Global warming - an urgent problem requiring radical solution (no politics or religion)

In most cases, what satisfies their shareholders will satisfy the customer, but there are exceptions. Environment is one of them, and Milton Friedman admitted as much.

Their consumers wouldn't be happy either.

These are organisations we’re talking about. You cannot sentence an organisation to five years of prison. What you’re talking about isn’t incentivising, it’s simply making it impossible to do business otherwise. More like prosecution aimed at making them not fulfil the criteria.

But there’s a problem. A big company that has escaped the fines because they met the targets, as has a smaller one. The big company has done more for the environment has a higher net positive than the smaller one. The smaller one just barely met the targets, and after they were met, stopped trying to increase their ‘score’. Under the method described, they would both be treated the same.

The way to fix this is by providing incentives to do more. I am an advocate for using both the carrot and the stick.

In this case keeping the consumer healthy and alive trumps happiness as well as profitability.

Regulation won't be enough. Isn't. Gets undermined anyway and in multiple ways.
When recent huge hurricanes hit the southeastern states hard the goverment had to put out a lot of disaster relief money.
In other words - 'subsidy' of manmade climate change.
Manmade climate change is 'losing money'.
For now - renewable energy sources are only 'taking up some of the slack' in the increasing world demand for electricity. Which doubled this century.
Coalburning for electricity had less share - but increased anyway.
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And it plus natural gas burning still stand at 60% of electricity production.
And more than 60% of the extra industrial CO2 dumped into the atmosphere every year.
Point: the carbon problem is like a big solid wall of steel -
and some of the measures are putting scratches and dents in it.
But to stop things from progressing to worse and worse -
that wall needs to get blasted. Ruptured. Blown open. 
Torn down - sooner better than later.
And without doing a lot more about that coalburning and natural gas burning and in multiple ways - then its scractches and dents.

For the first part: I actually was going to write in parentheses that it would be hard to put people in prison over this, because would you put the CEO, the chairman of the board, or the blue collar worker in prison?

The second part: Everyone should be expected to meet a criterion, and it should be the same for everybody, because it'd be too hard to set different expectations as companies grow larger.

Got to develop alternatives to that coal burning and natural gas burning.
Coalburning went out for powering ships. And for trains. Became extinct for those.
And for a lot of home heating.
But big big problem for the world that it did not 'go out' regarding electric power generation.
Instead of becoming extinct - its gotten much worse.
Coal burning and natural gas burning accounting for over half of the excess industrial CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere every year.

I agree with the second paragraph. But eliminating incentives for doing better and only prosecuting those that don’t meet the targets seems quite iffy to me. It’s using just the stick. Eventually, people are going to realise being first is no different from being last, as long as you meet the targets.

Its less than 'iffy'. That stick gets broken.

It's fossil fuels that are still used to generate 60% of electricity. Coal has fallen to 35% in 2024. Still a long way to go, but the growth is largely in the renewables now, with solar leading the charge.

There is no carrot to offer to industries producing fossil fuels. They will not voluntarily switch to making solar panels.

That’s a job for the stick. Although here it must do damage control instead of forcing change through.

If it's more efficient they will, and if it's not we shouldn't curb their freedoms. But Elroch is right that these technologies are getting more efficient with innovation and competition. It is my hope that in the near future green solutions will be cheaper and more efficient than fossil fuels.

See, these companies have gotten a ‘home turf’, and it is extremely unlikely that they will just pack up and move. Yes, some may own green companies, but tobacco companies once offered to fund lung cancer research to boost their public image and reduce the ability of their opponents to harm it.

You're right.
In China its 60%. And in India its higher.
Unfortunately - natural gas filling in the rest of the 60% for worldwide - doesn't fix it.
Natural gas burns 'cleaner' but still puts out that CO2 when burned.
So I'll have to say - 'coal and natural gas' from now on.
Oilburning for electric only at about 3% apparently.
Will edit a bit to correct previous posts to 'coal and natural gas burning'.

They already are.

Oil and coal producers can look into the future and see endless profits until exploration finds it's limit.

There is no equivalent large scale profit in production and maintenance of solar panels or wind turbines. Fuel is the key to their future and clean energy requires none.

That is incorrect. A solar panel or a wind turbine is basically like a power station that includes all the fuel it will consume (because that is an effectively free resource). So the value to producers is concentrated in the hardware rather than split between the hardware and the fuel.

The size of the market for the hardware is a sizeable percentage of the size of the electricity market, which I anticipate continuing to grow faster than the economy.

One suggestion I've read that I liked is releasing extremely fine chalk dust into the atmosphere to block out solar radiation. One approach would be to modify passenger airplanes to release it at 30,000 to 40,000 feet while they fly their scheduled flights. It would add a little weight and maybe take some cargo capacity, but it disperses the dust into the atmosphere without expending additional fuel. These planes were going to fly anyway, so it's efficient to use them as part of the geo-engineering effort.

According to Google chalk dust particles 5 microns or less can stay suspended in the air for up to 33 days. Releasing it 40,000 feet up would create clouds of dust that hover up in the air for long periods of time. If all passenger jets start releasing clouds of it at cruising altitude, the cumulative effect over time will likely occlude the Sun like a volcanic eruption would and would decrease temperatures across the globe. At least, that's the plan.

Chalk is nontoxic and doesn't have much of an impact on plants. In fact a little chalk in the soil can help plants grow. So it's unlikely to have much impact on the environment beyond the cooling effect.

I think we should try it. I don't think it's going to freeze the planet like in the movie Snowpiercer. If temperatures drop too fast we just stop releasing chalk dust and things go back to normal.

Sounds like a heck of a lot of chalk.

It's worth remembering that such measures reduce temperatures but also reduce the amount of sunlight for plants, photovoltaics, and likely reduce the wind resource too (solar energy is the main driver of wind). The thing is that climate change involves increasing temperatures while solar input stays the same.

Far better to let the sun come through and capture enough of that energy to not emit CO2 any more.

I am not sure what Bill Gates has against wind and solar. I feel he is a bit behind the times.