Last week, Andrew P. Morriss of PERC debated Kate Gordon of the Center for American Progress on The False Promise of Green Energy, a new book by PERC scholars. The event was held at the Cato Institute and is now available to watch online.
Andy's remarks are also the subject of today's Cato Daily Podcast. Listen here:
As has become the tradition, Laura Huggins injects some free market environmentalism wisdom into the national conversation on Earth Day.
This year she's at it again in the Daily Caller: "Green activism is often a threat to the very environment that activists are trying to save." Instead, she writes, "a better long-term strategy for Mother Earth might entail a little more economics and a little less activism."
To show your support for rights-based, free market solutions on Earth Day, please join our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter and recommend us there to your friends.
In honor of Earth Day, Reason.tv offers this video featuring Ron Bailey (a 2010 PERC Julian Simon fellow):
PERC enviropreneur alum Chris Corbin is featured at New West today for his water market consulting work with Lotic:
The company takes an approach to water different from engineering or legal consultants, traditionally the ones involved in these types of conversations, Corbin said. Lotic’s role is to look at water as an asset, just as one might look at a piece of land. Water rights are property rights, meaning anyone who owns a right is allowed to sell it to the highest bidder. But the market is informal and most people don’t really know what their water rights are worth, Corbin said.
The article goes on to describe how Lotic helps keep water in stream for fish and wildlife habitat through water markets. For more on Chris and how Lotic is "turning blue into green," see his essay in PERC Reports or this from PERCtv:
Jamie Workman, a PERC enviropreneur alum, has an excellent four-part series at IUCN on the paradoxes of water.
1. The paradox of value: "Water is priceless in use yet worthless in exchange."
2. The paradox of efficiency: "Your water-saving device increases our collective thirst."
3. The paradox of monopoly: "Thriving urban waterworks must encourage and reward waste."
4. Resolving the paradoxes: "Forget about virtue, enduring conservation must tap human vice."
For more from Workman, see this earlier post of his or read his book.
Cross-posted at Grist.
A recent post on Grist attempted to dismantle the intellectual foundations of free market environmentalism—the application of markets and property rights to solve environmental problems. But far from toppling a burgeoning movement within modern environmentalism, it succeeded only in misrepresenting the subject.
To recap: Clark Williams-Derry claimed that while free market environmentalism may be effective in some areas of the environment (e.g., fisheries management), its reliance upon unrealistic assumptions about the real world largely relegates it to useless intellectual theorizing. In particular, the Coase theorem—an important component of market-based environmentalism named for Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase—amounts to “a quirky but not particularly relevant bit of theoretical math.”
While there is certainly much more to free market environmentalism than the work of Coase (see Terry Anderson and Donald Leal’s book Free Market Environmentalism for more details), I focus here mostly on the misinformed critique of Coase that has been used to discredit free market environmentalism.
So, who is Coase, what is his theorem, and what does it have to do with free market environmentalism?
Much of Libya's water supply used to come from expensive desalination plants on the coast, which left little water to irrigate land—vital in this largely desert country. Moreover the coastal aquifer historically used in Tripoli was becoming contaminated and its salinity was increasing. So in 1983 a massive engineering project, known as the Great Man-Made River Project, was created to supply water from desert aquifers to the coastal region for the majority of the Libya’s 6.3m people and to expand agriculture through irrigation.The project currently extracts 2.5 million cubic meters of water per day (expected to reach 6.5 million per day) from 1,100 wells and through 4,000 kilometers of pipelines. The CS Monitor has more details:
The Libyan government heavily subsidizes the water for farmers who pay about $0.62 for one cubic meter; slightly less than half the price citizens pay to drink it.The government claims the reserves will last 4,625 years, but independent estimates suggest the reality is more like 60 to 100 years.
The water is drawn from an aquifer system shared with Egypt, Chad, and Sudan. Such transboundary aquifers are a classic case of the tragedy of the commons. As The Economist suggested last fall, an emerging trend in multi-state agreements over shared aquifers offers hope that the tragedy can be avoided.
Given the recent developments in Libya, the project's future is in question. Pro-Qaddafi forces have reportedly destroyed pipelines carrying water to regions under opposition control. Here are more details on the project and here are Terry Anderson and Pamela Snyder on groundwater rights and markets.
An Oregon county has approved a compensation fund for ranchers who lose livestock to wolves in the northeastern corner of the state, next to Idaho and Washington.The fund will begin this year as a community-based program accepting donations from people, businesses, and nonprofits.The Community Alliance Livestock Fund, or CALF, was approved unanimously on Monday by Wallowa County commissioners, who hope it can serve as a statewide model for Oregon.
1. How the market can keep streams flowing, from Rob Harmon on TEDx. See also his interview with David Zetland. Related: is water a big deal?
2. Should the government subsidize renewable energy? (video)
3. Indian entrepreneur turns pachyderm poop into paper.
4. Energy subsidies: what are the facts? From Steve Hayward.
5. You can now subscribe to PERC Reports online.
In the lush highlands of eastern Uganda, mud is a valuable commodity— so long as it is “quality” mud, with certain characteristics coveted by residents who construct their homes out of the stuff.You can read Zachary's whole piece, as well as the new edition of PERC Reports, at PERCReports.org.The search for mud is simple. Go north toward the town of Sironko about ten miles from the provincial capital of Mbale, and then, a few hundred feet past a cellular phone tower, you turn off the paved road and wind down a potholed lane. There you join a procession of mud customers. They come in trucks, cars, and even on bicycles. Upon reaching the village, Bukhalo, drivers turn left onto a narrower path that takes them into the finest mud quarry for many miles.
About two dozen families control specific pieces of the quarry. Each hires its own diggers, sells its own mud, and sets prices independent of each other. No individuals possess formal, legal title to their portion of the mud quarry, but no one considers this strange. Claims on the mud lands stretch back to the years before Uganda’s independence in 1962, when the British managed these parts. Everyone knows that their ancestors bequeathed them the use of a particular patch of the mud quarry. No one has ever asked for proof of their ownership or even tallied the costs of forgoing title in favor of “customary law.”
Founded 30 years ago in Bozeman, Montana, PERC—the Property and Environment Research Center—is the nation’s oldest and largest institute dedicated to improving environmental quality through property rights and markets.
PERC’s publications, each designed to resonate with specific groups, move ideas generated at PERC to broader audiences.
Research is at the heart of PERC's work, with a focus on the question: What is the link between economic growth and environmental quality?
The goal of PERC’s programs is to fully realize the vision of establishing “PERC University,” where scholars, students, policy makers, and others convene to expand the applications of free market environmentalism.
PERC's fellowships share a common goal of exposing new scholars, students, journalists, and policy makers to free market environmentalism, as well as enable scholars already familiar with FME to explore new applications.
PERC continues to publish and present a broad range of research and discussion through podcasts, videos, and other multimedia channels.