Taxes, quotas and tiered pricing can clearly help to ease humanity’s pressure on Earth’s sources and sinks, but here’s the trouble with believing that they will do the whole job. In practice they fall short because they are rarely set to the level required: corporations lobby hard to delay their introduction, to lower the tax rate, to increase the quota and to get permits given for free, not auctioned. Governments, in return, too often concede, fearing that their nation will lose competitiveness—and that their political parties will lose corporate backing. These policies fall short in theory
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