On the big red sofa with a highly intelligent polyglottal friend after a smoking vegan roast supper, discussing the notion of pricing Carbon Dioxide emissions, with some mint tea.
She said “like, ‘the Polluter pays’ ?”
“Yes”, I said, “that ‘Polluter pays principle’; except it should be ‘the Polluter pays to clean up’, but it doesn’t work like that. Either the corporates mess up and the governments take the money and don’t clean up; or the corporates mess up, pay the money, then try to recoup the cost from their customers, and don’t clean up; or they get told to clean up, but they don’t do a proper job.”
“It’s always so much more expensive to clean up environmental messes than to prevent them happening in the first place. It’s a Law of Physics – Entropy.”