Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway94857 | Hacker News Reader

It's perfectly reasonable to consider cost - which is what this move entails - when deciding whether or not to protect a species. We already employ this calculus, in that we are not spending our entire national budget on protecting some endangered subspecies of river fish in Arkansas. Anyone suggesting we do such a thing would be laughed at, because it's not worth it to spend all that money protecting fish.

The protection of obscure species concerns a small portion of activists very much, and they are very loud in their activism, but there are other large portions of the population that don't care nearly as much and would prioritize economic growth over protecting endangered species. The activists' personal convictions are not more important or more valuable than those of people who don't care as much for endangered species. They're just different, and the activists tend to be louder and more passionate in voicing them.

View on HN

Seems to me an activist loud enough to get legislation passed could also be loud enough to organize an effective boycott or at least a pretty effective PR campaign against companies (or even individuals) that are threatening species.

People like animals. I'd certainly be willing to buy Coke rather than Pepsi if I thought it was going to save an owl or a possum or something. I also don't think Coke would be above putting an owl on some of their packaging to remind people that buying Coke will save owls.

I'd much prefer this approach to legislation.

This is true, but it's a matter of abstract ideals vs concrete benefits. Who are we to tell people in a poor community that certain economic development cannot take place because it will harm certain animals or plants?

This is a very real problem for communities in Africa and the Amazon basin; they are unable to build the infrastructure necessary for further development because privileged Western animal rights activists are more concerned with protecting animals than other humans.

You mean like the abstract ideal of capitalism vs the concrete benefit of healthy ecosystems?

Your approach requires that the market makes knowledge about endangered-species-killing-companies available.

I can't think of a single company off the top of my head that is a 'known endangered species killer' so I'd suspect the mechanism you suggest does not actually function.

A good rule of thumb is that if something is good, the market will support it. The "information asymmetry" argument is typically a red herring.

No legislation will stop species extermination if information about the extermination is unattainable. If it's not available to activists and competitors, it's not available to regulators.

If the information is attainable, then the aforementioned activists and competing companies are both incentivized, morally and financially, to find it.

That libertarian fantasy is unworkable from start to finish: How do you even know who's behaving badly, if one of the major changes is that environmental impact studies are no longer required for many projects?

And, assuming you somehow can get that information (which you can't), how you would you boycott some oil exploration contractor eight levels removed from the consumer? How do you boycott Monsanto/Bayer, which sell to farmers who sell to wholesalers who sell to every mill in the country who sell to every single bakery?

How do you boycott Monsanto/Bayer, which sell to farmers

You organize the farmers to boycott.

If you can raise $1mm from various environmental activist communities to lobby congress, you could just as easily raise the same million and organize a boycott that directly targets the revenue source of the bad actor.

How does raising $1mm - which is nothing spread out across any number of farmers going to affect the revenue stream?

Don't get lost in the weeds here. The main thing to understand is that if something has value, there is a market-based approach to get that value.

I don't need to argue that the environment and endangered species have value. They clearly do. I'm arguing that activists should act more like entrepreneurs and find a way to use market forces to extract that value - in this case, protecting species and their environments.

I've thrown out hypothetical examples, but I'm not an environmental activist, I don't pretend to understand the market. But I know the market is there, because this thread is dedicated to discussing the market opportunity.

The market-based approach is to lobby - it's the fastest and most efficient way, and America's brand of capitalism has figured it out. Ironically to go with the more common market, you'd need anti-lobby legislation.

Those activists you seem so annoyed with are trying to promote the survival of the entire ecosystem by making sure that indicator species survive. All our food for 7 billion+ people comes from the soil and the sea. The productivity of both are supported by a complex web of life. Each species that goes extinct snips at a thread of that web. If one of those webs were to collapse, most of us would starve. Mars is a dead world. We have just this one living world. Money is just a social construct, you can't eat it.

The extinction of a species is permanent, it won't exist tomorrow, and it won't exist in a thousand years. Contrasting that with transitory economic interests of the current electorate is short sighted.

There's a very good reason to be extremely conservative in extinguishing a species, with the benefit of hindsight it won't be worth it. The extinction of the mammoths and dodos also increased economic growth for someone at the time.

This is an odd account - three days old, explicitly labled as a throwaway, and it's post history consists entirely of FUD about internet privacy, corporate regulations, and authoritarian regimes. Is it some sort of performance art?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com