I find, as usual, that Maximum Progress is offering a hubristic take.<p>Yes, plastics now are superior to ivory for any purpose aside from signalling wealth. But guess what, that last purpose is enough that ivory poaching remains a perpetual problem and elephants would probably have been wiped out by now if not for the dedicated efforts of governments and non-profits to combat poaching and to lock down the ivory trade.<p>Yes, solar power is getting very cheap, but it's a little early to declare the carbon emissions externality solved. Fossil fuel companies are still investing in infrastructure (pipelines, refineries, etc) with multi-decade payback times, so I expect we'll still have a long time yet to wait. And carbon emissions are a problem with a deadline.<p>Aquaculture is a growing source of fish, but overfishing remains a major unsolved problem, and there are also concerns about aquaculture itself having negative impacts on wild fish populations.
The list of counterexamples at the end is a little light.<p>The Montreal Protocol is probably the most famous example: <a href="https://www.unep.org/ozonaction/who-we-are/about-montreal-protocol" rel="nofollow">https://www.unep.org/ozonaction/who-we-are/about-montreal-pr...</a><p>And the German feed-in-tariffs helped renewables quite a bit: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed-in_tariffs_in_Germany" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed-in_tariffs_in_Germany</a><p>Or the European emission standards: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards</a><p>They achieved their two goals of (1) minimizing the externality and (2) driving technology innovation.
It's not either-or. Coordination provides the market incentives that encourage the adoption or development of the technologies; technological development reduces the cost of compliance.