Richard Littlemore's blog

Hats off to Jonathan Adler for his blogging of the Skeptics Conference. His fairly instant record of the event is exhaustive, accurate and (parenthetical comments excepted) evenhanded.

My favourite of his 13 posts is the one on Gregory Arnold's presentation on market trading mechanisms. Here you have the libertarian Adler struggling to find relevant criticism of a free market fellow traveller. Arnold, after all, is trying to figure out how to make money on emission traditing - how to make a profit saving the world. But Adler notices that the market has an inevitable government component (as all well-regulated markets do) and he can't stand the notion. He concludes: "...where it is impossible to create actual property rights in environmental resources (because you can't let the market work where you don't have property rights upon which the market is based) tradable credit systems may make sense. But for me, this approach is never more than a second-best solution." He doesn't propose a "first-best" solution.

The kinds of behaviour changes we need are not so much individual as collective. It’s the rule changes: the building codes, transportation infrastructure, transit, urban form – nobody makes those decisions as individuals. That’s why we need to support these collective policies – they are more important than, say, buying a smaller vehicle. If we just focus on the individual behaviour we miss all the big items. UBC Professor John Robinson

For the full text of an excellent interview by www.thetyee.ca, click here.