Environment protection via the free-market

Give fishermen an ownership stake in the fisheries they make their livelihood from and watch the fishery depletion issue vanish: http://vimeo.com/23564293

I had never heard of PERC before. A conservation group that looks to free markets and property rights for solutions. Woohoo!

In their solution, the fishermen themselves have a stake in the fisheries. But it doesn't have to be that way necessarily. Any ownership concept in a fishery would work: if I own a fishery, it behooves me to make sure there are fish to fish each season or else I make no money (either because I fish and sell them for my livelihood, or because I lease access to the fishery to fishermen).

I've long wondered at the fact that the ocean is treated differently than land with respect to property rights. I've always thought it was a little odd, but couldn't ever quite figure out how else it would work... leave it to people smarter than me...

Now we can add this lesson to the oil-drilling lesson we learned last year. Specifically, no one was looking out for the ocean in the deepwater horizon disaster. The government granted permission to BP to drill for oil, but didn't have the proper incentive to protect the ocean once it did so. Had someone owned the region of the ocean where the drilling was occurring, and they granted permission to drill, they would have been more interested in safety because of the potential for damage*, and because of the potential for liability.

* Of course, the ownership stake would have to be more than for just oil rights, so that there would be other economic incentives for ensuring safety. Consider dividing a region of ocean into different ownership interests, such as oil rights and fisheries. In the case of an oil spill accident there would be a clear responsible party to target for purposes of liability and compensation, and in there would be a clear impacted party to which compensation would flow.

One might argue that the oil companies would simply buy up all of the fisheries to avoid being liable to anyone else, but that seems unlikely to me as it generally doesn't happen on land, and an oil spill tends to (as we saw last year) impact a whole lot more area than would otherwise be needed for your typical oil drilling operation. That is, an oil company would have to buy up a LOT of ocean in order to protect its ability to be unsafe... seems unlikely... certainly no more likely than the government avoiding liability entirely after being given a monopoly on granting drilling rights.