Right when economies ought to be investing in ways that societies can adapt to and mitigate effects of “climate change” the green-industrial-empires are getting nations to raise their costs for energy, by trillions, just for chasing CO2, and diluting the capital that would be better spent elsewhere.
Because no matter how “green” Germany gets, or California or anywhere in the western world, it will not change the fact that the total accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere will continue to increase just on the contributions of China, India and the less developed world. And worse. Even if they could take the most dramatic CO2 related changes now, it would be 100 to 200 years before the atmospheric level of CO2 would peak and possibly afterward gradually, very gradually reverse.
But if instead societies started investing now in the means of adapting to and mitigating effects of “climate change”, instead of chasing CO2 by making all energy more expensive, then no matter what happens societies would be better prepared to deal with whatever changes come.
Full disclosure: I am not an alarmist on “climate change”. However using the very same “science” of the alarmists, it is clear their “solutions” deny critical elements of that science and they ignore those “solutions” will eat up money chasing CO2 and leave everyone unprepared for their own predictions because their chase of CO2 will not stop what they predict - based on their own “science”.
1) Spending money is identical to consuming energy and generating pollution. Using current and foreseeable technology, it is not possible for government to spend the money collected from a carbon tax without emitting even more carbon than before, and having less GDP to show for it.
2) Energy is the root cost of all economic activity. If energy is made more expensive, that ripples down to everything else. If energy costs 50% more, the third law of thermodynamics requires that quality of life decline 50%.
3) Earth does not have a CO2 problem, but a growing waste heat problem. The real problem to solve is how to cheaply radiate unwanted heat off Earth, and we'll need to know how to do that before we switch to nuclear alternatives. Solve that and we can manage the climate the same as we do inside buildings. Destructive hurricanes will cease to exist.