proportioned to the size of its economy and the living standards of its citizens, together with the consequent contribution to the world carbon footprint.
If for some reason the United States decides that it's going to stick with fossil fuels all the way, thank you very much, then in political terms there's nothing very much that anybody else can do about it, and given the size of the United States carbon footprint we are pretty well assured of a global climate disaster with temperature rises that will make major parts of the globe uninhabitable and destroy agriculture in many other regions, including the great plains of the US. The blow that will strike to the US economy will be so huge and irreversibly devastating that a few more years of cheap gasoline seen in retrospect are unlikely to be thought to be any compensation for what follows.
The "irreversible" bit is important: economists know a lot about economic disasters such as the dot-com crash and the great banking crisis that followed on the collapse of a few critical Wall Street firms. However, the problem with the way economists tend to view climate disaster, and the costs of avoiding it, is that economists know that all economic crises have turned out to be eventually capable of being recovered from. It is however almost certain that beyond a certain level of global heating runaway processes will be triggered (such as the release of carbon currently locked up in the frozen soil of Siberia) that will accelerate the heating process, in turn triggering other irreversible processes. And so on. From that there is no recovery. All the normal methods that economists use to estimate how much it is worth paying to avoid a certain kind of damage oh no longer applicable. What is worth paying is simply what it takes to avoid humanity going over the cliff.