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Originally Posted by Abbaddabba
It's true for any reasonable discount rate. That doesn't mean every species of plant and strain of bacteria is worth saving but you can't expect people to intuitively understand the impact of preserving pockets of biodiversity on medical research.
Regarding the discount rate: hm no. At 3-4% (which is probably on the low end) after 100 year the terminal value of future utility is basically irrelevant unless we are talking about human-exctinction/nuclear apocalypse level.
But anyway you other objection seems fine on paper, only it doesn't require at all country level environmental rules to be fixed.
You can do two major kind of things to avoid the risk of missing out on future research of some special animal or plant insight that could be a breakthrough for medicine and other fields.
You can collect genetic data and biological element in order to be able to clone species in the future, and you can preserve pockets of biomes that are particularly complex to replicate in future lab settings.
It's about cost, and you can do both.
And i am in favour of using public money for that endeavour, as the extreme long term view and the strong externalities components describe a situation where public intervention could be superior to markets.
Also, those solutions don't imply additional bureaucracy on normal people, nor a change in behaviour mandated by the state, which are the elements that generally should dissuade decent people that ask for government intervention.
But this is exactly why the radical left wouldn't be ok with that solution.