There is a counter solution to advocating for regulation. It's to create an economic system where people are naturally incentivized to do what's best. Vote with your wallet. You don't want energy that produced Co2? Don't buy it and advocate for others not to buy it.
Instead what people are doing is advocating for the government to come and point guns at people who don't do what they want -- even if they happen to be wrong. And when they are wrong, there are disastrous consequences as is currently extremely apparent in California. There are all kinds of perverse incentives which have resulted in the severe homelessness and extreme government waste.
The people advocating for this neither listen to the wisdom of Murphy's law, nor do they understand that when regulation impacts the market that regulation becomes what is bought and sold. Have you never heard of regulatory capture? That has worse human-cost impacts than leaving people to their own devices.
Vote with your wallet. Don't like the environmental cost of beef? Don't buy it. This works -- you can see it playing out.
"Vote with your wallet" depends on several micro-economic assumption holding true, that don't hold true here.
One of those is the assumption of perfect competition. Electricity is far, far from being a market with perfect competition. How many electricity providers are you able to choose from at your house? I'm going to guess 1.
Another assumption that doesn't hold here is the absence of externalities. The full cost of damage to the environment is not included in the price you pay for electricity, so people are going to over-consume it.
You rail against laws and regulations but even in the second sentence of your post you assume their necessity with the phrase "create an economic system..." Laws and regulations are how you create such systems.
Regulatory capture is a real thing, but it's not a good argument against all regulation. Maybe it's an argument for relatively less regulation than we'd have otherwise. It's also an argument for doing regulation better.
> Those regulations are going to create as much cost on humans as leaving it to people like yourself who care.
Humans optimise for short term gain, generally perceived gain over others, and rationalise this over large nebulous things like climate change, environmental health etc. They don't count externalities without being made to. And that's individuals. Companies are downright sociopathic and will happily defecate in their own back yard if they can make a dime out of it.
As a result we can already see what happens when people are left to choose themselves or the environment, they choose their own short term relative gain over the long term prospects of the whole species (before we even look at other species).
> Fixing the problem is up to you.
Yes, in a democracy it is, which is why I vote for political parties which will bring in regulations.
This idea doesn't apply at all for stupid speculative bubbles like proof-of-work crypocurrency.
As another good counterexample to your "market solutions for everything": I don't want rhinos driven to extinction, so I vote with my wallet by never buying powdered rhino horn or other poached products, and donating to environmental charities to protect them. However, it's very likely that rhinos will be extinct in the wild within our lifetime. Does this mean "the market" has decided to exterminate wild rhinos? Should we eliminate poaching regulations and remove red-tape to stop distorting the free-market price of rhino horn?
Instead what people are doing is advocating for the government to come and point guns at people who don't do what they want -- even if they happen to be wrong. And when they are wrong, there are disastrous consequences as is currently extremely apparent in California. There are all kinds of perverse incentives which have resulted in the severe homelessness and extreme government waste.
The people advocating for this neither listen to the wisdom of Murphy's law, nor do they understand that when regulation impacts the market that regulation becomes what is bought and sold. Have you never heard of regulatory capture? That has worse human-cost impacts than leaving people to their own devices.
Vote with your wallet. Don't like the environmental cost of beef? Don't buy it. This works -- you can see it playing out.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/BA65/production/...