We're basically discussing incentives at this point. Carrot, stick, subsidy, penalty, it's all incentives. Incentives and externalization. Milton Friedman argued that if people actually gave a shit about the environment then environmental laws would be a lot harder to circumvent; they aren't, ergo decent capitalists owe their shareholders their absolute best efforts to extract as much value from the environment as possible, future generations be damned.

The problem is when your law and your incentive don't line up. Sure - you can make it illegal to use water destined for Texas to irrigate your patch of beans (I think it was green beans, as opposed to pintos, for my grampa) but if you can make a feel-good movie about how awesome it is to steal water rights from unscrupulous land developers, you're not going to get much in the way of enforcement. And when the interior of Brazil thinks that Bolonsaro is giving the double fingers to American globalists by encouraging Brazilian cattle-ranching, Brazilian cattle-ranching will continue.

This, I think, is why the Green New Deal is a step in the right direction: Chinese solar panels dominate the market because the Chinese subsidized the ever-living fuck out of solar panel development and sales. America didn't because Coal and Oil. Our modern farm subsidy landscape belongs to Pearl Harbor and the Cold War, neither of which are relevant, and reorganizing our subsidy structure would go a long way towards improving the world. Reorganizing the world's subsidy structure would go a long way towards improving the world.

All we need is the right carrots and sticks.