“Payment schemes also risk creating perverse incentives…. If the system pays landowners to bank carbon, they may plant non-native species, or genetically ‘improved’ trees to bank carbon faster. Or they may discourage natural phenomena that happen to be good for biodiversity but bad for people, including such ecosystem disservices as fire, drought, disease, or flood.”
Just as there are supporters of this relatively new way of looking at environmental decision-making–commodification–there are also critics. I include myself among them.
Some environmentalists argue that ecosystems or their constituent parts with intrinsic value does not mean they should be priced and treated as economic goods. By stressing the market value of ecosystem services, should those values be exceedingly difficult to calculate, or come in at a lower-than-expected value, it will be easier for those pushing more intensive human intervention in the ecosystem to win the day in the policy field.…
Continue Reading[Editor note: Last month, a conference–“Evaluating and Trading Ecological Services: Is There a Role for Natural Capital in the Marketplace?”–was held in Houston, Texas. Local environmental activist Jim Blackburn organized the event (interviewed here). Appendix A describes the conference, and Appendix B lists the sessions.
Without a speaker challenging the premise of the conference, MasterResource asked Sterling Burnett of the National Center for Policy Analysis to provide this analysis, which will be forwarded to conference organizers.]
Pricing nonmarket ecosystem services may be a noble goal. But it is conceptually confused and problematic as a guide to real-world action, civic and certainly governmental.
This four-part series substantiates my concerns. After reviewing the general concept, I will examine environmentalist concerns with environmental commodification, review economist concerns with the same, and make final arguments and wrap-up.…
Continue Reading“Since 1970, the total emissions of the six criteria pollutants have declined by 68 percent, even though energy consumption has increased by 45 percent, vehicle miles traveled have increased by 167 percent, and the economy has grown by 212 percent…. As technology continues to advance, coal-fired power plants will become even cleaner and air quality will continue to improve. “
Coal, which until recently produced 50 percent of the nation’s electricity, has been losing market share to lower-cost natural gas and mandated, highly subsidized renewable energy. Anti-coal environmental regulation has also figured into the decline. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has essentially banned new coal plants and made its continued use in existing plants extremely costly. As a result, coal produced only 37 percent of our electricity in 2012.
One of the biggest stated concerns about coal is air pollution.…
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