What happened last time it was as warm as it’s going to get later this century?

I read an excellent book, The Ends of the World, on just this subject: https://jakeseliger.com/2017/09/18/the-ends-of-the-world-pet.... But the book gets there through looking at the last five mass extinction events. It turns out that either every one of them, or every one except one, hinged on changes in atmospheric carbon levels, which we didn't realize until relatively recently.

Does anyone know if there is any party or even organization anywhere right now pushing proper utilization of the free market to at least internalize the current cost of CO2 emissions (though that by itself could not solve the historical lack). It seems like this would actually be one of the few places where a free market should work extremely well: simply set the price of emitting a ton of CO2 at the ratcheted price (defined by bid) of industrial removal (time period of a day or less) a ton plus some assured margin (7%? exact number could be figured out by experts). The government would serve as the pivot, emitters would pay in units at the existing price, so a pool of credits per ton would collect. Anyone who could meet a minimum volume level (the whole point is massive industrial scale removal) would be able to bid for those in whatever amounts they could handle per day/week/month. If they figured out a new scalable way to remove a ton more cheaply, they'd be able to underbid anyone on a more expensive method and collect the much wider margin until they used up the pool at that price, while meanwhile the price for emitters would automatically be adjusted down to the new cost plus minimum margin. The government might have to get the ball rolling by funding an initial plant, but after that it should be self sustaining, and would it make energy prices directly embody the emission cost in a very clean way that would allow the rest of the economy to locally optimize as necessary.

Obviously there would be many low level implementation details to work through, but this seems obvious enough that I assume it's been proposed many times. However I haven't been able to figure out the right search terms to find any papers developing it further. I've seen plenty of carbon pricing schemes proposed but all of them seem to use pretty arbitrary rates rather then simply directly internalizing the goal of zero net emissions and letting a market on each side sort out how best the meet that goal in any given place. I'd love it if anyone knows where I could better search, after some recent work I do have access to college resources again so academic journals would be fine too. There are also of course plenty of awful schemes by various political parties pushing various subsidies or "efficiency improvements" or whatever in a command-control fashion, but that's not great either. Any HNers who have ideas/sources would be awesome.

As my ECON 101 teacher said many times, the way to handle negative externalities is to tax them. The free market cannot handle this.

Look at it this way- say you can make a ton of money manufacturing widgets, but you also make a ton of CO2. There is no law against this discharge, so you do it anyway. Climate change might cause you many problems, but it's 50 years or more until you start to personally feel the heat. This is a classic "tragedy of the commons" scenario.

Global warming is real and humans contribute to it. Just stating that so I am not called a 'denier' as I have been before.

That being said, the computer models predicting what the consequences of global warming will be, have greatly over estimated (at least the timeline of) real world impacts. Since I was a kid I've heard in the news that in the next 5 years or 10 years there will be all these catastrophes linked to global warming and I have yet to see them come true.

I remember the BBC reporting years ago that the children of today would only know snow from what they've seen in snow globes, things like that. I think part of the reason for inaction is due to the news media over simplifying the problem and reporting (perhaps even exaggerating) the worst long term predictions.

> So far the free market has failed spectacularly.

FTFY