Articles by Adam Stein

Environmentalism’s confusing accounting

The L.A. Times published an interesting if somewhat odd piece in last week's magazine about efforts to coax the business community into loving the environment by assigning a dollar value to our natural resources, or "ecosystem services."

So, for example, we learn that dung beetles provide $380 million of waste management services to the U.S. cattle industry. One mile of coastal wetland provides $2.4 million of storm protection. A nice fern is worth $4, or you can get 3 for $9.99.

I made up the last one.

The odd part of the article is that it wraps together these efforts to place a concrete value on natural resources with a very different phenomenon: the use of pollution markets to curtail environmentally damaging activities.

Setting some facts straight about the future of carbon regulation in the U.S.

Gar Lipow offers up his latest critique of carbon offsets, which this time is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying science of greenhouse gases. The story, for those following along at home, can be summarized thusly:

• Gar feels that carbon offsets are, among other things, the "enemy of the human race."
• I feel that offsets are an interesting policy option with kinks to be worked out. The kinks are not nearly so fundamental or intractable as some would have you believe.

The following discussion gets a bit dense, but it's also highly instructive, so I recommend soldiering through if this is a topic you're interested in.