Richard Stroup, RIP

One of pioneers of free-market environmentalism has passed.

I was terribly sad to hear that noted economist Richard Stroup passed away last week. He succumbed to liver cancer after a long and productive career as an academic and policy analyst, and was one of the pioneers of free-market environmentalism.

Some readers may be familiar with his popular economics textbooks, co-authored with James Gwartney (now in the 17th edition). Others may know his extremely useful and pithy Eco-nomics: What Everyone Should Know about Economics and the Environment. I remember him as a teacher and a friend.

I first met Rick when I was working on environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Though based in Bozeman, Montana -- at Montana State University and PERC (then the Political Economy Research Center, now the Property & Environment Research Center) -- he would come to Washington, D.C. frequently, whether to testify, deliver a lecture, or brief political staff. He would share stories and insights and (if we were lucky) some wine.

Upon retiring from MSU, Rick and his wife, Jane Shaw, moved to North Carolina, where he continued to write, comment and think about public policy.

I learned quite a bit from him as a relatively newcomer to environmental policy, and value the times we had together. He will be missed.

Comments

[blue heron]

I do not know the late fellow Stroup, nor am I familiar with his record. But as a person who has battled kidney and bladder cancer for the past 38 years due to benzene exposure I shudder when I hear the terms "free market environmentalism." I also had the misfortune of unknowingly living in the early 1970's on what later became a Chevron PCB Superfund site. Something felt very wrong the two years I lived there, later I understood. The free market does a lousy job with the environment and there are far too many people like me and perhaps Stroup, who are human collateral damage.

[Darth Chocolate]

If you think the free market does poorly with the environment, try living in a third world country for a bit.

You would be forever grateful for the way the free market handles the environment.

[Sarcastr0]

We haven't used the free market to handle the environment for over a century.

[blue heron]

When it comes to a battle between the market and the environment the market always seems to win. You live with my stage 4 cancer for a while and then tell me all about it.

[Darth Chocolate]

It’s a shame that you have had to battle cancer, but the fact remains that if you were in a third world country, you would be far worse off.

[bernard11]

Except the problem in many third world countries is in fact the absence of any meaningful regulation. Now that may sometimes be because they are corrupt and the government is happy to let polluters operate freely in exchange for certain considerations.

When praising how well the free market deals with the environment remember Milton Friedman's idea that the only obligations of a corporation are to obey the law and maximize shareholder returns. If it's profitable to pollute, and no one stops them, they are going to pollute. That's your free market.

Now, some conservatives have supported ideas which try to solve the environmental problems our actually existing free markets create. I think Stroup was among them. How realistic those proposals are is a different matter.

[Brett Bellmore]

The problem in third world countries is that they can't AFFORD what you'd call "meaningful regulation". Environmentalism is a luxury good, wealthier countries are cleaner because they can afford to be.

Maybe without that 'meaningful regulation' America would be one big toxic waste dump. But America was a much poorer country prior to the environmental movement, and maybe we'd be cleaner today voluntarily, too, just because we can afford it.

[bernard11]

The problem in third world countries is that they can't AFFORD what you'd call "meaningful regulation". Environmentalism is a luxury good, wealthier countries are cleaner because they can afford to be.

At some level environmentalism is not a "luxury good." If environmental degradation causes illness, neurological harm, etc., it has powerful negative economic effects. It is very far from clear that these costs are outweighed by the savings from not having to use cleaner production methods.

The issue is that the people bearing the costs and the people reaping the savings are two distinctly different groups, and guess which one is in power in those countries. You know enough to know that under those conditions the tradeoff will have nothing to do with costs and everything to do with political power, legitimate or otherwise.

maybe we'd be cleaner today voluntarily, too, just because we can afford it.

If you're talking about things like nicer parks you have a point, but for other issues you simply have not identified a practical mechanism whereby the free market will produce environmental improvement. It does no good to wave your hands and say it would just happen. Even things like Coasean bargaining really would require government involvement to work

[blue heron]

You don't have to look at other countries, look up Duke Energy and coal remediation or how the radioactive Atlas uranium mill contaminated the Colorado River before the company declared bankruptcy. Money always wins and human beings always get the shaft.

[Brett Bellmore]

How about Love Canal? Oh, wait, that was the local government ignoring a company's warnings.

Or, look at the 2015 Gold King mine spill. Oh, wait, the government did that one themselves, too.

Powerful government is perfectly capable of screwing up the environment, too.

[Darth Chocolate]

The fact remains that only wealthy nations are the only ones who can afford to worry about the environment.

And they get wealthy through something that functions as a free market. Communist countries generally either don’t have the wealth, or if they do, they are more interested in growing their economies than the environment.

[blue heron]

And poor and remote countries like the Maldives, Palau and Fiji are likely to be completely submerged in the next fifty years because the rich countries don't give a hoot about global warming.

[Ben_]

Billions and billions of people should be made artificially poor for hundreds of years so thousands in island countries don't have to possibly build or move.

[blue heron]

If only you had the fortune or misfortune to live or be born in one of those places. Do you think you would have the same attitude and lack of sympathy?

[Ben_]

Did you see today Pelosi bought an oceanfront mansion in Florida? She’s apparently not too worried.

And sympathy is for when something bad happens, not for when something somewhat challenging might or might not happen over the course of the next 120 years.

[Krayt]

I'm sure people on the Maldives will get right on their computers and cell phones and bitch about it, when not serving tourists who fly in on jets.

Amelioration is what will happen. Command and control breaking of the economy, coincidentally overlapping with corrupt behaviors to get in the way of business, should not.

[Currentsitguy]

The bottom line is with a global population rapidly approaching 8 billion we need to focus our efforts on learning how to adapt and cope with a dynamic climate rather that trying to preserve some unobtainable arbitrary status quo.

Much of the Sahara was once a verdant grassland. We have plenty of rock art and archaeological evidence to prove it. It changed. The people there learned to adapt. Not all do. The end of the ice age doomed millions of species including our close relatives the Neanderthals. Extinction is a natural part of the planet's cycle.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Currentsitguy, the current rate of extinctions is an utterly unnatural part of the planet's typical cycle. You cannot discuss this stuff without noting details, though. Probably, when the dinosaurs' asteroid hit (or whatever else happened) the extinction rate then was as high or higher than now. Maybe the same with the Permian extinction. It is disturbing, however, to have to look to the history of life's worst catastrophes to find the right comparisons. Minimizing today's extinction rate makes about as much sense as minimizing Covid—but the risk from the former is far higher than the risk from the latter.

[Currentsitguy]

Current research shows the last Ice Age shows it ended very rapidly, over the period of just a few decades. within the lifetimes of single individuals. Rapid climatological change is not unprecedented. It's part of the natural cycle. No species can live without having an impact on the environment around them, particularly one as numerous as us

I think we have far bigger fish to fry, such as with increasing automation, what are we going to do with all the excess population for whom there will never be any gainful employment available? How do we avoid the inevitable social unrest that results from that?

[Gandydancer]

"...likely to be completely submerged in the next fifty years because..."

You're not increasing anyone's sympathy for your personal claims off causation by spouting innumerate nonsense like this.

[Toranth]

I've had people tell me they could feel the year-to-year warming.

It's statements like those that make it obvious that these are not serious people thinking deeply about the problem, but are instead True Believers in the Fire and Brimstone (Green version).

[Ben_]

Some will insist climate change is not like a religion, even though the warmeners have:
- special holidays and observances like Earth Hour
- their own Ragnarok-style doomsday myths
- priest-like individuals using esoteric mechanisms only a few people claim to understand to divine the future
- evangelists (Greta)
- ritual recycling behavior
- carbon sins

And they also have the idea that climate change is omnipotent and causes everything: warm weather, cold weather, mild weather, rain, drought, floods, snow, winds, hurricanes, lack of hurricanes, wars, animals changing color, the collapse of that building in Florida, earthquakes, rioting, illness, bugs, lack of bugs, etc. Any newsworthy phenomenon: climate change did it. And for most of the believers, these claims are not falsifiable.

But it's nothing like a religion. Mustn't think that.

[bernard11]

As opposed to the guy bringing a snowball into the Senate to prove nothing's happening?

[blue heron]

https://www.dnaindia.com/viral/photo-gallery-five-beautiful-islands-including-maldives-and-fiji-to-disappear-in-water-before-end-of-this-century-here-s-why-2894120/maldives-may-submerge-in-water-by-2100-2894122

[Toranth]

The highest point in any of those three countries is only three inches high?!

BTW, Fiji will never be completely submerged - there is simply not enough water on the planet to do that.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Toranth, there is enough tectonic dynamism to do it—the rocks on the top of Mt Everest are full of marine fossils.

Won't happen soon, of course, but there is still a general point to be made about complicated processes with unforeseeable feedbacks and interactions. Policies seem unwise to prioritize economic efficiency based on assumed margins between current practices and ecological catastrophe.

Free markets already move nature in the direction of ecological catastrophe, at measurable rates. What cannot be measured yet is what level of stress delivers catastrophe, but that is hardly reassurance, more the opposite.

[blue heron]

The first village in Fiji, Vunidogoloa, was lost in 2014. People had to swim to their houses. Currently over 80 other Fijan communities are similarly endangered. An island does not have to be completely submerged to be uninhabitable. Perhaps we should chide them for not being as resourceful as the good folk in Rotterdam?

[Toranth]

You claimed the islands would be completely submerged in 50 years.
The estimated sea rise in 50 years is about 3 inches.
Your statement is, trivially, false.

Vunidogoloa was a victim of erosion and subduction, not sea rise. Like many places built on the coast and in river flood zones, they'd been suffering a continual loss of land (due in no small part to their own poor farming practices), and knew about the problem even more than 100 years ago. The other side of the island, BTW, is rising.

As for "swim to their houses", I don't know what you are drinking, because the records say the evacuation was planned almost 10 years in advance, not an emergency event. Even today the village's location is above water - some parts more than 20 meters up.

[Brett Bellmore]

"And poor and remote countries like the Maldives, Palau and Fiji are likely to be completely submerged in the next fifty years because the rich countries don't give a hoot about global warming."

Weirdly, Some Small Islands Are Growing Bigger in The Face of Rising Seas

""Such projections are founded on the assumption that islands are geologically static landforms that will simply drown as sea-level rises," Ford, along with his co-authors, explained in another study published last year.

That assumption turns out to be flawed. A 2018 analysis of 30 coral atolls in the Pacific and Indian Oceans – encompassing 709 islands in total – found that 88.6 percent of the islands were either stable or increased in area in recent decades, and that none of the atolls had lost land area overall."

[blue heron]

Perhaps it the fijans grew gills, that would be the ultimate adaptation, right? Will be interesting to see what tricks we have to leach all the pfas and phthalates in our bodies, all that teflon is wreaking havoc on our endocrine systems. Will be very slick.

[Gandydancer]

IF their country is going underwater they'll need to move, or do something like the Dutch. The rest of the world isn't going to stop reproducing in order to save them.

[Sarcastr0]

Now that's an impressive false choice.

[Stephen Lathrop]

So-called free-market environmentalism is about free markets, not about environmentalism. "Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded" – John Muir.

That was 1909. For more than a century, that observation has endured without contradiction.

[Krayt]

And had people in 1909 slammed on the breaks due to foolish notions of command and control environmentalism, we'd be lucky to have 1970 level technology today.

Thanks for murdering hundreds of millions if not several billion.

[Sarcastr0]

1909? When the ideas of conservation and regulation of corporations began? There was plenty of folks caterwauling this kind of command and control was gonna end America.

Seems about the same as the New Deal and the Great Society and the ACA and nowadays. THIS time it's truly the limit and we'll be socialist!

[David Nieporent]

Only things dollarable are safe.

[blue heron]

God forbid we leave decisions about our species survival to the economists, bankers and engineers. The empathy and concern for people's real pain here resembles an entomologist casually pulling the wings off of live flies. I think back to Herman Kahn's postulations on life after a nuclear war. "Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, objective studies indicate that even though the amount of human tragedy would be greatly increased in the postwar world, the increase would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their descendants.” Hello Doctor Strangelove. Continue to rearrange titanic deck chairs until we enter the mass extinction, tempered only by the solace that you managed to clutch the most number of bitcoins in your grimy paw before we cashed it all in.

[Ben_]

You speak of sympathy. Where’s your sympathy for the billions of people you want to live artificially poor, artificially deprived lives? Why do thousands on islands matter more than billions on continents?

[Sarcastr0]

This is called begging the question.

The net benefit of conservation is actually not really controversial.

[Ben_]

^ This is called changing the subject.

[Geezer]

If we lowly Commoners didn't have politicians and bureaucrats to tell us how to live, we would foul our own nests.

[Brett Bellmore]

"God forbid we leave decisions about our species survival to the economists, bankers and engineers."

What's your alternative? Letting the decisions be made by people who don't know squat about how the world actually works?

[blue heron]

Another false choice but I'll play the game; poor and deprived is > dead.

[Ben_]

How do you die from water rising 2 mm per year?

You must think people who live on islands are extremely dumb. Even insects and rodents seek higher ground rather than drown, but you don't even give people living on islands that much credit.

[blue heron]

There are lots of horrid tertiary effects from rising sea levels, including lack of fresh water and an increase in infectious diseases like dengue fever. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4622157/

[Brett Bellmore]

"Scientists studying the 2013–14 outbreak believe climate change was one factor but that increasingly mobile populations, urbanization and the appearance of a virus serotype that had not been seen before in Fiji also contributed to its severity."

IOW, they had proof of causes that would normally be adequate to explain a disease outbreak, but threw in "climate change" just because.

[bernard11]

It's a conspiracy, Brett.

[Brett Bellmore]

It's unfalsifiable: When everything is caused by global warming, nothing is.

They made a vague reference to climate change, and then listed actual classical causes of disease outbreaks, which were perfectly capable of explaining what happened. What did mentioning climate change, without invoking any causal mechanism, contribute?

Nothing.

[Ben_]

Yeah, climate change has a supernatural, unfalsifiable ability to cause everything. Climate change was wrathful and decided to smite islanders with diseases to afflict them.

[blue heron]

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has always been an industry shill, getting scads of funding from EXXON among others. . .Who can forget the immortal words of it's founder, Fred Smith, touting the benefits of anthropogenic climate change: "Most of the indications right now are it looks pretty good. Warmer winters, warmer nights, no effects during the day because of clouding, sounds to me like we're moving to a more benign planet, more rain, richer, easier productivity to agriculture."

[Brett Bellmore]

Words of wisdom, that need to be remembered. That is indeed the pattern scientists expect of global warming: The nights warm more than the days, the winters more than the summers, and the higher latitudes more than the equator.

They just kind of neglect to mention it most of the time because balmy nights and mild winters don't have the same scare value as heat waves.

[Sarcastr0]

Also huge storms, flooding, and droughts.

As an engineer you should know what happens when you pump energy into a complex system.

And you also know how transition costs to a new climate normal would not be great.

I'm not screaming apocalypse, but it'd suck mightily and we should do what we can to avoid what we can.

[Brett Bellmore]

As an engineer who aced thermodynamics, I understand better than you what happens when, instead of pumping more energy into a complex system, you merely throw an insulating blanket over the radiator.

We're not talking about an increase in insolation, the amount of energy entering the system. We're talking about an increase in insulation, the difficulty of energy leaving the system.

The end result is a reduction in Carnot efficiency, and thus work performed.

And, indeed, if you talk to climate modelers, instead of publicists, they'll dismiss as unfounded predictions of generally worse storms.

[Ben_]

"… transition costs to a new climate normal would not be great."

This is an example of the argument that the alternative is not perfect, therefore [literally anything]. Want to hurt people? Well, the alternative is not perfect utopia for all, so why not?

[blue heron]

With the rise in fires in the west, new continued drought, rising sea levels and a host of other warming effects, I have to ask you Brett, how is that working out?

[Brett Bellmore]

California's screwed up forest management is indeed not working out. The oceans have been rising since the last glacial period, and "a host of other warming effects" mostly boils down to blaming everything you don't like on global warming.

[blue heron]

Forest mismanagement raised the temperatures three degrees in California in the last century?

[Brett Bellmore]

No, that was NOAA revising past temperatures. 😉

Forest mismanagement causes more severe fires, though.

[JasonT20]

This research paper would have classified this claim under 5.1.4 (Temperature records are unreliable), 5.2.5 (Climate scientists are biased), and/or 5.3.2 (Climate science is a conspiracy). (See Figure 1)

[Brett Bellmore]

I'd classify the paper under 6.3.7 (Classifying anything refutes it).

[blue heron]

Forest mismanagement is a familiar canard used by people allergic to the truth when discussing global warming. My area of Southern California has no forests, the fires typically occur in sage and chaparral and they have become exponentially greater in the last fifty years, resulting in the loss of thousands of homes. Dry and hot does the trick just fine, no forests required.

[Brett Bellmore]

A key part of the dynamic is building houses in places that tend to catch fire. That really does increase the human impact of fires, curiously.

Kind of like building along the coast increases the financial impact of hurricanes, without any need for hurricanes to have actually gotten any worse.

[Jmaie]

No forests? Angeles Crest National Forest would like a word with you. And no, the issue of forest mismanagement is not a canard. Saying that forest fires have increased strictly due to global warming is silly, why do you people insist on the all or nothing approach?

Chaparral cones sit idle until heated, that species evolved in an environment of regular fires. Been that way since long before the industrial revolution. The wood is naturally dry with highly flammable sap, if left alone fires tend to burn out quickly keeping them localized (think ebola). Cones in the hottest areas crack open allowing seeds to germinate.

Forest management practices centering on fire prevention allow a build up of fuel which results in much larger fires. I was living in La Crescenta in the late 70's when an example burned a number of homes. These practices were instituted (IIRC) back in the 30's and have been causing issues ever since.

[blue heron]

I said my area JMAIE, which happens to be San Diego and the areas that have suffered like Fallbrook and Bonsall are a long way from Angeles Crest. It is getting hotter and dryer, hard as it is for some of you to understand.