How would business work? Currently a business’s purpose by law is to make money. How would you enforce a different goal without going full centralized economy?

And how is trying to add less value more effective than internalizing externalized costs? For example, co2 is an externalized cost, one companies don’t need to pay for right now, it’s external to them. If we made them pay for it to fund carbon capture at 1 ton removed for every 1 ton emitted, they would decrease their emissions and the rest would be removed. You could do something similar for other ecological issues as well. What’s the benefit of degroth over internalizing?

Any cost that you try to internalize will just be passed on to the consumer.

Remember, you said it in your comment, “… a business’s purpose by law is to make money.” The business doesn’t pay the cost, the worker pay the cost.

Your example of carbon capture is great, a “business” starts up doing carbon capture. They make their money by selling carbon credits to other businesses, NOT to clean up their act and stop polluting but to “offset” their carbon emissions. If my business produces more pollution, I just buy more credits and pass on the cost to the consumers or freeze employee raises or fire chunks of the workforce to cover the increase in business costs without to reduce the chance that it will hurt profits.

Like, if I poop in your kitchen sink every day, but I buy a “poop free kitchen sink credits” to offset that I poop in your kitchen sink every day that says “somewhere else there is a kitchen sink free of poop that will cancel out that I’ve pooped in this sink today,” … I’m still pooping in your kitchen sink.

Any cost that you try to internalize will just be passed on to the consumer.

That’s fine. The government can give subsidies for low income people or subsidize some products directly.

The poop in the sink example isn’t applicable to carbon emissions. Co2 dilutes very quickly, so it’s all essentially going into one big reservoir. The equivalent then is for everyone to be pooping in one big pile. I don’t care in that case whether you don’t poop in the pile or you pay someone else to take one poop’s worth of poop out of the pile somewhere else. The pile stays the same size. The overall quantity is what matters for co2.

You might have a point though for externalities like resource extraction or habitat destruction. That’s harder to quantity if the degradation of one area can be offset by the improvement of another. That’s a much more variable exchange, so it’d be more difficult to work trades on those. But governments have been able to mostly figure it out for things like national forests, logging, and hydraulic fluid spills. So I don’t think it’s impossible.

pass on the cost to the consumers or freeze employee raises or fire chunks of the workforce to cover the increase in business costs without to reduce the chance that it will hurt profits.

Exec’s don’t have that much headroom left to squeeze out of customers and workers. If they raise prices or lower wages too much, their product or jobs will be uncompetitive with companies that emit less co2 and thus need to pay less to offset it. It will be cheaper in most cases to decrease emissions instead of paying for offsets.

Exec’s don’t have that much headroom left to squeeze out of customers and workers. If they raise prices or lower wages too much, their product or jobs will be uncompetitive with companies that emit less co2 and thus need to pay less to offset it.

How many different gas stations do you see during your daily travels? Are the prices all over the place or are they the same? What are the price differences between different manufacturers of the same type of TV? They’re all pretty much the same with one or two very high end or very low end models being the exception. There won’t be much price competition because that hurts businesses, if one of your business peers raises their prices you are now under pressure to RAISE your prices so that you’re not loosing potential profits.

I’m pretty sure that manufacturing any particular type of thing or extracting any particular type of resource will produce the same amount of environmental degradation regardless of which company’s name is on the paperwork. Exxon doesn’t have some special way to extract oil that is better for the envrioment than the one ConocoPhillips uses. So there won’t be any competition that way.

It will be cheaper in most cases to decrease emissions instead of paying for offsets.

If the emissions are directly correlated to the thing they are selling, then no. Decreasing emissions means a company is pumping less oil or making less iPhones or selling less gasoline. This gives a company’s competitors who aren’t decreasing their production a way to capture its market share because somebody else will still have product to sell to meet the demand.