I'm a treehugger. During the 90s, I volunteered at Wetlands Conservation Network (WetNet), a short lived Audubon offshoot trying to save the Pacific salmon.
During my time there, I somehow got the impression that all environmental (ecological) challenges could be fixed with better accounting and fair markets.
More than just addressing externalities.
With our salmon, the (economic) winners were timber companies and developers. Who reaped outsized rewards for developing habitat. (Timber companies were turning second growth forests into urban sprawl thru their subsidiaries.)
Other beneficiaries were power (hydroelectric) and some farmers (irrigation).
The biggest losers were the commercial & tribal fishers, anglers, and the hard to quantify "culture".
But for some reason, beyond my experience and understanding, commonsense structural reforms were completely out of bounds.
For instance, (I'm told) that water rights in the West are "use it or lose it", so potato farmers in Idaho continue to grow an oversupply. Whereas if they somehow rent (or transfer) those water rights in an open marketplace, that water could be put to better uses.
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Note that I've been out of the treehugger game since 2000, so I don't know what, if any progress, has been made since.
Also, I continue to be surprised that Wright's Nonzero thesis apparently hasn't gotten any traction. Neither with the libertarian Freedom Markets™ cultists. Or the weirdly regressive leftists who reject markets and incentives, and continue to conflate corporatism & cronyism with capitalism.
Robert Wright's book Nonzero, which advocates for these kinds of reforms, deeply influenced my worldview, way back when.
https://www.amazon.com/Nonzero-Logic-Destiny-Robert-Wright/d...
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I'm a treehugger. During the 90s, I volunteered at Wetlands Conservation Network (WetNet), a short lived Audubon offshoot trying to save the Pacific salmon.
During my time there, I somehow got the impression that all environmental (ecological) challenges could be fixed with better accounting and fair markets.
More than just addressing externalities.
With our salmon, the (economic) winners were timber companies and developers. Who reaped outsized rewards for developing habitat. (Timber companies were turning second growth forests into urban sprawl thru their subsidiaries.)
Other beneficiaries were power (hydroelectric) and some farmers (irrigation).
The biggest losers were the commercial & tribal fishers, anglers, and the hard to quantify "culture".
But for some reason, beyond my experience and understanding, commonsense structural reforms were completely out of bounds.
For instance, (I'm told) that water rights in the West are "use it or lose it", so potato farmers in Idaho continue to grow an oversupply. Whereas if they somehow rent (or transfer) those water rights in an open marketplace, that water could be put to better uses.
--
Note that I've been out of the treehugger game since 2000, so I don't know what, if any progress, has been made since.
Also, I continue to be surprised that Wright's Nonzero thesis apparently hasn't gotten any traction. Neither with the libertarian Freedom Markets™ cultists. Or the weirdly regressive leftists who reject markets and incentives, and continue to conflate corporatism & cronyism with capitalism.
Oh well.