I no longer endorse this comment because, since then, I found out that there’s a lot of research on internalising climate change externalities—and that Weitzman (2012) and others present mitigation as akin to insurance. I still wonder how much of this line of reasoning could extrapolate to other GCR.
It turns out that I changed my mind again. I don’t see why we couldn’t establish pigouvian taxes for (some?) c-risks. For instance, taxing nuclear weapons (or their inputs, such as nuclear fuel) according to some tentative guesstimate of the “social cost of nukes” would provide funding for peace efforts and possibly even be in the best interest of (most of?) current nuclear powers, as it would help slow down nuclear proliferation. This is similar to Barratt et al.’s paper on making gian of function researchers buy insurance.
I no longer endorse this comment because, since then, I found out that there’s a lot of research on internalising climate change externalities—and that Weitzman (2012) and others present mitigation as akin to insurance. I still wonder how much of this line of reasoning could extrapolate to other GCR.
It turns out that I changed my mind again. I don’t see why we couldn’t establish pigouvian taxes for (some?) c-risks. For instance, taxing nuclear weapons (or their inputs, such as nuclear fuel) according to some tentative guesstimate of the “social cost of nukes” would provide funding for peace efforts and possibly even be in the best interest of (most of?) current nuclear powers, as it would help slow down nuclear proliferation. This is similar to Barratt et al.’s paper on making gian of function researchers buy insurance.