Editor’s Note: This concludes a two-part series with real-world examples of anticipating and ameliorating extreme weather events, a challenge throughout human history. Today’s post was originally published at MR on May 21, 2015.
Yesterday’s post explained how market incentives can address environmental issues, including the believed-to-be negatives of climate change. Prices of inputs and outputs, utilizing resources even if they are subject to the tragedy of the commons, incorporate dynamic environmental changes. Markets, in other words, offer the potential for dynamic responses.
If climate change reduces the productivity of land for wheat production, for example, the price of land will be high relative to its productivity. This generates an incentive for wheat farmers to seek new places for wheat production where land prices are lower. Hence, the 2012 Bloomberg news headline, “Corn Belt Shifts North With Climate as Kansas Crop Dies.”…
Continue ReadingEditor’s Note: A classic post at MasterResource from a decade ago concerns the most important weather/climate strategy in a new political era. Written by Terry Anderson and Donald Leal of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), this post explains how humankind successfully meets challenges with adaptation rather than top-down government edicts. Part II is tomorrow.
Rather than simply throwing up our hands in despair with respect to what appear to be intractable problems of establishing property rights and encouraging markets in regard to global climate, we turn to a major theme of free-market environmentalism—dynamic markets provide the best hope for human interaction with dynamic environments.
Once we abandon static models of market equilibrium and recognize that people respond to changing environmental conditions (e.g., experiencing rising sea levels), as well as resource prices that reflect those conditions (e.g.,…
Continue Reading“To turn the noun ‘resources’ into the verb ‘resourcing,’ to discard entirely the notion of a resource ‘glass’ that is somewhere between full and empty, requires one more analytic step—a step that Zimmermann failed to take.”
In 1972, just two years after the first Earth Day, a team of scholars from MIT published a 200-page book called The Limits to Growth. Using the emerging instrument of computer models, they created a worldwide stir by suggesting that science had now put numbers to a few self-evident truths. Non-renewable resources are fixed; the consumption of such resources must eventually end; any civilization based on such consumption must collapse. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis called the work “likely to be one of the most important documents of our age” (January 28, 1972).
Of course, the scholars acknowledged that they were dealing with variables.…
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