Can Free Markets Fix The Environment?

Capitalism gets blamed for everything wrong in the world. “If we just end capitalism everything would be perfect.” Unfortunately for our species we have short life spans and don’t know our history. Either its been rewritten, not taught or just lost in time. From what we do know, life on this planet was extremely hard until just recently. A low income family in the west lives better than most kings throughout history.

Common folk live better now than royalty did in earlier times
Things Are Getting Better, So Why Are We All So Gloomy?

“Sure our standard of living has gone up but we’re destroying the environment to achieve it.” As compared to what? If tomorrow morning we turned off all the fossil fuels because they are “evil”, by the end of this year a billion people would die from starvation. Within a few years billions more would die. Clean energy technology is not ready to replace fossil fuels. The more extreme environmentalist are unknowingly advocating for genocide against poor black and brown people around the world if you look at their environmental policies.

How Oil Prices Affect the Price of Food

Here is the deal with clean energy technology and free markets, when its ready they will adopt it. Research is taking place around the world into new batteries for storage. Research is taking place into affordable efficient solar. The sun is a giant ball of energy, we just can’t properly harness it yet. This is just a couple examples. Once we have a feasible clean energy source to replace fossil fuels we will replace them.

3d Graphene in solar
Direct conversion of CO2 to 3D graphene….
Graphene and batteries

99% of the people who will read this are already capitalist, for that 1% who don’t know this. Free market revolve around people providing goods and services that benefit society. They provide them by solving problems. Need a house, someone will build it. To build it they need tools so someone will make tools. In order to make tools you need components. To make components you need materials. See where I’m going with this? Entrepreneurs are people who find a need in the market place and attempt to solve it.

How does this apply to environment? People don’t want to live in toxic environments. There is a need to solve environment issues. If governments would get out of the way, the markets would meet the demand through innovation. If you get a chance, look into urban gardening, permaculture, food forest, and other related technology/systems for growing food. Its more environmental than traditional farming, water efficient, more nutritious, and gets higher yields per sq foot. This is just 1 area of environment technology.

Permaculture Economics

In order to have true free market capitalism, you need to have individual rights and freedoms with personal responsibility. No special rights or privileges based on status. This mean you are responsible for externalities. If you poison someone else you can be held liable. Do really think poor Chinese farmer living downstream from a solar power plant want to be poisoned by the plant? They have no recourse. Governments protect bad actors, free markets punish them. China got rich by exploiting its people and the environment. All I see is a huge economic opportunity to fix their environment after communism fails.

The Dirty Side of a “Green” Industry
China’s ageing solar panels are going to be a big environmental problem

I just want to be clear, if government fines for environmental pollution are lower than the cost properly removing the waste. Then there is an economic incentive to pollute. The punishment has to be greater than the cost properly removing the waste. People need to he held liable. You can’t hold people liable if they are protected by governments and their corrupt regulations. Libertarians want to hold people liable for externalities (anything that effects 3rd parties) proportional to the actual damages.

Yes we have environment issues we need to resolve. Advances in technology will solve them. Think of the technological progress we have made since 1918 and carry that same exponential rate into 2118. Don’t panic we can solve our problems through voluntary co-operation or as many on the left call it "evil capitalism".