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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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Instead of trying to get capitalists involved in common goods, it sticks with charity.

And thus it'll never work as well as making people do "good" for more selfish reasons like financial gain. Even the Effective Altruists don't outspend the cosmetics industry.

If there's a latent demand for nature/environmentalism/conservation, and a mechanism for making people who care about them willing to pay instead of using legislative means to strong-arm those who don't, and vice versa, you'll have the more hard-nosed simply buy up empty land because they can make money off being paid not to exercise their right to do other things with it.

If someone wants to prevent me from turning my grassy knolls into a parking lot, they'd better pay me more than I'd get by doing so, or at least the same amount.

I have far more confidence in rational self-interest than in expecting people to "do the right thing" for its own sake when it costs them. I know which one works better at scale.

Not that I'm against Conservative Easements, it's a mutually positive sum trade, or at least I'd hope so. Doesn't mean there aren't benefits to expanding on it and streamlining things.

I don't see how it would receive funding other than "expecting people to 'do the right thing' for its own sake".

In a normal company, the flow of money goes:

  1. Investors invest
  2. Customers buy things
  3. The investors receive a fraction of the customers' money (aka Profit!)

In a NAC (as far as I can tell), it goes:

  1. Investors invest
  2. ???
  3. Profit!

Even their summary is just:

Listed NACs can convert the long-understood – but to-date unpriced – value of nature into equity capital which can generate the financial capital needed to manage, protect, and restore healthy ecosystems over the long term.

Skimming through the linked PDF, it appears that step 2a) is "write down a number" and 2b) is "write down a bigger number" (they're even putting a dollar sign in front of the big numbers!). The only two ideas I have for 2c) are to take a charitable purchase and print an Impact Certificate (or similar), or else to build a pyramid scheme and resell it to another investor.

Your steps "2a" and "2b" sound like a good fit for non-fungible tokens and other cryptocurrency ideas.

I don't see how it would receive funding other than "expecting people to 'do the right thing' for its own sake".

Doesn't matter so much whether or not it's the "right thing" as much as whether it's something people will pay for.

To the extent that many/most people value environmental protection or nature, for whatever reason, those two can be aligned.

I don't have a strong opinion on whether NACs have any value outside of being a speculative asset, I'm making a more general point about getting people to buy out others who would do something they didn't prefer they do, with the additional considerations of more universal externalities.