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Comment by nisten | Hacker News Reader

So by not fishing at all in the protected 11% portion of their fishing area, they're projected to get more fish due to the spillover effect. Well, no surprises there.

We rarely ever do these economic projections.

They can apply to so many more areas, like the forests in Indonesia where they're discovering new antibiotic compounds in shrubs, or the spider habitats whose venom is used in producing heart medication, they're probably a lot more expensive than some lumber and cornfields.

I feel like if we communicated environmental protection more materialistically instead of emotionally, people would have an easier time convincing their politicians to actually enact it.

If we're gonna calculate 25-30 year mortgages for homes than we should probably do environmental risk projections too in dollar figures for those kinds of time frames.

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I don't think the problem is not knowing that one in a million spiders in the nearby jungle could cure cancer, it's the knowing that once someone finds the spider they'll take it, get rich, and leave you with 999,999 poison spiders.

If you torch the jungle and grow stuff maybe you could get rich, or at least get rid of the spiders.

One argument against this position is that economic environmentalism cuts both ways. Sure

Sure, marine preserves produce an economically beneficial surplus of salmon. Also, the oil reserves in the Arctic national wildlife refuge are worth more than 500 billion dollars.

In the case of Arctic drilling, I think the moral argument against destroying wilderness is the only viable option.

This can apply here too.

The amount of oil that can be safely burned is finite. Meaning there's only so much air to burn, and it should be auctioned off at market value, thus it gets more and more expensive over time. We pay for garbage disposal, why not pay market rate for carbon disposal too, it's the most capitalistic and scalable way to solve the problem.

Instead of trying to have this type of accounting many lobby to simply not pay for it because it would make their business less competitive with other energy businesses.

As for the alaskan wilderness, that could become profitable farmland or residental area later on as the climate warms. Being a wilderness experience would increase the value of the real instead whereas being oil contaminated would make it a lot less desirable.

There is a strong economic argument for keeping oil in the ground now, though. Namely, that the planet will cease to support a functioning global economy under runaway warming.

That oil could theoretically be burned and the carbon sequestered. Hence no climate impact.

The hazard to fragile ecosystems from an industrial accident is still huge.

Edit: the point is that some environmental protection actions have to be driven by moral/ethical forces. We can't leave everything to the economy.

Having said this there might be ways to use market forces to implement the ethically required environmental protections.

Well, if they can afford to pay market-rate insurance on the liability of their sequestration method then yeah sure.

Interesting thought. I know nuclear plants are required by law to set aside a part of revenue for eventual long term storage of the waste. You could have that for coal plants.

Of course we already have quotas and trade which is designed for something similar.

And the offsets have their problems...

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