Environmentalists love to blame capitalism and businessmen for polluting the environment and advocate for market regulation. But are there any normal pro-market environmentalists? What about the implementation of the sustainable development concept under ancap?

анонимный вопрос

I let this question simmer for quite a while, but then by complete chance I had the opportunity to provide an interesting example of a pro-market approach to ecology. Vladimir Zolotoryov, a well-known Kyiv ancap, published a translation of an article by Joaquin Bukay regarding a market-based approach to reducing risks from climate change.

To generalize, the approach looks roughly like this. There are certain risks that depend on some external factors. If these are systemic risks, then information about the risks can be aggregated, and then the possibility to insure them arises. The wider the insurance market for this type of risk becomes, the more money is invested in ways to reduce them, because any insurance company is interested in paying out less on insurance claims.

And, in general, it doesn’t matter at all whether we are talking about the risk of becoming disabled in old age, or the risk of suffering from a hurricane caused by climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. If the risk is real, people will pay for insurance. If it is contrived, the insurance will sell poorly. Many people are willing to buy insurance against a poverty-stricken old age (many states in the 19th-20th centuries realized this and monopolized the pension industry). Those who fear unsustainable development, climate change, and the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano also have a fairly large community.

Imagine the profit: a bunch of people insured themselves against disasters caused by climate change, and then climatologists go and prove that it was a false theory and there are no risks from carbon emissions—that’s it, the collected money doesn’t have to be paid out, beauty! You can invent a new scary story to sell. But the main thing is that everything is completely voluntary, no taxes. That’s how the magic of ancap works.