Decent compromise to what? The group who want to pollute the world because it's cheaper? Doesn't sound like a compromise many of us would want.

that is simply untrue. China, for as bad as it has historically been in terms of environment, it has invested waaaay more than anybody else in clean energy [1]. It's a game we are all in together and things are moving forward, albeit too slowly.

[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-invest...

You might be interested to learn that both of those statements are very wrong.

So? Countries outside of EU don't always care for human rights or other things we find important.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't still aim for the values we stand for.

Global warming is ultimately a global problem. It doesn't matter if you reduce your CO2 emissions if others aren't following.

That is good, because it is a lie that others are not following. People love to point to China for their emissions, completely avoiding that China, as the workbench of the world, essentially is burdened with the emissions of the world.

Developing nations skip the fossil fuel stage entirely because Solar in particular and at a ceratain point wind is just cheaper than buying Oil and natural gas. Chinese EVs are also increasingly popular in emerging markets, not because they are more environmentally friendly, but because they are more cost effective to operate.

Wether or not it is because of environmental concerns or not, the world is moving towards cleaner technology, specifically it is also more efficient.

Considering that we in Europe have a remarkable absence of easily accessible fossil fuels, Europe should be continuing to push towards renewable technologies

It does matter to follow through with your values though. Humanity isn't supposed to be just minmaxing economical output, a common set of values that we strive for is much more inspiring than burning everything to the ground, and leaving a world of ashes for future generations to capture maximum economical output right now.

I don't think it's a hard mindset to understand, giving up because others aren't taking it as seriously is the cowardly way to go about it. It's much more meaningful to show it can be done, help to scale technologies to become cheaper and more accessible for poorer countries, and inspire others with examples that it can be done so action can spread.

You are right, it is a global coordination problem. There are two moves: Cooperate (i.e. reduce your CO2 emissions) or Defect (burn baby, burn).

Obviously there are many global actors but we can model it simply as a two-player game: Europe and the-Rest-of-the-World.

Its economic payoff matrix looks something like (oversimplified and with direction only; scale appropriately):

  v Europe/RoW -->    Cooperate     Defect  
  |-----------------------------------------|
  |    Cooperate   |    (0,0)    |  (-1,0)  |
  |----------------+-------------+----------|
  |      Defect    |    (0,-1)   |  (-1,-1) |
  |-----------------------------------------|

If Europe cooperates and the RoW cooperates, nobody gains a relative economic advantage and our world doesn't burn.

If Europe cooperates and the RoW defects, Europe loses relative economic advantage and our world still burns.

If Europe defects and RoW cooperates, Europe gains relative economic advantage and our world (maybe) still burns.

If Europe defects and RoW defects, nobody gains an economic advantage and our world burns to a RCP8.5 crisp.

Obviously the preferred siutation is everybody cooperating so our world doesn't burn and nobody gains or loses an economic advantage. But the Schelling point is everybody defecting and burning our world to a crisp.

Everyone ought to push for global cooperation; we've all gotta live here and it'd be nice not to burn our only planet. But if Europe cooperates while the rest of the world defects (i.e. the current situation today), you're an idiot.

Indeed, but if everyone starts thinking "No one else is lowering their emissions so why would I?", how are we supposed to ever make any sort of progress?

Someone doing something is always better than no one doing anything, can we at least agree on that?

But it is by no means obvious that carbon taxes are the right path. Targeted investments in low-emission energy sources might work better.

Fair point, I agree, that isn't obvious. What is obvious to both of us (I assume?) is that pollution has to be lower, not just in the EU, but across the world. But we (Europeans) can mostly just influence what happens inside of Europe, EU and our countries. Hence, we do what we can to reduce it, where taxing it is one approach.

With that said, more investments into other energy sources are totally welcome, and I don't think that should mean we also need to tax pollution less, we can have both :)

> But it is by no means obvious that carbon taxes are the right path.

When the government says that the market should do something, people complain about government interference. When the government lets the market do something, but sets the right incentives, people are complaining about it again.

Co2 taxation is effectively internalizing the cost of co2 pollution. The price goes up the more we pollute, because we have less budget until we cannot reach our goals anymore.