Topic: Global warming - entrepreneurial market response - page 2. (Read 1990 times)

I thought of a cluster of ideas to combat global warming that, I'm really dumbstruck, didn't occur to me earlier.

I'm posting this as a separate thread because the global warming thread has got derailed into a discussion about regulation and government.

In the world of competitive city governments with a free exit structure (Libertarian at the macro-most level, but individual cities or phyles may not be libertarian), there will be free markets in almost everything, including idea futures and real estate.

As the idea of global warming becomes more prominent, with possible impacts listed out, then idea futures would be floated for various parameters of the global warming model. Some ideas would win out.

Now let us consider the scenario that global warming is occuring. Then the ideas futures markets will discover this pattern. Rainfall futures contracts would discover effects on rainfall. Fertility futures contracts would discover the patterns on soil fertility. Various social indicators contracts on global health would discover impacts.   

Then the ones who see the pattern would very quickly start buying up land near canada and siberia. They will combat personal impact to themselves from global warming. The antarctic and the tibetan plateau would start experiencing a real-estate buying spree. Ships and floating platforms would become popular. Dam and dyke builders will be in demand. Hilly and mountainous regions would experience building booms. Green houses and controlled temperature environments for growing crops will become more reasonable as a technological solution.

There are those who think that - all this innovation is wasteful. All you need to do is come to a global agreement on reducing emissions. But that is just the statist part of us thinking. We are used to thinking in the form of governments and imposion of laws. Thinking entrepreneurially is a little alien to most of us. There are a million micro impacts of global warming. Those million micro-impacts are best studied by the thousands of people getting affected by each. Getting 7 billion people to agree on anything is a much much larger problem.

It is part of the human condition that it is easier to make techno fixes than to setup an establishment that will not get corrupted. Get used to it.

Or create friendly AI. The Singularity institute is working on it. www.singinst.org