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Shout it from the Streets
This is Fred Krupp president of the Environmental Defense Fund interviewed in Wired who after noting the success of markets in acid rain avoidance says this about approaches to carbon avoidance and global warming:
...I know that capitalism works, that American entrepreneurialism works, and we can damn well expect that private capital — not government money — will actually solve this problem.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on February 26, 2008 at 02:31 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
I hope so too - but let's not forget the critical issue that SO2 is much much easier to "scrub" out than CO2. That is what drove the acid rain market success more than anything else.
I'm all for markets too, but chemistry unfortunately has a hand in this too.
Posted by: Nate at Feb 26, 2008 8:42:45 AM
There is definitely a libertarian wing to the environmental movement. That might surprise some, but once a libertarian accepts the scientific basis for an externality ... it sort of follows.
I was surprised myself a few years ago at this agreement between Cato and the Sierra Club, but maybe I should not have been.
Posted by: odograph at Feb 26, 2008 9:00:45 AM
Krupp is certainly at the forefront of the environmental movement in terms of economic literacy and business acumen. As the director of environmental defense he was the broker of the environmental portion of the TXU buyout and he consistently trumpets cap and trade as the viable solution to the problem of carbon emissions.
That being said he doesn't seem to believe that a tax would work in the same way, if not better as most economists believe. He argues that utilities want a system that give them the possibility to earn money off their permits, and that they would never accept a carbon tax. Perhaps this is just a function of what he would believe is politically possible but perhaps he doesn't quite understand the efficiency argument for a Pigouvian tax...
Posted by: Chaz at Feb 26, 2008 10:19:49 AM
If you read between the lines, it is government planning (mandates) that are directing this technological development. The same way safety requirements have in the past.
This is nothing new. It's been a standard liberal prescription for decades.
Posted by: Mike Huben at Feb 26, 2008 10:40:38 AM
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7218002.stm
"Without regulation, markets would not have delivered unleaded gasoline, catalytic converters on the exhausts of cars or seatbelts and airbags, nor clean air to London after the killer smogs of the 1950s."
Posted by: amy.leblanc at Feb 26, 2008 2:37:15 PM
I'd be quite happy for libertarians to take the credit for solving the global warming problem if they'd actually sign up to the government intervention required to solve it. For one thing, too many of them are still wedded to the idea that there is no problem.
Posted by: Jim at Feb 26, 2008 3:14:07 PM
While I'm heartened to see enviros and libertarians finally coming together on this issue, I wish they would both take a look at perhaps the most popular, most uncontroversial, and largest public works projects in American history: the interstate highway system. I think you'd find that it's a huge determinant of land use and consequently environmental degradation.
Posted by: at Feb 26, 2008 5:05:33 PM
People who believe that the market will save us forget that the market is fundamentally based on the greed of the few. Those few have greater interests in expanded unregulated profits than clean air and less CO2. The market has got us in the situation to begin with I don't think it will get us out. There isn't a pill for every thing that ales.
Posted by: Jack Zabrowski at Mar 2, 2008 7:00:14 PM
