The Sick Ness Monster

Through some combination of illness, laziness, unwilingness and Blogger-not-working...um...ness has lead me to miss two weeks of posting. In the meantime, I'm a year older and wiser (perhaps) and I've had a chance to find at least one more job. It looks like I will be doing an internship at the Philadelphia DA's office, working at ABC and probably selling sandwiches at Panera. I'm planning on helping in Taiko class some more as well, so it should be a pretty full schedule. Oh, I also redid the look of the blog, let me know if you like it.

One of the things that I've been thinking a lot about recently is the possibility that market solutions are actually better at resolving environmental concerns than all the government intervention going on. Clearly there are going to be some environmental problems that are not well addressed with market solutions, but it is interesting to see the degree to which my knee-jerk socialist let-the-government-regulate-it attitude seems very problematic for soem of these concerns. For example, public ownership of forests and fisheries tends to lead to the Tragedy of the Commons. Because the governement owns the land and sells rights to its use for a duration, the incentive is to maximize the profit during that period by clear-cutting as much as possible. On the other hand, private ownership of forest lands gives the lumber interests long-term incentives to maintain the forests for future cutting. In fact, in parts of the world where this model is followed, forests are actually regrowing. Fisheries are more problematic because the issue of fishing rights is more tangled by the simple fact that fish do not have roots.

Other problems, including preservation and restoration of endangered species and supplying clean water to populations in the developing world seem to suggest the feasablity of capitalist solutions. In many cases, regulations and fines are incentives to avoid compliance or avoid the industry all-together where these are problems that really want addressing.

Energy and air pollution (and corresponding ozone damage) are more difficult issues for a variety of reasons. Even solid waste appears to offer the potential for profitable and environmentally friendly businesses. For example, organic waste may be a good potential input for the manufacture of thermal insulation. Imagine the possibility of a company being payed to manage the waste of other industries (and potentially of the residential sector) and turning this into low-cost insulation (subsidised by the industries that produced the waste) which in turn reduces heating and cooling costs. Inorganic waste (especially metals) is profitable to recycle. There is some clear danger of wealthy countries essentially exporting all their garbage to the developing world, but at least there is the potential for clever recyling developments.

The problem with air pollution is that its effect is not recognized in a given local to a strong enough degree to deincentivise a given producer. Compound this with the fact that most of the world's air pollution comes from difficult sources to manage. Some libertarians have theorized a system wherein polluters can buy and sell the right to a certain amount of air pollution. First of all, notice that this still preassumes a certain degree of government control (or control by some other public proxy, such as a business bureau), which creates the same sort of potential for cheating. But even if this solves the big polluter problem to a degree by creating the incentive to pollute less and thereby profit from selling pollution rights, it does not solve the problem of diffuse sources of air pollution, which are the bigger issue to begin with. In most of the world, diffuse sources of air pollution are the source of more pollution than the point sources to begin with. In the developed world, these sources are mostly things like private cars and homes burning oil for heat and power. In the developing and nondeveloping world, these are mostly things like coal and wood burnt for cooking and heating purposes. The role of livestock is not to be underestimated either. Apparently in New Zealand, sheep and cattle farming are among the most significant sources of pollution. Furthermore, the damage to the ozone layer is caused by all these polluters in agrigate, which makes it very hard to incentivise individuals.

In any case, just thought these are some interesting things to think about. Also, Green Wombat is a pretty interesting source of info on these enivirocapitalism trends.