Robert Costanza has a new model for moving the task of preserving the environment from the regulatory world to the economic one.
...there are more than moral reasons for governments to pursue environmentally friendly policies: There can also be significant economic value.

We figured to expand to this hypothetical area would take about $45 billion a year, worldwide. So it's an order of magnitude [greater than what we spend now], but it's a lot more area, and $45 billion a year in the larger scheme of things is not that much money. It's a small fraction of the global military budget.

And it's also a small fraction of what's spent on perverse subsidies -- those are huge subsidies that are not benefiting society at all but are benefiting only the private recipients of those subsidies. Society would be much better off if they were eliminated -- so if you eliminated even a small fraction of those perverse subsidies you could pay for this reserve network. So $45 billion a year for the global reserve network: We're not saying that's all you have to spend, but it's our hypothetical scenario.


I especially like the idea of removing the hissing and spitting over who has the right science from the policy arena. If a proposed development has an environmental risk let the developers post a bond equivalent to what the downside of that risk. Then it becomes an economic decision, "Is this risk affordable by the company in light of the potential reward?" There would be a genuine economic incentive to keep the environmental impact to a minimum and the corporate world is much more responsive to economic incentives than regulatory ones.

If I were a candidate for office one of the things I would really go after is the elimination of the perverse subsidies. That would be like a real tax cut for everyone as opposed to fake tax cuts that only benefit the few at the top of the heap.