free market environmentalism

Human Achievement of the Day: Tree-Bombing Planes

by Michelle Minton on March 8, 2011 · 1 comment

in Environment, Features, Private Conservation

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As our frenemies over at Treehugger wrote last October about how Lockheed Martin had come up with an ingenious idea for its 2,500 decommissioned Hercules cargo planes: mass-planting of trees.

As The Guardian reports, while these planes were once used for aerial assaults, they can now drop sapling-containing cones instead of land mines — about 3,000 cones a minute or about 900,000 a day.

According to Peter Simmons from Lockheed Martin:

Equipment we developed for precision planting of fields of landmines can be adapted easily for planting trees.

…The tree cones are pointed and designed to bury themselves in the ground at the same depth as if they had been planted by hand. They contain fertilizer and a material that soaks up surrounding moisture, watering the roots of the tree.

The containers are metal but rot immediately so the tree can put its roots into the soil.

Lockheed has set up Aerial Forestation Inc., a company to market the idea. But just who might pay for something like this? According the article, the system works well for replacing forests that have disappeared for one reason or another. For example, desert areas like Egypt, where there is already a pilot program in the works, the Scottish mountains, or the Black Forest, part of which was cut down for strategic military purposes during the Cold War.

The turboprop plane, which was originally designed for troop medical evacuation and cargo transport, might someday be used to speed up the process of reforestation post-disaster. For example, when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, it took nearly 25 years for wind-blown seeds to take root to begin to regrow the forest that the super-heated pyroclastic flow leveled. Perhaps with this new way of planting we can accomplish the Herculean task of regrowing an entire forest in less than a decade.

This is what human achievement hour is all about: using human intelligence, creativity, and technology — not government interference or mandated conservation to come up with the solutions of the future.

The Environment is a Luxury Good

by Iain Murray on August 3, 2010

in Environment, Global Warming, Politics as Usual, Private Conservation, Regulation

One of the central insights of Free-Market Environmentalism is that people treat the environment as a luxury good.  They are willing to pay for it when they have spare money, but not when they don’t.  That’s why treating the environment as a tax, which is how statist environmentalism works, arouses resentment, while treating it as a privately-owned asset, like FME does, promotes stewardship and conservation.

There’s more evidence for this view from a new study, Environmental Concern and the Business Cycle: The Chilling Effect of Recession.  Here’s the abstract:

This paper uses three different sources of data to investigate the association between the business cycle—measured with unemployment rates—and environmental concern. Building on recent research that finds internet search terms to be useful predictors of health epidemics and economic activity, we find that an increase in a state’s unemployment rate decreases Google searches for “global warming” and increases searches for “unemployment,” and that the effect differs according to a state’s political ideology. From national surveys, we find that an increase in a state’s unemployment rate is associated with a decrease in the probability that residents think global warming is happening and reduced support for the U.S to target policies intended to mitigate global warming. Finally, in California, we find that an increase in a county’s unemployment rate is associated with a significant decrease in county residents choosing the environment as the most important policy issue. Beyond providing the first empirical estimates of macroeconomic effects on environmental concern, we discuss the results in terms of the potential impact on environmental policy and understanding the full cost of recessions.

The paper’s authors are obviously concerned that the recession means that statist environmental policies are less likely to be enacted.  It would be helpful if, instead of thinking so linearly, environmental academics could think what opportunities this gives to advance free-market environmentalism.  It is clear that low-cost environmentalism is much more likely to be supported during a recession than high-cost environmentalism.  because free-market environmentalism shifts the burdens of environmental protection from the masses to those who are willing to pay, it should be much more attractive to people during a recession.  It is indicative of the ideological blinkers of the environmental establishment that this possibility does not occur to the authors.

Elephantine Mistake

by Iain Murray on January 9, 2009 · 1 comment

in Environment, International

In the 80s and 90s, Zimbabwean elephant management was a magnificent illustration of how property rights and markets combine to protect and even rescue endangered species.

Since Robert Mugabe’s government turned to racist demagoguery and violence to keep in power, the elephant has suffered tremendously as property rights and markets have been shattered. Today, it is reported that
elephants are being slaughtered for food by Mugabe’s army.

The elephant is probably one of the lesser reasons to work for the downfall of this vicious dictator, who has ruined the breadbasket of Africa. Yet if its role as a “charismatic megafauna” can help, I trust the green environmental groups will join me in calling for his overthrow and the restoration of the successful policies that allowed the elephant to thrive.