Cross-posted at Grist.
A recent post on Gristattempted to dismantle the intellectual foundations offree market environmentalism—the application of markets and property rights to solve environmental problems. But far from toppling a burgeoning movement within modern environmentalism, it succeeded only in misrepresenting the subject.
To recap: Clark Williams-Derry claimed that while free market environmentalism may be effective in some areas of the environment (e.g.,fisheries management), its reliance upon unrealistic assumptions about the real world largely relegates it to useless intellectual theorizing. In particular, the Coase theorem—an important component of market-based environmentalism named for Nobel Prize-winning economistRonald Coase—amounts to “a quirky but not particularly relevant bit of theoretical math.”
While there is certainly much more to free market environmentalism than the work of Coase (see Terry Anderson and Donald Leal’s bookFree Market Environmentalismfor more details), I focus here mostly on the misinformed…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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