What are negative prices in the market? When you don’t want something and have to pay someone to take it. But why can’t you just “dispose” it somehow? Or “leave it there”? Maybe there are regulations in place. Or maybe there isn’t a place that you can and want to “leave it”
Carbon prices are negative prices; you need to pay someone to take it away. By creating regulations to prevent people from just “leaving it there (in the atmosphere)”, you push the cost of disposal to the polluters and set out the signals and momentum necessary to rewire the system.
Free market doesn’t emerge spontaneously; it requires regulation, boundaries and legal mechanisms to enforce rules, especially explicit ones. Implicit rules are also necessary to keep things together. Question is if we are willing to create a system intellectual property and enforce rights to spark innovation, why aren’t we doing so for climate change?