I believe that Mises convincingly demonstrated in Socialism (1920) that socialism cannot calculate. Even a brilliant and well-meaning central planner cannot know the subjective valuations of all members of society. Without suffering profits or losses, there is simply no way for the state to know if it is meeting the needs of society in the best possible way.
Perhaps with free markets in "sea-level rise" insurance for beach-front properties, owners of such policies could make a case for partial compensation for the amount of the risk-premium paid. However, it would be up to the owners of these policies to make a convincing case to demonstrate the responsibility of, lets say, oil companies in actually causing these risk-premiums to increase above the level necessary to insure against natural climate fluctuations. Furthermore, it would be up to total population of property owners to act voluntarily in the inforcement of an adjudication in recognition of their common interest in defense of property rights.
I suspect that if left up to speculators to construct a CO-2 level to climate-change risk scale by trading futures contracts in the previously described insurance policies, we would see that the real social costs are in all likelyhood only a minute fraction of what is purported by the climate alarmist. Some proposed solutions to the perceived greenhouse gas problem go as far as recommending a 90% reduction in world energy consumption (as I recall was suggested on CBC public-radio around the time of the Bali conference). By all indications, the social cost of this solution would involve mass starvation and disease on a scale rivaling that imposed on the soviet population under Lenin and Stalin. A financial estimate on lost productivity incured by such a drastic solution would clearly amount to at least 10's to 100's of trillions of dollars. The implication made by the climate alarmist is that the social cost of allowing CO-2 levels to continue to rise up to their saturation point would have an even greater social cost! If the climate alarmist is telling the truth, then he can make an enormous profit by buying future insurance contracts against climate change risk. In fact, it would be profitable for him to bid the value of such contracts at least as high (higher if the solution is not likely to be 100% effective in offsetting climate change) as the cost of his proposed solution to the greenhouse gas problem. However, the climate skeptic stands to gain himself by trillions of dollars just by selling the contracts which he perceives as being totally worthless, to the extent that he has the collateral to back them. So this begs the question, how far would the climate alarmist go to put his money where his mouth is, so to speak?
I elaborate now on how such contracts could be denominated: Since the precise, mathematical relationship between CO-2 level and relevent climate factors is not known, a variety of different types of contracts could be traded. CO-2 neutral contract would exist, simply covering the climate-risk irrespective of future CO-2 levels. Another contract could be denominated in $ per unit of CO-2, so that the insurance value of the contract would double with a doubling of CO-2. Yet another could be per unit of CO-2 squared, and so on so forth. Anyone who has taken 2nd year calculus is aware that a mathematical function can be approximated as a Taylor's Series, which is nothing more than the sum of various power functions. The constants in this climate-risk functions are nothing but the values of the various contracts. This is important, because certain climatoligists predict a "tipping point" event where supposedly, once CO-2 passes some critical value, a runaway feedback loop is triggered resulting in some sort of armagedon. This would be apparent in a high value of a higher-order contracts. In any case, a causal climate-change model would be arrived at that would represent the best available information, unbiased by political motivation. If such a model did indicate an increased climate-change risk with rising CO-2, then it could be introduced as evidence in the previously described adjudication procedures.
My personal reading into the climate change studies which have been made has led me to conclude that there is in fact a net benefit to society to be gained from CO-2 enrichment of the atmosphere.
First, it is not at all clear that CO-2 levels are a driver to temperature. This theory is based on an unproven contention that higher CO-2 levels will increase humidity, which is by far the dominant greenhouse gas. CO-2, on it's own, is not claimed to significantly affect temperatures. In contradiction to this theory, historical evidence suggest that CO-2 levels naturally follow temperature changes, and that the highest CO-2 levels correspond with dropping temperature and vice-versa.
Second, experiments have shown that enriched CO-2 levels in fact increase the rate of plant growth. The increase is particularly beneficial for fast-growing plants such as food-crops. This could prove to be a blessing from the heaven for low-productivity individuals who must spend substantial portions of their income in meeting their basic nutritional needs. Also, the increased biomass also absorbs CO-2 from the atmosphere at an increasing rate, resulting in a saturation and levelling-off of CO-2 level. This levelling off is already beginning to occur in the case of CO-2.
And there are numerous other arguments putting in doubt the alarmist claims, which I won't cover.
The central fallacy in all types of environmental accounting and "sustainability" measures is that they are assuming that somehow a static equilibrium state ought to naturally occur. Any increase or decrease in any environmental factor is obviously unsustainable as the level of that factor cannot shrink below zero neither can it grow forever. However, nature is and has always been, long before humans came along, a dynamical system. It is not static. At any given point in time, nature itself is always changing in an unsustainable manner, in that the current trend obviously cannot be perpetuated forever. An example taken from elementary biology is the wolf-hare population:
As hare populations increase, wolves have more food available and begin to increase themselves after a certain time lag. As wolf populations themselves increase, the hares are cought more frequently and their population begins to decline. The wolves then find themselves in shortage of food and their own population declines, allowing the cycle to resume. Clearly, at any given time, wolf and hare populations are changing in an unsustainable manner (at least to the ignorant ecologist).
Nature always seems finds a way to keep her various factors in check. These negative-feedbacks stand in contrast to the positive "run-away" feedbacks alleged by the alarmists. In fact, if any kind of "run-away" feedback mechanisms existed, earth would have long-ago followed the way of Venus. On geological time scales, levels of CO-2 (and of real pollutants) have been occasionally pushed orders of magnitude beyond levels which humans are capable. This could have occurred as a result of major meteor impacts or volcanic eruptions spewing immense amounts of contaminants into the atmosphere. Yet, nature has always managed to re-equilibrate herself, and this for billions of years!