Objections & Answers

That's the opposite of our position. Our critique of individual moralism starts precisely from the observation that demanding a symbolic individual effort while entire swaths of the economy remain off the climate radar is both ineffective and unjust. The lever we advocate for is not individual, it is structural: internalizing the carbon cost into prices at the scale of the sectors and companies that actually matter, rather than placing the burden on individual consumption choices. Making sustainability economically rational is aimed first and foremost at economic and public decision-makers.

We don't reject sufficiency as an outcome — we reject sufficiency as a moral injunction. There's a difference between asking people to renounce out of virtue, and letting a properly calibrated carbon price automatically reduce demand for the most carbon-intensive goods and activities — a drop in consumption that results from a rational economic choice in the face of a real cost, not from guilt. This is also why the price signal needs to cover a product's entire life cycle, manufacturing included, not just its use: that's what captures the rebound effect instead of letting it slip through under the guise of innovation.

That's correct, but it isn't a failure of the market mechanism as such: it's the consequence of an incomplete price signal. The cost of carbon is structurally paid by no one at the moment of transaction, which amounts to asking the market to optimize without giving it the right information. We're not defending laissez-faire as it exists today, but correcting this signal — through regulation and taxation — so that once the right price is in place, the market can efficiently steer economic choices toward lower-carbon solutions.

The failure of 2018 owes largely to how the measure was designed, not to the underlying principle. A carbon tax applied uniformly, with no redistribution mechanism for lower-income households and no transport alternative in rural areas, weighs proportionally more heavily on households with the least room to maneuver — which rightly fed a sense of injustice. Carbon-pricing schemes that work elsewhere systematically pair the tax with direct, often progressive, redistribution to households, which fundamentally changes its acceptability. We defend the economic principle, not any one particular implementation: the design of the redistribution matters just as much as the carbon price itself.

That's a strong point, and we don't claim that political pressure is ineffective in general. But those struggles shared a common trait: an identifiable opponent capable of unilaterally giving ground — an employer, an administration, a specific law. Climate change is different by nature: it's a diffuse collective-action problem, where billions of daily decisions and tens of thousands of economic actors need to converge, with no single one of them able, on its own, to resolve the problem by yielding. The balance of power retains its usefulness for targeted fights — blocking a specific project, forcing a named actor to back down. But a durable climate policy, like carbon pricing, has to survive several electoral cycles: it needs broad buy-in, not just a one-off win. It's this difference in scale that leads us to favor incentives over confrontation, without disqualifying the latter on principle.

The two overlap less than it appears. Forcing a specific company to change a specific practice has real value, but it has a structural limit: if the underlying demand doesn't change, another actor — often a less scrupulous one — simply steps into the vacated space. This is carbon leakage, a well-documented phenomenon in environmental economics. Targeting named actors remains a useful tool for specific fights, but it isn't sufficient on its own: without a change in the price signal that applies to every actor in a sector, a win against one particular company just displaces the emissions rather than reducing them overall.

That's the hardest question we're asked, and we don't have a complete answer. We don't rule out political engagement: we believe that, for this particular type of policy, a durable majority coalition is more effective than confrontational mobilization led by a committed minority. Our role isn't to substitute ourselves for the political work needed to get these measures adopted, but to produce proposals well-designed enough — particularly on redistribution — to lower the political cost of adopting them, and to make the work easier for those carrying that fight, including through mobilization. This is a point where our thesis remains, at this stage, incomplete.

Economic incentives act on decision-makers and cost structures; on their own, they aren't enough to shift the cultural perception of a choice. Part of our thesis addresses this second lever: showing that what already embodies material success — performance, technological edge, smart choices — increasingly coincides with what is low-carbon, as innovation progresses. We use "high-performing" strictly in the sense of efficiency measured across a product's entire life cycle, manufacturing included — not in the sense of more powerful or more recent, which would encourage replacement and therefore overconsumption. In practice, this means highlighting, in our communication, the choices, products, and innovations that succeed on both fronts at once, rather than treating success and environmental sufficiency as competing goals.

We're not trying to convince anyone to consume less out of virtue, nor to pass off a minimalist lifestyle as intrinsically desirable — that would be both unconvincing and contrary to our method. What defines a product or choice as desirable shifts over time, and has historically tracked what is most advanced and most capable, not necessarily what consumes the most resources. When innovation and the right economic incentives make the highest-performing technologies also the lowest-carbon ones, social status can redirect toward them — but that doesn't happen on its own: it requires active communication work, which we treat as part of our method rather than an automatic market effect.

We're also aware that the perceived cost of a change (a higher price at purchase or at the pump) is felt more strongly than the future benefit it produces: this is precisely why the redistribution discussed elsewhere serves not only to correct a social injustice, but also to offset this imbalance between immediate loss and deferred gain. The goal, then, isn't to make sufficiency desirable, but to make what is already desirable coincide with what is low-carbon — and to say so clearly rather than counting on a spontaneous adjustment.

That's a real risk if the message is limited to the most expensive goods. Our position isn't about access to premium status symbols, but about how innovation and falling costs, driven by the right incentives, progressively make high-performing, low-carbon choices accessible to more people — as has happened with other technologies. An environmentalism perceived as reserved for an elite would be a failure of our method, not an accepted consequence of our thesis.

No — the name describes our method of analysis, not a judgment on people engaged through other means. We start from the assumption that everyone involved in the climate movement is acting in good faith; we compare strategies on their measurable effectiveness, not people on their good sense.

The argument is solid and well documented. Without a corrective mechanism, a unilateral carbon price penalizes sectors exposed to international competition and can cause carbon leakage — empirical studies confirm this risk, though its magnitude varies significantly by sector: markedly higher for steel, cement, or chemicals than for most of the economy. This is why we believe carbon pricing needs to be paired with a border adjustment mechanism — like the EU's CBAM, which taxes imports according to their carbon content to neutralize the advantage held by lower-standard countries. That mechanism is still young, legally contested (compatibility with WTO rules), and for now limited to a handful of sectors.

We don't believe in a single global carbon price in the foreseeable future — a binding international agreement remains politically out of reach. The realistic path is coalitions of major economies moving together and applying a border adjustment to countries that don't, rather than waiting for global unanimity. It's a second-best solution, one that reduces the risk of leakage without eliminating it entirely — and as far as we know, it's the best option available until a universal agreement exists.

Two things are often conflated under the term "carbon market." On one side, compliance markets like the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS): a global, declining cap on allowed emissions, within which companies trade allowances. Once that cap is tightened enough — which has really only been the case since the 2018 reform of the Market Stability Reserve — it forces a genuine reduction in emissions from the sectors it covers, and the data confirms this. On the other side, voluntary carbon offset markets (forestry credits, projects sold to companies to "offset" their emissions): these markets suffer from well-documented integrity problems, with several investigations showing that credits sold as additional didn't correspond to any real reduction.

We defend compliance markets with a strict, declining cap, limited free allocation of allowances, and rigorous independent verification — a mechanism that works, imperfectly but genuinely, when properly calibrated. We do not defend voluntary offset markets as they exist today: their lack of standardization and oversight makes them, in their current state, more of a communications tool than a reliable climate one.

This is a genuine blind spot of technocratic approaches in general, and we don't claim to escape it entirely. Experience confirms it: most carbon prices that exist today around the world remain below the estimates of the social cost of carbon put forward by economists, precisely because they result from political compromise rather than an optimal calculation. We don't think a state can spontaneously set the "right" price. What we advocate for is an institutional design that limits, without eliminating, this distortion: a price trajectory announced in advance and automatically indexed rather than renegotiated every year, and a rate-setting process entrusted to a technical authority partially insulated from the electoral calendar — modeled on the independence of central banks in setting interest rates.

We have no guarantee to offer, and it would be dishonest to claim one — no market mechanism is immune to political capture. These partial-independence arrangements reduce the risk without eliminating it; as far as we know, it's the best option available for a real problem, not a solution that resolves it.

Monetary redistribution offsets the loss of purchasing power, but it doesn't recreate a job or an industrial sector in a region that depended on it — that's a genuine blind spot if we stop there. What we add to redistribution: funding for professional retraining committed ahead of closures rather than after, targeted investment in affected regions to help transition industries set up there rather than elsewhere, and a gradual, pre-announced sequencing of the price trajectory, to give companies and workers time to adapt rather than face a sudden shock.

We don't, at this stage, have a detailed region-by-region transition plan — that undertaking goes beyond the scope of our thesis, which centers on the price signal, and falls under industrial policy in its own right. We consider that the absence of such support makes a carbon tax politically untenable, however well designed its monetary redistribution — the Yellow Vests proved that. It's a body of work still to be developed, not a point our current thesis fully covers.

No — if anything, it's the opposite of what we're aiming for. We're not trying to make sustainability rationally acceptable — a choice people accept reluctantly after calculating it's the least bad option; we want people to converge on it because they want to, not because they've resigned themselves to it. Someone who buys an electric vehicle because gasoline has become too expensive is making a constrained calculation: they're settling for it. Someone who buys one because they see it as the smartest, most enviable choice is embracing it. The material outcome is identical, but the underlying dynamic is opposite — and it's the second one that holds up over time and spreads socially.

This is precisely why our thesis doesn't rest on the price signal alone: the desirability lever we advocate for elsewhere is designed as a corrective to the biases you mention — loss aversion, excessive discounting of the future, resistance to change — that price alone doesn't fix. That said, we recognize that prices often act more slowly and more weakly than a perfectly rational model would predict: the price elasticity of fuel demand, for instance, is historically low in the short term, because the alternatives (switching vehicles, moving, changing jobs) take time.

An effective pricing policy therefore has to be designed with that slowness in mind — a gradual, pre-announced trajectory, a signal made visible and immediate rather than diluted into a bill — rather than assuming instant adjustment. We still believe the price signal is necessary, but it isn't sufficient on its own; that's an observation that reinforces our thesis more than it contradicts it, so long as we don't claim actors behave with perfect rationality, which we don't.

Saying "active communication work is needed" would be a weak answer to an immediate, tangible material interest — the rise of parties that explicitly promise to preserve present comfort, even at a later cost, is a real phenomenon, not a textbook hypothesis.

Our structural answer rests on the redistribution mechanism already discussed: properly calibrated, it makes a majority of households net financial winners, not just the wealthiest — that's the principle behind carbon-fee-and-dividend schemes, where modeling typically shows a majority of households receiving more than they pay, due to the structure of their consumption. The coalition you're asking us to name, then, isn't defined by sociological categories, but by an economic position: the households that come out net ahead under the scheme — a majority, by construction, if the redistribution is properly calibrated.

This answer has a serious limit we can't wave away. In political science, a diffuse majority of small winners historically mobilizes less effectively than a concentrated minority of identified losers — a collective-action problem documented since Mancur Olson. Canada's recent experience with its carbon dividend illustrates this directly: the scheme left a majority of households better off on paper, but political support collapsed once the benefit remained hard to perceive against an organized, vocal opposition. We don't have a complete solution to this asymmetry. What we take from it: the visibility and perceived immediacy of the benefit probably matter as much as its economic reality, and the just-transition mechanisms discussed above should prioritize the concentrated losers — precisely because they are structurally better organized to exert political weight than a diffuse majority of modest winners.

Our critique concerns the comparative effectiveness of different mobilization strategies, not the legitimacy of the people or ideas behind them. We don't take a position on the underlying debates that fall outside our method — which economic system would be most desirable, for instance — because our analysis is grounded in economics and behavioral science, not doctrine. Our Declaration of Independence details this positioning further.

As of today, The Rational Project receives no external funding: the project runs entirely on the volunteer commitment of its members. Should this change, any funding source will be subject to an editorial-independence clause, and we rule out, as a matter of principle, any funding from any government, political party, or organization whose primary purpose is to serve a partisan or electoral agenda, regardless of the electoral cycle. Details are available on our Organization page.

Today, around thirty members, present in about thirty countries — generally one per country. This is deliberately limited at this stage: we'd rather build a solid method with a committed core than recruit at scale before we have something rigorous to offer. The network is meant to grow, but our legitimacy today rests on the clarity of our thesis and our method, not on headcount.

The premise needs correcting first: our members are spread across about thirty countries, several of them in the Global South — this isn't an exclusively Western network. But the objection remains partly valid in another form: having one person per country isn't enough to guarantee a fine-grained understanding of local realities, or to represent the diversity of these countries' development priorities. The tension you raise is real and well documented in international climate negotiations: the countries historically least responsible for cumulative emissions are often the ones that most need room to develop, which creates tension with a uniform pace of decarbonization.

We don't claim to have resolved this tension, nor to fully represent the realities of the Global South with about thirty members, even if internationally spread — it's an area to strengthen through deeper local partnerships, not just the presence of one member per country. On substance, we believe a serious proposal must incorporate the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities — carbon-price trajectories adapted to each country's level of development, funded in part by the historically highest-emitting countries — but we haven't yet developed this dimension in detail.

Not many, for now: we're a young organization, still building its method, its governance, and its first pilot projects. We'd rather own that limitation than dress it up — a clear, verifiable roadmap, even a modest one, seems more solid to us than an inflated results narrative. Our Actions page details where things stand, and will be updated as our projects move forward.

Our members are selected with a strong emphasis on the quality of their profile, not on recruitment volume: we specifically look for applicable skills in economics, data, public policy, and engineering, and we'd rather stay a group of around thirty strong profiles than grow headcount at the expense of rigor. Beyond individual profiles, our method itself is verifiable: we rely on published data and research, we cite our sources, and we revise our positions when they're contradicted by new evidence.