this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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How are we supposed to do that though? We're talking about BP partnering with the Iraqi government to extract their oil reserves, which then hit the global market. I realize BP brings technology to the deal but it's not exactly rocket science. I'd love to see moratoriums around the world, but that's going to be a bunch of individual countries/jurisdictions making those decisions. Companies are legally required to maximize profit and that means maximizing extraction. Killing the capitalism and making BP a workers co-op probably gets us the same decision, based on the reticence of any workforce to abandon their livelihood.
Here in the US we're at record oil/gas production but half the country thinks we're killing the entire industry. Like I wish we were actually doing that, but instead we just have the IRA (which is great all things considered) but it's mostly industrial policy focused on mostly the right industries for once.
You could, for example, cap total importation & extraction at a national or regional level, and lower that cap each year.
I'm just having trouble imagining the sort of global cooperation required for something like this. It seems significantly more difficult than a carbon tax, which is practically impossible already.
Cap systems like this are about equivalent to carbon taxes in terms of difficulty in cooperating around, but give certainty about total emissions instead of about future prices. They're mostly not implemented because they make it clear that you need to actually decarbonize.