That said, some specific rules may be required. James Hansen, the renowned climate scientist who deserves much of the credit for making global warming an issue in the first place, has argued forcefully that most of the climate-change problem comes down to just one thing, burning coal, and that whatever else we do, we have to shut down coal burning over the next couple decades. My economist’s reaction is that a stiff license fee would strongly discourage coal use anyway. But a market-based system might turn out to have loopholes — and their consequences could be dire. So I would advocate supplementing market-based disincentives with direct controls on coal burning.“

What this suggests, then, is that while pursuit of a carbon price is a worthwhile goal, it can’t be the end of the policy response. A carbon price, even one insufficiently small, would create some incentive to change behaviour and innovate. But what’s also needed is a set of technological leaps sufficient to quickly and drastically increase the elasticity of demand for carbon. And that militates in favour of large-scale investment in green infrastructure and a broad push to encourage research into alternatives to carbon-intense activities. These activities wouldn’t be cheap, but they’d be easier to bear than an immediate price of $200 per tonne of carbon. And politically, such measures should go down easier, given that they entail the doling out of government resources rather than the imposition of a tax on a negative externality.

Of course, there will be costs to moving away from a purely market-driven approach to climate policy. Non-Pigouvian taxes to fund the above measures will generate bigger economic distortions, and targeted government spending is likely to breed some inefficiencies and opportunities for rent-seeking. Politics being politics, it’s also possible that some counter-productive steps are taken—the example of ethanol subsidies looms large in these discussions. But for some expected cost and likelihood of tail climate impacts, these downsides become acceptable.”

Such policies would have to be carefully designed, however, so as not to have a harmful effect on children who, after all, didn’t choose to be born. As discussed before, cutting subsidies for child raising does risk harming innocent kids.

One option that could work is cutting pension benefits for people who have more than two children.

People who don’t exist have very low carbon footprints.

I know it currently falls very much into the ‘fantasy’ category, at least here in Canada, but it seems to me that population control could be a very effective, albeit longterm, part of the solution to climate change.

Hansen, James. Storms of My Grandchildren. p.2 (hardcover)

The term sounds much better than national socialism or totalitarian capitalism.