> why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all?
Unintended consequences of large-scale ecological engineering perhaps. Sure, commercial beekeepers can increase prices and the neonicotinoid users can accept it as an indirect cost of their choice of pesticide, but what about the large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied into commercial interests, but on which we still depend?
Seems to me like there's a huge indiscriminant spillover effect into an incredibly complex system, the implications of which can not be easily predicted nor priced.
One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost onto carbon emissions. Also note how you said "have fewer ill effects on other mammals"... there are still effects, and asbestos seemed like a miracle material before the long-term effects were studied.
The indiscriminate usage of an chemical toxic enough to cause measurable ecological web disruption sounds like a geo-engineering quagmire to me, even if the commercial front-line can compensate with higher prices. How do you accurately price what you don't know?
>what about the large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied into commercial interests, but on which we still depend?
Going even further, what about the side-effects on the very same field?
Pesticides kill insects, but they kill both beneficial (pest eating) and pestilent insects. The problem is the bad guys can bounce back faster - picture the deer population vs. wolf population. This means that, paradoxically, the use of pesticides now leads to a greater need for pesticides later.
The solution is to step back, recognize this negative feedback loop, and address the root causes of pest invasion: dead soil and loss of biodiversity. This is where techniques like cover cropping, interplanting, and inoculating with compost (soil microorganisms) come in.
One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost onto carbon emissions.
Actually, this isn't a shortcoming of the market as such. It's a failure in conjunction of our incomplete recognition of private property rights. By preventing certain types of property from having private ownership, we don't allow the market to correct itself. More specifically, if we had some private entity or entities that were recognized as the owners of air or water, then they would be able to recover damages from the polluters, thus removing ability to externalize the cost of pollution.
But once you start removing things from the purview of the market (in this case by saying that nobody can own it, and thus nobody has an ownership interest in protecting or has a right to damages), then you're actively preventing the market from correcting. I think it's really amazing that the market does as well as it does, considering how ubiquitous are the regulations that handicap it.
Edit: I should have read farther down the chain, where this [1] mentions the same idea.
I don't want to endorse your position as a monopoly owner of both air and water, and yet I want to reward you for boldness. There isn't a button for that.
>if we had some private entity or entities that were recognized as the owners of air or water
How exactly would that work? Say I buy a piece of land. Under your proposal, I presume I would have to pay a licensing fee to Nestle whenever it rains, and to 3M for the privilege of breathing?
So are you saying that the solution to externalisation of damage to the environment by a corporate entity is to have other corporate entities own everything? All the air, all the sea, all the rivers etc?
It's certainly one possible solution. This isn't just my idle speculation; see Coase Theorem [1] in economics:
The theorem states that if trade in an externality is possible and there are sufficiently low transaction costs, bargaining will lead to an efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property.
In the interest of intellectual honesty, I should go on to quote:
In practice, obstacles to bargaining or poorly defined property rights can prevent Coasian bargaining. ... Coase argued that real-world transaction costs are rarely low enough to allow for efficient bargaining and hence the theorem is almost always inapplicable to economic reality. Since then, others have demonstrated the importance of the perfect information assumption and shown using game theory that inefficient outcomes are to be expected when this assumption is not met.
That being said, it should be equally clear that the failures of public choice [2] are also legion, and in the example of pollution, it's clear that the regulatory system has bungled quite a lot of it, so it's far from obvious that the private ownership approach would be any worse.
Unintended consequences of large-scale ecological engineering perhaps. Sure, commercial beekeepers can increase prices and the neonicotinoid users can accept it as an indirect cost of their choice of pesticide, but what about the large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied into commercial interests, but on which we still depend?
Is it relevant that honeybees are not native to North America, and can't pollinate many native American plants?
Unintended consequences of large-scale ecological engineering perhaps. Sure, commercial beekeepers can increase prices and the neonicotinoid users can accept it as an indirect cost of their choice of pesticide, but what about the large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied into commercial interests, but on which we still depend?
Seems to me like there's a huge indiscriminant spillover effect into an incredibly complex system, the implications of which can not be easily predicted nor priced.
One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost onto carbon emissions. Also note how you said "have fewer ill effects on other mammals"... there are still effects, and asbestos seemed like a miracle material before the long-term effects were studied.
The indiscriminate usage of an chemical toxic enough to cause measurable ecological web disruption sounds like a geo-engineering quagmire to me, even if the commercial front-line can compensate with higher prices. How do you accurately price what you don't know?