Report

It’s easy being green

This report from UK think tank the Adam Smith Institute looks at how to embrace nuclear energy, a border-adjusted carbon tax, and clean free trade.

The Adam Smith Institute’s latest paper, in conjunction with the British Conservation Alliance (BCA), and authored by BCA policy director Connor Tomlinson outlines a market centric approach to tackling environmental issues such as climate change: Market environmentalism uses the engine of free markets to tackle environmental challenges. This provides practical, sustainable and highly effective solutions. The market system naturally drives towards good environmental stewardship — through the profit mechanism that rewards innovation that produces more using less resources and waste; property rights that rewards protection of valuable land; and wider prosperity that creates wealth and political pressures for protection. State-led, socialist economic models have consistently failed the environment. Nobody takes care of unowned resources, as demonstrated by the Tragedy of the Commons. Resources are overexploited, as demonstrated by the Soviet Union’s continuing whaling (the Soviet Union were responsible for 98% of all blue whales killed between 1967 and 1978, after the 1966 global ban). The economies are less efficient and therefore more environmentally exploitive, as demonstrated by the Eastern bloc economies or modern day Venezuela. The best, in fact the only way to tackle the challenge presented by climate change, including the Government’s Net Zero by 2050 target, while maintaining modern prosperity is to embrace a market-led approach.